Lucifer's Hammer

June: One

The lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangeal’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we who remain alive shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.

There at the top of the great disintegrating totem pole, there in that tiny space at the tip, Rick Delanty lay on his back with his smile blinking on and off. His carefully enunciated voice gave no hint of that. It sounded just like Joh

“Switch to internal power.”

“Internal power check. In the green.”

“T minus fifteen minutes, and counting.”

Whenever he glanced over at Rick, at that wavering smile, then Joh

Delanty kept smiling. They’d picked him! He’d gone through the training, and the simulators, and then off to Florida. Two days ago he’s been doing barrel rolls and loops and Immelma

“T minus one minute, and counting.”

Those final, hurried, crammed hours ended when Wally Hoskins led him up the elevator and arranged him, clumsy in his pressure suit, within the Apollo capsule. After that he could lie on his back with his knees above his head, waiting for the glitch. But the glitch hadn’t come yet, and it looked like they were going, it really—

“Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Ignition. First motion…”

Going!

“We have lift-off…”

The Saturn rose in thunder and hellfire. A hundred thousand official visitors and more, newsmen, science fiction writers with scrounged press passes, dependents of astronauts, VIPs and friends…

“There he goes,” Maureen Jellison said.

Her father looked at her curiously. “We mostly call those ships ‘she.’ ”

“Yes. I suppose so,” Maureen said. Why do I think I’ll never see him again?

Behind her the Vice-President was muttering, just loud enough to hear. “Go, go, you bird — ” He looked up with a start, realized others were listening, and shrugged. “GO, BABY!” he shouted.

It did something to the watchers. The power of the thundering rocket, the knowledge that had gone into it; to the older watchers it was something impossible, a comicbook incident from their childhood. To the younger ones it was inevitable and to be expected, and they couldn’t understand why the older people were so excited. Space ships were real and of course they worked…

Inside the Apollo the astronauts smiled the rictus smile of a cadaver, as several gravities pulled their facial muscles back onto their cheeks. Eventually the first stage shut down and fell away, and the second stage did the same, and the third stage gave them a final push… and Rick Delanty, in free fall, was still smiling.

“Apollo, this is Houston. You’re looking good,” the voice said.

“Roger, Houston.” Delanty turned to Baker. “Now what, General?”

Baker gri

“On one condition,” the President had said when he handed Baker his stars.

“Yes, sir?” Baker asked.

“You don’t tease your Russian counterpart about his name. Resist the temptation.”

“Yes, Mr. President.”

But it was going to be hard. Pieter Jakov didn’t have a double meaning in Russian — but Comrade General Jakov spoke very good English, as Baker knew from their orientation meeting at Houston. He’d also met the other one, a dish — but only in Russia. She’d been officially too busy to come to the U S.

“Now we find that bloody garbage can, Lieutenant Colonel Delanty,” Baker said. “Great up here, isn’t it?”

“You know it.” Delanty peered out, eyes wide in wonder. They had showed it all to him, many times, in simulators. There were movies, and the other astronauts talked incessantly of space: they put him in wet suits underwater to simulate no-gravity. But none of that mattered. This was real.

There was the absolute black of space ahead, stars shining brightly, although the Sun lit the Earth below. There were Atlantic islands, and coming up ahead was the coastline of Africa, looking just like a map with bits of cotton stuck on it for clouds. Later, to the north, was Spain, and the Mediterranean Sea, and after a while the dark green slash across the wastelands of Egypt, the Nile with all its bends and crooks.

And then they were in sunset, and the lights of the fabled cities of India lay below.

They were above the darkness covering Sumatra when Delanty got the blip on his radar screen. “There it is,” he said. “Hammerlab.”

“Rojj,” Baker acknowledged. He looked at the Doppler; they were slowly drawing up to the capsule. They’d catch up to it in dawn over the Pacific, just as Houston’s computer had predicted. They waited. Finally Baker said, “Unlimber the cage. We’ve got to catch our house.” He thumbed the downlink set on. “Goldstone, this is Apollo. Hammerlab is in visual range, we are begi

“Apollo, this is Houston, what did you say was in visual range, interrogative?”

“Hammerlab,” Baker said. He looked over at Delanty and gri

They approached rapidly: slowly to the astronauts, who were themselves moving at 25,000 feet each second. Then it was time. Delanty flew the Apollo. Jets edged their craft closer to their target: a big steel garbage can, forty feet long and ten in diameter, with viewports along the sides, one airlock, and docking hatches at each end.

“The economy-price spacelab,” Baker muttered. “It’s tumbling. I make that one rotation in four minutes, eight seconds.”

First to match completely with Hammerlab: Fire the Apollo’s attitude jets in just the precise pattern, so that it would tumble with the target. Then move closer to the thing, waiting for the chance, until the big docking probe on Apollo could enter the matching hole in the end of Hammerlab… and they were in darkness again. Rick was amazed at how long it had taken him to fly what looked like far less than a mile. Of course they’d also come 14,000 miles in the same fifty minutes…

When dawn came Rick was ready, and made one pass, and a second, and cursed, and eased forward and felt the slight contact of the two ships, and the instruments showed contact at center, and Rick drove forward, hard…

“Virgin no more!” he shouted.

“Houston, this is Apollo. We have docking. I say again, we have docking.” Baker said.

“We know,” a dry voice said from below. “Colonel Delanty’s mike was live.”

“Whoops,” Rick said.

“Apollo, this is Houston, your partners are approaching, SOYUZ has you in visual. I say again, Soyuz has visual contact.”

“Roger Houston.” Baker turned to Rick. “So now you stabilize this mother while I talk to friendly Asian brother — and sister. SOYUZ. SOYUZ, this is Apollo. Over.”

“Apollo. this is SOYUZ.” a male voice said. Jakov’s English was grammatically perfect, and almost without accent. He’d studied with American-speaking teachers, not Britishers. “Apollo, we copy you five by five. Is your docking maneuver completed, interrogative? Over.”