Lucifer's Hammer

Joa

“But they couldn’t say that.”

“It’s maybe true,” said Frank Stoner. He and Mark had met on the dirt tracks, fighting it out for prize money across the country. “We can go places cars can’t. We don’t use as much gas. We stick together. We don’t mind a fight. If we had some gas cached somewhere… Hey. What are the chances?”

Mark waved a hand and almost hit his cup. “Almost zilch, unless you believe the astrology columns. Sharps says we might go through the tail, though. Man, won’t that be a kick!”

Joa

“Yeah, and he was stranger than any of them! You’ll see it on TV. Hey, did you know that Hot Fudge Sundae falls on a Tuesdae this month?” He gave it a good dramatic pause — during which Joa

An hour later, and Lilith had had to go to work. The saki was dwindling fast. Mark was feeling good. Joa

Mark had been living with Joa

“You’d have a hell of a time getting back in shape,” said Frank.

“Huh?” Mark tried to remember what they’d been talking about. Oh, yeah: the duels they’d fought on the racing circuit years ago. For Mark the dirt tracks were a spectator sport these days. He still had the muscles, but he had grown a great soft pillow of a beer belly. He glanced down and said, “Right. Well, Joa

“Fair’s fair,” Joa

“I’m gettin’ too old for fooling around. I should sign up permanently with Randall.” He picked up Joa

“Don’t be there,” Stoner answered. A few seconds later “Don’t be at the beach either. Don’t be near a coastline Three out of four it’d be an ocean strike. Bring me a beer.”

“Yeah.”

“You got a map of the fault lines in California, don’t you?”

Mark was sure he did. He began hunting for it.

Frank said, “I think I’d want the same bike I took to Mexico. The big single, the Honda four-stroke. Not so much problem getting spare parts.” Frank let his mind track possibilities, taking its time. He and Joa

“Guns?”

“I brought a souvenir back from ’Nam. Registered lost.”

“So did I.” Mark gave up on the map. “We’d want a siphon. For awhile you’d find abandoned cars—”

“I always carry a siphon.”

“Hey. Why don’t we get together about the time the head’s supposed to pass?”

Frank didn’t answer immediately. Joa

Frank Stoner thought it over for a few seconds longer than was tactful. He did not make promises lightly, and the comet was becoming real to him. Mark was a good man in a fight, but he couldn’t always do what he said he could do, and he tended to drop things, and there was that brand-new beer belly. To Frank, that belly was a piece of personal sloppiness. Still… “Yeah. Okay. Not here, though. Say we take some sleeping bags up onto Mulholland the night before.”

Mark raised his saki cup in salute. “Good. It’d take a bitch of a tsunami to reach that high. And we could go off the road if we had to.” He would have been displeased if he could have followed Frank’s reasoning.

Frank was concerned for Joa

It took Eileen almost half a minute to realize that Mr. Corrigan was sitting on the edge of her desk, studying her. Bolt upright at her desk, she sat with her fingers motionless on the keyboard. Her eyes seemed to study a blank wall… and then, somehow, they found Corrigan in the foreground. She said, “Yah!”

“Hi. It’s me,” said Corrigan. “Care to talk about it?”

“I don’t know, Boss.”

“About a month ago I would have sworn you were in love. You’d come in with that sappy look, and sometimes you’d be dead tired and gri

“It was love,” she said, and smiled. “His name’s Tim Hamner. He’s indecently rich. He wants me to marry him. He said so last night.”

“Um,” said Corrigan, not liking that. “The crucial question, of course, is whether the business will collapse without you.”

“Naturally that was the first thing I thought of,” said Eileen, but with a pensive look that Corrigan didn’t quite know how to take.

“Occupational hazard,” he said briskly. “Do you love him?”

“Oh… yes. But… nuts. I’ve already made up my mind,” she said, “but I don’t have to like it.” And she attacked her typewriter with a ferocity that drove Corrigan back to his own desk.

She called Tim three times before she found him home. Her first words were, “Tim? I’m sorry, but the answer’s no.”

Long pause. Then, “Okay. Can you tell me why?”

“I’ll try. It’s… it’d make what I’ve been doing look silly.”

“I don’t see that.”

“Just before we met I made Assistant General Manager at Corrigan Plumbing Supplies.”

“You told me. Listen, if you’re afraid of losing your independence, I’ll settle, say, a hundred thousand dollars on your cringing head and you’ll be as independent as anyone.”

“I don’t know how I knew you’d say that, but… that isn’t it. It’s me. I’d change more than I’d like. I made myself what I am, and I want to stay proud of the result.”

“You want to keep your job?” Tim had trouble getting the word out; he must have thought the idea was silly. But — “Okay.”

Eileen pictured herself arriving at Corrigan’s every morning in a chauffeured limousine — and she laughed. After that, things went all to hell.

Colleen was reading a paperback novel. Her hair was in curlers. She’d switched on the stereo, and sometimes her fingers tapped in rhythm on the table beside her easy chair.

Fred wondered wistfully what she was hearing. He knew what she was reading; he couldn’t see the title, but the cover bore a woman in long, flowing garments in the foreground and a castle in the background, with one lighted window. Gothics were all alike, outside and in.

And he didn’t mind the curlers. She looked cute in them.

Half the joy was in the anticipation. Soon, soon, they would meet.

Sometimes the guilt was overwhelming. Then the mad temptation would come on Fred Lauren: to destroy his telescope, to destroy himself, before he could hurt Colleen. But that really was insane. A month and a week from now he would be dead anyway, and so would she. Any hurt he did her would be a passing thing, and done for love.

For love. Fred yearned for the girl in his telescope. His hands were tender on the little wheels that controlled the image, and the fingers trembled. It was too soon, much too soon.