Lucifer's Hammer

They paddled around in the pool, watching small trout dart near the surface. Harvey looked for larger fish, but they were keeping out of sight. The stream looked perfect for trout, deep pools below small rushing falls. The banks were overhung with trees except for two places where they’d been cleared, obviously by someone who liked fly fishing and had opened the banks out for his back cast.

“I think I’m turning blue,” Maureen shouted finally. “You finished?”

“Tell the truth, I was done ten minutes ago.”

They climbed out onto another of the enormous white boulders, the contours smoothed by floodwaters. The sun, low as it was, felt good on Harvey’s chilled body, and the rock was still hot from old sunlight. “I’ve been needing this,” he said.

Maureen turned over on belly and elbows to look at him. “Which? The freezing water, or the acrophobia, or the climbing your legs off?”

“All of the above. And not interviewing anyone today, I needed that, too. I’m glad your father didn’t make it. Tomorrow — shazam! I’m Harvey Randall again.”

She had changed back into the tan slacks. Harvey came out to find she’d also made drinks.

“Stay for di

“Well… Sure, but can I take you out somewhere?”

She gri

“Sure—”

“Not that there’s much cooking involved,” Maureen said. She took steaks out of the freezer. “Microwave ovens and frozen food. The civilized way to gourmet meals.”

“That thing’s got more controls than an Apollo.”

“Not really. I’ve been in an Apollo. Hey, you have too, haven’t you?”

“I saw the mock-up,” Harvey said, “not the real thing. Lord, I’d like to do that. Watch the comet from orbit. No atmosphere to block it out.”

Maureen didn’t answer. Randall sipped at his scotch. There was an edge on his hunger. He searched the freezer and found frozen Chinese vegetables to add to the meal.

After di

It was incredibly dark. Randall asked, “Why did you do that?”

A disembodied voice answered, “You’ll see in a few minutes.” He heard her take her chair.

There was no moon, and the stars lit only themselves. But gradually he saw what she meant. When the Pleiades came over the mountains he didn’t recognize them; the cluster was fiercely bright. The Milky Way blazed, yet he couldn’t see his own coffee cup,

“There are city people who never see this,” Maureen said.

“Yeah. Thanks.”

She laughed. “It could have been clouded over. My powers are limited.”

“If we could… No, I’m wrong. I was thinking, if we could show them all what it looks like — all the voters. But you see star scenes on the newsstands all the time, paintings of star clusters and black holes and multiple systems and anything you could find out there. You’d have to take the voters up here, a dozen at a time, and show them. Then they’d know. It’s all out there. Real. All we have to do is reach out.”

She reached out (her night vision had improved that much) and took his hand. He was a bit startled. She said “Won’t work. Otherwise the main support for NASA would come from the farming community.”

“But if you’d never seen it like this… Ahh, you’re probably right.” He was very aware that they were still holding hands. But it would stop there. “Hey, do you like interstellar empires?” Harmless subject.

“I don’t know. Tell me about interstellar empires.”

Harv pointed, and leaned close so she could sight down his arm. Where the Milky Way thickened and brightened, in Sagittarius, that was the galactic axis. “That’s where the action is, in most of the older empires. The stars are a lot closer together. You find Trantor in there, and the Hub worlds. It’s risky building in there, though. Sometimes you find that the core suns have all exploded. The radiation wave hasn’t reached us yet.”

“Isn’t Earth ever in control?”

“Sure, but mostly you find Earth had one big atomic war.”

“Oh. Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but just where are you getting your information?”

“I used to read the science fiction magazines. Then around age twenty I got too busy. Let’s see, the Earthcentered empires tend to be small, but… a small fraction of a hundred billion suns. You get enormous empires without even covering one galactic arm.” He stopped. The sky was so incredibly vivid! He could almost see the Mule’s warships sweeping out from Sagittarius. “Maureen, it looks so real.”

She laughed. He could see her face now, pale, without detail.

He slid onto the broad arm of her chair and kissed her. She moved aside, and he slid in beside her. The chair held two, barely.

There is no harmless subject.

There was a point at which he might have disengaged. The thought that stopped him was: tomorrow, shazam! I’m Harvey Randall again.

Inside the house it was utterly black. She led him by the hand, by touch and memory, to one of the bedrooms. They undressed each other. Their clothes, falling, might as well have fallen out of the universe. Her skin was warm, almost hot. For a moment he wished he could see her face, but only for a moment.

There was gray light when he woke. His back was cold. They lay tangled together on a made bed. Maureen slept calmly, deeply, wearing a slight smile.

He was freezing. She must be too. Should he wake her up? His slow brain found a better answer. He disentangled himself, gently. She didn’t wake. He went to the other of the twin beds, pulled off the bedclothes, took them back and spread them over her. Then — with the full conviction that he was about to climb under the covers with her — he stood without moving for almost a minute.

She wasn’t his wife.

“Shazam,” Harvey said softly. He scooped up an armload of his clothes, careful to miss nothing. He padded out into the living room. He was starting to shiver. The first door he tried was another bedroom. He dumped the clothes on a chair and went to bed.

Not dead, but transmuted! The comet is glorious in its agony. The streamer of its torn flesh reaches millions of miles, a wake of strange chemicals blowing back toward the cometary halo on a wind of reflected light. Perhaps a few molecules will plate themselves across the icy surfaces of other comets.

Earth’s telescopes find the comet blocked by the blazing sun itself. Its exact orbit is still uncertain.

The glory of the tail is reflected sunlight, but more than sunlight glows in the coma. Some chemicals can lie intimately mixed at near absolute zero, but heat them and they burn. The coma seethes in change.

The head grows smaller every day. Here, ammonia boils from the surface of an ice-and-dust mixture; the hydrogen has long since boiled out. The mass contracts, and its density increases. Soon there will be little but rock dust cemented together by water ice. There, a stone monolith the size of a hill blocks the path of a gas pocket that grows hourly warmer, until something gives. Gas blasts away into the coma. The stony mass pulls slowly away, tumbling. The orbit of Hamner-Brown has been changed minutely.