She knew that all the Monuments were believed to date to a five-thousand-year period ending roughly at 19,000 B.C. This was thought to be one of the earlier figures. "I wonder why they stopped," she said.

Richard looked up at the stars. "Who knows? Five thousand years is a long time. Maybe they got bored." He came over and stood by her. "Cultures change. We can't expect them to do it forever."

The unspoken question: Did they still exist?

What a pity we missed them. Everyone who came here shared the same reaction. So close. A few millennia, a bare whisper of cosmic time.

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."