Damon Knight: Orbit 21

The walls of the shaft were slick-looking under our bright lights. We inspected the ice as we pushed off and descended, pushed off and descended.

Lhotse looked up. “You probably should wait till I get to the bottom.” The people at the top of the ladder heard him and Jones and I slowed. Lhotse dropped away swiftly.

The descent lasted a long time. Our lamps made the ice around us gleam, but above and below us it was black. The ice changed to dark, smooth rock. We were underground.

Finally we hit a gravelly floor. Lhotse was waiting, crouched in the end of a tunnel pointing northward that descended at a slight slope. Ahead lay pitch blackness.

“Send another person down to this point for a radio relay,” said Lhotse, and then, holding his lamp ahead of him, he hurried down the tunnel. Jones and I stayed close behind him. We walked for a very long time, down the bottom of the cylindrical tunnel. Except for the fact that the walls were rock—solid basalt, the tunnel had been bored through it—it might have been a sewer pipe. I was shivering uncontrollably, colder than ever. Jones was stumbling over me; he kept ducking his head at imaginary low points.

Lhotse stopped. Looking past him I could see a blue glow. I rounded him and ran.

Suddenly the tunnel opened up and we were in a chamber, a blue chamber. A cobalt-blue chamber! It was an ovoid, like the inside of a chicken’s egg, about ten meters high and seven across. As Lhotse’s lamp swung unnoticed in his hand, streaks and points of red light gleamed from within the surface of the blue walls. It was like a blue glass, or a ceramic glaze. I reached over and ran my hand over it, and it was a glassy but lumpy surface. The points and lines of dark red came from chips under the surface. . . . Lhotse raised his lamp to head-level and rotated slowly, looking up at the ceiling of the chamber. His voice barely stimulated the intercom’s carbon: “What is this? . . .”

I shook my head, sat down and leaned back against the blue wall. “Who put this here?” Lhotse said.

“Not Vasyutin,” I said. “There’s no way they could have put this under here.”

“Nor Holmes neither,” suggested Jones. Lhotse waved his lamp and red points sparked. “Let’s discuss it later,” he said.

We stood, and sat, in silence, and watched the blue walls gleam with ruby light. The constantly shifting patterns created the illusion of extended space; the room seemed to grow ever larger as we watched. ... I felt fear, fear of Holmes, fear that I had been in her power: who was she, to have created this? Could she have?

Questions, doubts, thought receded, and the three of us remained mesmerized by light. After a time white flashes from the tunnel, and voices on the intercom, snapped us awake.

Our air was low. Several others crowded into the chamber, and we moved out so they could see and marvel freely.

Jones, through his faceplate, looked stunned. His mouth was open. As we walked slowly back up the sloping tunnel, he was shaking his head, and I could hear his deep voice muttering: “ . . . strange blue glass under Icehenge . . . star chamber, red light ... a space . . . underground.”

Then they hauled us up the long narrow shaft of the hollow lith. I stood on the rim at the top, and looked up, up to the great blanket of stars.

It gave the scientists a lot more to work on.

They soon reported that the chamber was directly under the pole—that is, the pole passed directly through the chamber. The walls were covered by a ceramic glaze, fired onto the bedrock.

Dr. Hood and his team soon discovered traces of the drill bits used to bore out the tunnel in the bedrock—small smears of metal, of an alloy just like that used for the bits of a boring machine designed to cut tunnels through asteroids. The machine had been first produced in 2514 . . . by Holmes.

And Brinston was ecstatic. “Ceramic!” he cried. “Ceramic! When they fired that glass up to melting temperature, they put a date on it clear as those marks on the Inscription Lith—with no chance of lying, either.”

It turned out that thermoluminescence measurement was a method that had been used to date terrestrial pottery for centuries. Samples of the ceramic are heated to firing temperatures, and the amount of light released by them is a measure of the total dose of radiation to which the ceramic has been exposed since the last previous heating. The technique can determine age—even over short periods of time—with an accuracy of plus-or-minus ten percent.

After a week Brinston triumphantly released the results of the tests. The Blue Chamber was one hundred years old. “We got her!” Brinston cried. “It was Holmes! Doya, you were right. I don’t know how she landed that ice, but I know she did it!”

The reporters had a field day. Icehenge was once again a nine-day wonder. This time the scoop was that it was a modern hoax. Speculation was endless, and Holmes was named directly by more people than she could sue—or destroy. They called this the Holmes explanation—or Doya’s theory.

I sat around the site.

One day I heard that Nederland had been interviewed on the holonews. Several hours later I went down to the holo room and ran the scene through.

It wasn’t at the usual University of Mars press-conference room. As the scene appeared, Nederland was leaving a building, and a group of reporters circled him.

“Professor Nederland, what do you think of the new developments on Pluto?”

“They’re very interesting.” He looked resigned to the questioning.

“Do you still support the Vasyutin theory?”

His jaw muscles tightened. “I do.” The wind ruffled his hair.

“What about— But what about— What about the fact that a twenty-sixth-century drill bit was used to bury the Blue Egg?”

“I think there may be some other explanation for those deposits .. . for instance—”

“What about the thermoluminescence dating?”

“The ceramic measured is too deep for the method to work,” he snapped.

“What about the alleged inauthenticity of the Weil journal?”

“I don’t believe that,” he said. “Emma’s journal is genuine—”

“What’s your proof? What’s your proof?”

Nederland looked down at his feet, shook his head. He looked up, and there were deep lines around his mouth. “I must go home now,” he said, and then repeated it in such a low voice the microphones barely caught it: “I must go home now. . . .” Then, in his full voice, “I’ll answer all these questions later.” He turned and made his way through them, head down, and twisted to avoid a reporter’s grasp; and as he did so I saw his lowered face, and it looked haggard, exhausted, and I slammed the holo off and made my way blindly to the door, struck it with my hand, “Damn it,” I said, “damn it, why aren’t you dead!”

The day before we were to leave, a bulletin came in from Waystation. A group there at the Institute—led by my student April—had presented a new solution. They agreed that it was a modern construct, but contended that it was put up by Commodore Ehrung and her crew, right after they arrived on Pluto, and just before they “discovered” it. The group had a whole case worked up, showing how both Vasyutin and Holmes were red herrings, planted by Ehrung’s people. . . .

“That’s absurd!” I cried, and laughed harshly. “There’s a dozen reasons why that can’t be true, including everything that Brinston just found!” Nevertheless I was furious, and though I laughed again to hide it as I left the room, the people there stared at me as if I had kicked the teletype machine.

Later I walked out to the site. The henge was gleaming again, in the relative clarity of Pluto’s day. It looked unchanged by all our new discoveries; as obscure as ever.