Lucifer's Hammer

Because I’ve got Hammer Fever, and my wife knows it. Loretta thinks I’ve gone crazy — and I’m scaring her, too. She’s convinced I think it’s going to hit.

And the more he did to prepare for Hammerfall, the more real it became. I’m even scaring myself, he thought. Have to remember that for the book. Hammer Fever. “Hey, hon…”

“Yes, darling?”

“Don’t look so worried. I’m doing research.”

“On what?” She brought him a beer.

“Hammer Fever. I’m going to write a book on it, once the comet’s gone past. I’ve done all the work. It might even be a best seller.”

“Oh. I’d love it if you had a book. People look up to an author.”

Which, Harv thought, they do. Sometimes. Okay. Now we can eat, drink and sleep. That leaves fight and run.

Fight. Not so good. He had no faith in his skill with guns; either the shotgun or the target pistol. No gun would have given him real confidence. There was no limit to how good a weapon the other guy might have, or how skillful he might be with it, and Harvey Randall had spent the war as a correspondent, not as a soldier.

But there’s also bribe. The liquor and spices might buy my way out of trouble. And if I can hang on to them, in a few years they’ll be literally priceless, providing there’s any surplus food left for luxuries, and there usually is, for someone. For centuries the price of black pepper was fixed, all across Europe, at its own weight in gold, ounce for ounce, and not everybody’s going to have thought of hoarding pepper.

Harvey was proud of that idea.

So. That leaves ru

Harvey went in, exhausted, but with a feeling of satisfaction. He wasn’t exactly ready, but at least he could pretend to be prepared. And a lot better than most. Loretta had waited up for him, and she had the Ben-Gay out. She didn’t bug him with a lot of questions; she just rubbed him down good, decided he wasn’t interested in anything more intimate and let him get to sleep.

As he dropped off he thought about how much he loved her.

June: Four

The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.

It was night below on Earth. Every ninety minutes Hammerlab passed through day and night; time aboard was kept by a clock, not by light and dark outside.

Cities glowed across Europe at the world’s edge, but the black face of the Atlantic covered half the sky, hiding nucleus and coma of Hamner-Brown. In the other direction stars blazed through thin mist. The comet’s tail streamed up from the horizon on all sides, doming the black Earth with luminous blues and oranges and greens streaming upward to the dome’s star-pierced dark apex. Far off to the side the half-moon floated in a matrix of shock waves, like diamond patterns in a still photograph of rocket flame. It was a sight that no one could tire of.

They had broken off work for di

“So long as you’ve got your health,” Rick said, “you’ve got everything. Wow, it’s good not to vomit.”

He got puzzled looks from the kosmonauts, who had never watched American TV commercials. Baker ignored him. The Sun exploded over the world’s edge. Rick closed his eyes for a few moments, then opened them to watch dawn’s blue-and-white arc roll toward them. Yesterday’s hurricane pattern still squatted on the Indian Ocean like a sea monster on an ancient map. Typhoon Hilda. Far to the left was Everest and the Himalaya massif. “That’s a sight I’m never going to get tired of.”

“Yes.” Leonilla joined him at the viewport. “But it seems so very fragile. As if I could reach out and… run my thumb across the land, leaving a path of destruction hundreds of kilometers wide. That is an uneasy feeling.”

Joh

“You are worried about the comet?” Her expression was hard to read. Russian face and body language is not quite the same as American.

“Forget the comet. The more you know, the more fragile we are,” said Joh

Leonilla was amused. “We need not worry for thirty-three thousand years. Speed of light, you know.”

Joh

Rick said, “Not so fast. Heat pollution could be the only thing saving us from the glaciers. Some people think the next Ice Age started a few centuries back. And we’re ru

“Sheesh! You can’t win.”

“Atomic wars. Giant meteor impacts. Supersonic aircraft destroying the ozone layers,” said Pieter Jakov. “Why are we doing this?”

“Because we aren’t safe down there,” Baker said.

“The Earth is large, and probably not as delicate as it looks,’ Leonilla said. “’But man’s ingenuity… sometimes that is what I fear.”

“Only one answer,” Baker said. He was very serious now. “We’ve got to get off. Colonize the planets. Not just here, planets in other systems. Build really big spacecraft, more mobile than planets. Get our eggs into a lot of baskets, and it’s less likely that some damn fool accident — or fanatic — will wipe us out just as the human race is becoming something we can admire.”

“What is admirable?” Jakov said. “I think you and I would not agree. But if you are ru

“That’s a pity,” said Joh

The nucleus of Hamner-Brown was thirty hours away. In the telescopes it showed as a swarm of particles, with a lot of space in between. The scientists at JPL were excited at the discovery, but for Baker and the others it was a pain in the ass. It wasn’t easy to get Doppler shift on the solid masses, because everything was immersed in the tail, and the gas and dust was streaming away at horrendous speeds, riding the pressure of raw sunlight. The masses were approaching Earth at around fifty miles per second. Finding a sideways drift was even more difficult.

“Still coming straight at us,” Baker reported.

“Surely there is some lateral motion,” Dan Forrester’s voice said.

“Yeah, but it’s not measurable,” Rick Delanty told him. “Look, Doc, we’re giving you the best we’ve got. It’ll have to do.”

Forrester was instantly apologetic. “I’m sorry. I know you’re doing all you can. It’s just that it’s hard to make the projection without better data.”

And then they had to spend five minutes soothing Forrester’s ruffled feathers and assuring him they weren’t mad at him.

“There are times when geniuses drive me crazy,” Joh

“Easy way to fix that,” Delanty said. “Just give him what he wants. You don’t hear no complaints about my observations.”

“Shove it,” Baker said.

Delanty rolled his eyes. “Where?” He drifted over to Baker. “Here, I’ll punch in the numbers. Just read ’em off.”

When they finished the morning observations and had a few moments to relax, Pieter Jakov coughed apologetically. “There is a question,” he said. “I have wanted to ask it for a long time. Please do not take it wrong.”