Lucifer's Hammer

His brother (mother’s son, not just blood) waited for him in a car that wasn’t hot. They drove off just at the speed limit, fast enough not to attract attention, slow enough not to get busted.

“Had to waste two,” Alim said.

Harold winced, but his voice was cool. “Too bad. Who were they?”

“Nobody. Nobody important.”

March: Two

Most astronomers envisage comets as forming a vast cloud surrounding the solar system and stretching perhaps halfway to the nearest star; the Dutch astronomer I. H. Oort, after whom the cloud is usually named, has estimated that the cloud contains perhaps 100 billion comets.

They loaded them up well in the Green Room. Two ushers and an astonishingly pretty hostess poured their glasses full as soon as they were half empty, so that Tim Hamner had drunk more than he liked. At that, he thought, I’m well off compared to Arnold. Arnold was a best-selling writer, and Arnold never talked about anything that wasn’t in his books. When Tim told him Hamner-Brown was now visible to the naked eye, Arnold didn’t know what Tim was talking about; when Tim told him, Arnold wanted to meet Brown.

One of the ushers signaled and Tim got unsteadily to his feet. The stairs hadn’t seemed so steep when he came down them. He arrived onstage to hear the last of Joh

Joh

The opening chatter got Tim through a terrible moment of stage fright. Then Joh

“You wouldn’t have time,” Tim said. “It takes years. Decades sometimes, and no guarantees, ever. You pick a telescope and you memorize the sky through it, and then you spend every night looking at nothing and freezing your can off. It gets cold in that mountain observatory.”

Mary Jane said something. Joh

“Half a comet,” Tim said automatically. “I love it.”

“He won’t own it long,” Dr. Sharps said.

“Eh? How’s that?” Tim demanded.

“It’ll be the Russians who own it,” Sharps said. “They’re sending up a Soyuz to have a close look from space. When they get through, it will be their comet.”

That was appalling. Tim asked, “But can’t we do something?”

“Sure. We can put up an Apollo or something bigger. We’ve got the equipment sitting around getting rusty. We even did the preliminary work. But the money has run out.”

“But you could put something up,” Joh

“We could be up there watching Earth go through the tail. It’s a shame the American people don’t care more about technology. Nobody cares a hang as long as their electric carving knives work. You ever stop to think just how dependent we are on things that none of us understand?” Sharps gestured dramatically around the TV studio.

Joh

“Not just the TV,” Sharps was saying. “Your desk. Formica top. What is Formica? Anyone know how it’s made? Or how to make a pencil? Much less penicillin. Our lives depend on these things, and none of us knows much about them. Not even me.”

“I always wondered what makes bra straps snappy,” Mary Jane said.

Joh

Sharps shrugged. “It may not. You’re asking what good new research does. And all I can answer is that it always has paid off. Not the way you thought it would, maybe. Who’d have thought we’d get a whole new medical technology out of the space program? But we did. Thousands are alive right now because the human-factors boys had to develop new instruments for the astronauts. Joh

Joh

“They tell us we’re finished,” Sharps broke in. “And that’s stupid. We’re only finished because they won’t let us really use technology. They say we’re ru

“Can we?”

“You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Joh

The studio audience applauded. They hadn’t been cued by the production assistants, but they applauded. Joh

There was more after the commercial. When Sharps got going he was really dynamic. His thin, bony hands waved around like windmills. He talked about windmills, too, and about how much power the Sun put out every day. About the solar flare Skylab’s crew had observed. “Joh

But they were neglecting Tim Hamner, and Joh

“Pretty close. We’ll definitely pass through the tail of the comet. I showed you why we can’t tell how close the head will come — but it’s going to be very close. If we’re lucky, maybe as close as the Moon.”

“I wouldn’t call that luck,” Mary Jane said.

“Tim, it’s your comet,” Joh

“That’s Hamner-Brown,” Tim said.

“Oh.” Joh

“You know it,” Charlie Sharps said.

“Just what would it do?” Joh

“Well, we’ve got some pretty big holes left from meteor strikes,” Tim said. “Meteor Crater in Arizona is nearly a mile wide. Vreedevort in South Africa is so big you can’t see it except from the air.”

“And those were the little ones,” Sharps said. They all turned to look at him. Sharps gri

“Were those meteors?” Joh

“A lot of us think so. And something pretty big cracked the Moon wide open — a quarter of its surface is covered by that so-called ocean, which was once a sea of lava welling up from where a big asteroid hit.”