“What sort of structure?” I said, trying to visualize what he meant.

“An impact structure. Imagine an ancient meteorite lodged like a spearhead in a heart, encircled by a jagged, irregular ring of fissures and chasms and galleries. Imagine the corrosive alien metals of that fallen rock dissolving terrestrial substrata, creating a vast, suppurating wound. Imagine some heretofore unclassified radiation emitting from the depths of the earth in sporadic pulses. Imagine the potential effects on animals and men across eons.”

I couldn’t imagine, not really.

“Huh, you’re saying that instead of cordoning off the area for all time, Redlick and allies eagerly built a research complex with a giant hunk of radioactive space metal in the basement.” I pondered this for several moments before moving on. “Have you gone caving in the Valley?”

The question amused him.

“Have I beheld the cosmic spearhead or the broken ring with my own eyes? Dear God, no. Twenty-five years ago, I sold Gerald Redlick a journal and a map that were originally the property of a collector of antiquarian rarities. The journal detailed an expedition undertaken in the summer of 1798. A small company of professional explorers were alerted by the natives of a cave system that ran beneath the Valley. Twelve went in; three returned, including the leader. He claimed the others were ‘swallowed by the void.’ A likely euphemism for falling into a pit. The addled survivors had contracted a plague. They repeated ‘the rule of nine’ over and over as their flesh blackened and their teeth and hair fell out. Their stories end as medical curiosities in a cadaver laboratory.

“Redlick became interested in the journal. Displaying an abundance of caution, his forebears gave those caverns a wide berth. Gerald Redlick is cut from a different bolt of cloth. Incidentally, the Horseheads system possesses similarities to caverns beneath Anvil Mountain in eastern New York. Anvil Mountain is a secret maintained by the Labrador family. I’m sure that the relative proximity of these systems and their unusual properties is the result of a dramatic event—a meteor shower over a vast swath of what is now New York State during a prehistoric era.”

“And you got your mitts on this journal how?” I said.

“The usual way. We’ve forged many connections among the disenfranchised and the discredited searchers after truth. I burned a small fortune and all of my influence amassing an archive of documents stuffed into several warehouses and storage facilities.”

I glanced at the blurred photographs, the glass cases of parchments and arcane instruments. Among these latter, a ceramic-handled tuning fork leaned next to a shot of Nikola Tesla at a podium.

“The academic community’s garbage was an industrialist cabal’s treasure,” I said. “Those moldy old-monied families recognized you were the real deal.”

“As did the government, in happier times. A contraction of communal imagination has disempowered the American spirit of exploration. China and India are embarking for the moon. Our gaze has turned inward. It is the age of the industrialist entrepreneur who bankrolls private voyages into space, deep-sea surveys, spiritual and scientific research. We may have cause to celebrate. We are more likely to rue this evolutionary phase.”