Lucifer's Hammer

Mark Czescu whistled. Manuel didn’t glitch so Harvey knew it hadn’t got onto the tape. Harvey felt like whistling himself.

The office door opened. In came a short, rounded, vague man, about thirty years old. He had a trimmed dark beard and thick glasses. He wore a green Pendleton wool shirt, and both pockets bristled with pens and pencils of every imaginable color and nib. A pocket computer hung at his belt. “Oh — sorry, I thought you were alone.” His voice was apologetic. He began to back out.

“No, no, stay and hear this,” Sharps said. “Let me introduce Dr. Dan Forrester. His job title is computer programmer. His degrees say Ph.D. in astronomy; around here we usually call him our sane genius.”

Mark was muttering behind Harvey. “If they call him a genius in this outfit…”

Harvey nodded. He’d thought of that too.

“Dan’s been doing more recasts of Hamner-Brown’s orbit. He’s also working on the optimum launch date for our Apollo, given the limited amount of equipment we can take, and the limited amount of consumables—”

“Consumables?” Harvey asked.

“Food. Water. Air. They take mass. We can only put up so much mass, and so we trade consumables for instruments. But consumables mean time in orbit. So Dan’s working on the problem: Is it better to launch earlier, with less equipment, so they can stay longer but get less information—”

“Not information,” Forrester said. His voice was apologetic. “Sorry to interrupt—”

“No, tell us what you mean,” Harvey said.

“We’re trying to maximize information,” Forester said. “So the problem is, do we get more information by having more data about a shorter time, or less data about a longer time.”

“Oh.” Harvey nodded. “So what have you got on Hamner-Brown? How far away at its closest point?”

“Zero,” Forrester said. He didn’t crack a smile.

“Uh — you mean it’s coming down our throats?”

“I doubt it.” Now he smiled. “Zero within the limits of prediction. Which is a good half-million miles error.”

Harvey relaxed. So, he noticed, did everyone in the room, including Charlene. They took Forrester seriously here. He turned to Sharps. “Tell us, what would happen if the comet did hit us? Suppose we got unlucky.”

“You mean the head? The nucleus? Because it looks as if we might actually pass through the outer coma. Which is nothing more than gas.”

“No, I mean the head. What happens? The end of the world?”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. Probably the end of civilization.”

There was silence in the room for a moment. Then for another. “But,” Harvey said, his voice puzzled, “Dr. Sharps, you told me that a comet, even the head, is largely foamy ice with rocks in it. And even the ice is frozen gases. That doesn’t sound dangerous.” In fact, Harvey thought, I asked to get it on the record.

“Several heads,” Dan Forrester said. “At least it looks that way. I think it’s begi

“So it’s even less dangerous,” Harvey said.

Sharps wasn’t listening to Harvey. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Calving already?”

Forrester’s grin widened. “Ook ook.”

Then he noticed Harvey Randall again. “You asked about danger,” he said. “Let’s look at it. We have several masses, largely the same material that boils off to form the coma and the tail: fine dust, foamy frozen gases, with pockets where the really volatile stuff has been long gone, and maybe a few rocks embedded in there. Hey — ” Randall looked up at Forrester.

Forrester was gri

Sharps was getting that thoughtful, lost look again. Harvey said quickly, “Dr. Sharps—”

“Oh. Yes, certainly. What happens if it hits? Which it won’t.

Well, what makes the nucleus dangerous is that it’s big, and it’s coming fast. Enormous energies.”

“Because of the rocks?” Harvey asked. Rocks he could understand. “How big are those rocks?”

“Not very,” Forrester said. “But that’s theory—”

“Right.” Sharps was aware of the camera again. “That’s why we need the probe. We don’t know. But I’d guess the rocks are small, from the size of a baseball to the size of a small hill.”

Harvey felt relief. That couldn’t be dangerous. A small hill?

“But of course that doesn’t matter,” Sharps said. “They’ll be embedded in the frozen gases and water ice. It would all hit as several solid masses. Not as a lot of little chunks.”

Harvey paused to think that over. This film would take careful editing. “It still doesn’t sound dangerous. Even nickel-iron meteors usually burn out long before they hit the ground. In fact, in all history there’s only been one recorded case of anyone being harmed by a meteor.”

“Sure, that lady in Alabama,” Forrester said. “It got her picture in Life. Wow, that was the biggest bruise I ever saw. Wasn’t there a lawsuit? Her landlady said it was her meteor because it ended up in her basement.”

Harvey said, “Look. Hamner-Brown will hit atmosphere a lot harder than any normal meteorite, and it’s mostly ice. The masses will burn faster, won’t they?”

He saw two shaking heads: a thin face wearing insectile glasses, and a thick bushy beard above thick glasses. And over against the wall Mark was shaking his head too. Sharps said, “They’d bore through quicker. When the mass is above a certain size, it stops being important whether Earth has an atmosphere or not.”

“Except to us,” Forrester said, deadpan.

Sharps paused a second, then laughed. Politely, Harvey thought, but it was done carefully. Sharps took pains to avoid offending Forrester. “What we need is a good analogy. Um…” Sharps’s brow furrowed.

“Hot fudge sundae,” said Forrester.

“Hah?”

Forrester’s grin was wide through his beard. “A cubic mile of hot fudge sundae. Cometary speeds.”

Sharps’s eyes lit up. “I like it! Let’s hit Earth with a cubic mile of hot fudge sundae.”

Lord God, they’ve gone bonkers, Harvey thought. The two men raced each other to the blackboard. Sharps began to draw. “Okay. Hot fudge sundae. Let’s see: We’ll put the vanilla ice cream in the center with a layer of fudge over it…”

He ignored the strangled sound behind him. Tim Hamner hadn’t said a word during the whole interview. Now he was doubled over, holding himself, trying to hold in the laughter. He looked up, choked, got his face straight, said, “I can’t stand it!” and brayed like a jackass. “My comet! A cubic mile of hot… fudge… sun… dae…”

“With the fudge as the outer shell,” Forrester amplified, “so the fudge will heat up when the Hammer rounds the Sun.”

“That’s Hamner-Brown,” Tim said, straight-faced.

“No, my child, that’s a cubic mile of hot fudge sundae. And the ice cream will still be frozen inside the shell,” said Sharps.

Harvey said, “But you forgot the—”

“We put the cherry at one pole and say that pole was in shadow at perihelion.” Sharps sketched to show that when the comet rounded the Sun, the cherry at the oblate spheroid’s axis would be on the side away from Sol. “We don’t want it scorched. And we’ll put crushed nuts all through it, to represent rocks. Say a two-hundred-foot cherry?”

“Carried by the Royal Canadian Air Force,” Mark said.

“Stan Freberg! Right!” Forrester whooped. “Shhhh… plop! Let’s see you do that on television!”

“And now, as the comet rounds the Sun, trailing a luminous froth of fake whipped cream, and aims itself down our throats… Dan, what’s the density of vanilla ice cream?”

Forrester shrugged. “It floats. Say two-thirds.”

“Right. Point six six six it is.” Sharps seized a pocket calculator from the desk and punched frantically. “I love these things. Used to use slide rules. Never could figure out where the decimal point went.