One of the landers from the Steinitz expedition had been left behind. A gray, clumsy vehicle, with an old U.S. flag painted near an open cargo-bay door, it lay two hundred meters away, at the far end of the ramp. Lost piece of a lost world. Lights glowed cheerily in the pilot's cabin, and a sign invited visitors to tour.
Richard had turned back to the inscription.
'What do you think it says?' she asked.
'Name and a date.' He stepped back. 'You had it right, I think. Kilroy was here.'
She glanced away from the figure, out across the plain, sterile and white and scarred with craters. It ascended gradually toward a series of ridges, pale in the ghastly light of the giant planet, (lapetus was so small that one was acutely conpious of standing on a sphere. The sensation did not bother her, but she knew that when Richard's excitement died away, it would affect him.)
The figure looked directly at Saturn. The planet, low on the horizon, was in its third quarter, It had been in that exact position when she was here, and it would be there when another twenty thousand years bad passed, It was flattened at the poles, with a somewhat larger aspect than the Moon. The rings were tilted forward, a brilliant panorama of greens and blues, sliced off sharply by the planet's shadow.
Richard disappeared behind the figure. His voice crackled in her earphones: 'She's magnificent. Hatch.'
When they'd finished their inspection, they retreated inside the Steinitz lander. She was glad to get in off the moonscape, to kill the energy field (which always induced an unpleasant tingling sensation), to dispose of her weights, and to savor the reassurance of wails and interior lighting. The vessel was maintained by the Park Service more or less as it had been two centuries earlier, complete with photos of the members of the Steinitz team.
Richard, buoyed by his excitement, passed before the photos one by one. Hutch filled their cups with coffee, and lifted hers in toast. 'To Frank Steinitz,' she said. 'And his crew.'
Steinitz: there was a name, as they say, to conjure with. His had been the first deep-space mission, five Athenas to Saturn. It was an attempt to capture the public imagination for a dying space program: an investigation of a peculiar object photographed by a Voyager on lapetus two decades earlier. They'd returned with no answers, and only a carved figure that no one could explain, and film of strange footprints on the frozen surface of the moon. The mission had been inordinately expensive; political cartoonists had loved it, and an American presidency had been destroyed. The Steinitz group had borne permanent scars from the flight: they had demonstrated beyond all further quibble the devasting effects of prolonged weightlessness. Ligaments and tendons had loosened, and muscles turned to slush. Several of the astronauts had developed heart problems. All had suffered from assorted neuroses. It was the first indication that humans would not adjust easily to living off-Earth. Steinitz' photo was mounted in the center. The image was similiar; he'd been overweight, aggressive, utterly dedicated, a man who had lied about his age while NASA looked the other way. 'The bitch of it,' Richard said solemnly, turning toward the windows and gazing out at the ice figure, 'is that we'll never meet them.'
She understood he was referring to the Monument-Makers.
'It was,' he continued, 'Steinitz' comment when he first saw her. And he was right.'
'Right for his age. Not necessarily for ours.' She didn't exactly believe that, since the Monument-Makers seemed to have vanished. Nevertheless it was the right thing to say. She examined her coffee mug. 'I'm amazed that they were able to get that kind of articulation and detail into a block of ice.'
'What do you think of it?' he asked.
'I don't know. It is disquieting. Almost oppressive. I don't really know how to describe it.' She swung the chair around, turning her back to the plain. 'Maybe it's the desolation.'
'I'll tell you what it is for me,' he said. 'It's her footprints. There's only one set.'
Hutch didn't quite understand.
'She was alone.'
The figure was idealized. It watched Saturn with unmistakable interest, and there was nobility and grace in its lines.
Hutch read something else at the juncture of beak and jaw, and in the corners of the eyes: an amalgam of arrogance and distrust laced with stoicism. Tenacity. Perhaps even fear.
'The inscription,' she said. 'It's probably the thing's name.'
'That's the position Muncie takes. If in fact it's a work of art and nothing else, it could be the title of the work. 'The Watcher. 'Outpost. Something like that.'
'Or,' said Hutch, 'maybe the name of a goddess.'
'Possibly. One of the members of the original mission suggested it might be a claim marker.'
'If so,' she said, 'they're welcome to this rock.'
'They were thinking more of the solar system.' The plain lay flat and sterile. The rings were knife-edge bright. 'Are you ready to take a walk?'
They followed the ramp out onto the plain. Off to one side they could see the booted tracks of the astronauts. Approximately a kilometer and a half west, her prints appeared.
There were two sets, going in opposite directions. She wore no shoes, and the length of both the foot and the stride, measured against the anatomy of the ice figure, suggested a creature about three meters tail. They could distinguish six toes on each foot, which was also consistent. 'Almost as if,' Hutch said, 'the thing climbed down and went for a walk.'
Chilling thought, that. They both glanced reflexively behind them.
One set of tracks proceeded west into the uplands.
The other wheeled out across the plain, on a course well north of the artifact. Astronaut prints, and ramps, followed in both directions. Richard and Hutch turned north.
'The bare feet shook them up,' said Richard. 'Now, you and I could match the trick, if we wanted.'
After about a quarter-kilometer, the prints stopped dead in the middle of the snow. Both sets, coming and going. 'There must have been a ship here,' Hutch said.
'Apparently.' The snow beyond the prints was untouched.
The ramp circled the area, marking off a space about the size of a baseball diamond. Richard walked completely around the circle, stopping occasionally to examine the surface. 'You can see holes,' he said, pointing them out. 'The ship must have been mounted on stilts. The prints show us where the creature first appeared. It— she—walked off the way we've come, and went up into the hills. She cut a slab of rock and ice out of a wall up there. We'll go take a look at the spot. She fashioned the figure, put it back on board, and flew it to the site.' He looked in the direction of the ice figure. 'There are holes back there, too.'
'Why haul it at all? Why not leave it up in the hills?'
'Who knows? Why put something here and not there? Maybe it would have been too easy.' He tapped the ramp with his toe. 'We're in a valley. It's hard to see, because the sides are low, and the curve of the land is so sharp. But it's there. The ice figure is located precisely in the center.'
After a while they went back the other way, and followed the tracks into the hills. The walkway plunged through deep snow and soared over ravines. The prints themselves twice went directly up to sheer walls and stopped. 'They continue higher up,' said Richard.
'Anti-gravity?'
'Not supposed to be possible. But how else would you explain any of this?'
Hutch shrugged.
They entered the ravine from which the ice and stone for the figure had been taken. A block had been sliced cleanly out of one wall, leaving a cut three times the visitor's height. The prints passed the place, continued upslope, and petered out on thick ice. They reappeared a little farther atop a ridge.
The ground dropped sharply away on both sides. It was a long way down.
Richard strode along the ramp, submerged in his thoughts, not speaking, gazing neither right nor left. Hutch tried to caution him that the energy field provided fair traction at best, that the light gravity was treacherous. 'You could sail off without much effort. You'd fall kind of slow, but when you hit bottom, there would be a very big splash.' He grunted, and went a little easier, but not enough to satisfy her.
They continued along the crest of the ridge until the tracks stopped. It was a narrow place. But with a rousing view of Saturn, and the breathless falling-off of the worldlet's short horizon.
Judging from the confusion of tracks, the creature might have been there for a time. And then of course she had doubled back.
Richard gazed down at the prints.
