Lucifer's Hammer

“I know.”

“Right,” Gordie said. He walked a little way uphill, to be alone, and sank down in the long grass.

Tomorrow it won’t matter, he thought. I don’t need any sleep.

He had the cliff all picked out. A fatal fall… it would have to be fatal. A mistake would leave him injured but alive the kids frantic, while a rescue team moved in to get him to a hospital. He’d be in a hospital bed when the bank examiners found the shortages. Crippled, maybe. Not even able to run.

Not that he would run. He’d had that chance, and it was no good, no good at all. Where would he go? The money was gone, and there was nothing for an American exile without money. Besides, children ought to grow up in their own country. Gordie glanced over to where his own son, age twelve, lay huddled in his sleeping bag. It was going to be rough on Bert, but there wasn’t any help for it.

Fu

I sure wish Bert wasn’t along.

A red velvet curtain rippled across the sky. Magnificent show for my last night, Gordie thought. He tried to watch the sky, but he kept seeing the cliff.

One moment. One carefully careless moment and he’d be at the bottom with a broken neck, and worse. There was a path down, easy enough for the kids. Andy would see that they went down properly. Then Andy Randall would be in charge, and that would be okay. Gordie had been training Andy for two years. Not for this — well, yes, for this, just in case of a genuine accident. Fu

The crescent moon rose over the hills, washing out some of the stars and blending its own eerie colors into the light show. Gordie imagined he could see shock waves in the comet tail — but that was probably imagination. The astronauts up there would be seeing it, though, with instruments if not with their eyes. Wonder what it’s like to be up there? Gordie had been a flyer, for a short time, until he’d been low scorer in his class and washed out of flight school to become a navigator for the Air Force. Should have stayed in, he thought. But I had to be a banker…

Too damn bad to ruin the boys’ trip. No choice. None at all, and an accident solves all problems. Half a million in insurance, enough to cover all the bank shortages and leave Marie and Bert in pretty good shape. Call it three hundred thousand left, at seven percent. It’s not magnificent wealth, but it’s sure as hell better than having your father in prison and nothing to live on…

Toward dawn the frantic sky became even more frantic. There was a bright spot in there. If it was the head, it was hard to see, looking down through the luminous tu

He went back to his sleeping bag and slid in. No point in catching a nap. It won’t be long…

The Svea was laid out with the fuel bottle, pan of water next to it. Gordie reached out with one arm and primed the tiny stove. His sleeping-bag breakfasts were a standard joke with everyone who’d been camping with him. He didn’t really feel like eating, but it would be dangerous to change the routine. He brought a pan of water to a boil and made hot chocolate. It was surprisingly good, and then he was ready for oatmeal, and a big cup of Sherpa tea, strong tea with brown sugar and a lump of butter…

One by one the boys woke. Gordie chortled to hear Andy Randall tell Bert, “You mean you slept through it? All night?”

No campfire. Not enough wood. Every year there were fewer and fewer places you could build a real fire. Not very many of the kids knew how to cook over a wood fire. Be bad if they really had to be out on their own, but that didn’t happen anymore. Nowadays, if you get lost, you clear an area fifty feet in diameter and light a match in the middle of it. Pretty soon a fire patrol will be out to give you a citation. There aren’t any deep woods anymore, not like when I was a kid…

I should have got some sleep, Gordie thought. My mind’s wandering. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s not very far now. I think I’ll have one more cup of chocolate.

He put the water on. “Let’s get it together,” he called. “Time to be finishing up. Stuff your bags and lace your boots. 1 want us on the trail in five minutes.”

The comet’s nucleus is bathed in light. The tail and coma trap sunlight throughout a tremendous volume and reflect it, some to Earth, some to space, some to the nucleus itself.

The comet has suffered. Explosions in the head have torn it into mountainous chunks. Megatons of volatile chemicals have boiled away. The large masses in the head are crusted with icy mud from which most of the water ice has boiled out.

Yet the crusts retard further evaporation. Other comets have survived many such passages through the maelstrom. Much mass has been lost, poured into the tail; but much of the coma could freeze again, and the rocky chunks could merge; and crystals of strange ices could plate themselves across a growing comet, out there in the dark and the cold, over the millions of years… if only Hamner-Brown could return to the cometary halo.

But there appears to be something in its path.

2

THE HAMMER

And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as a sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth.

Hammerfall Morning

There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them.

I know of a world with a million moons.

I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of diamond.

Rick Delanty woke on a wonderful morning, with a rectangle of hot sunlight crawling across his arm. The wonderful mornings came every hour and a half aboard Hammerlab, and he hadn’t tired of them yet. He used the tube and crawled out of the Apollo.

The larger windows in Hammerlab were filled with telescopes and cameras and other instruments. You had to crane around them, holding on to handholds on the bulkheads, swimming across open spaces.

Baker and Leonilla Malik were feeding data into the onboard computer. She looked up and said quickly, “Hello, Rick,” but turned back to work too quickly to see his quick grin.

It was time for work, but Rick Delanty was still partly tourist, and his eagerness was for the dawning of the comet. He found an observation scope unused at the moment, it had a big sun shield built into the optics, so that he could look at the comet without going blind.

The view was something like a stylized sunburst done in Day-Glo, and something like falling down a deep well while high on LSD. The gay streamers of the tail flowed outward as sluggishly as a lunar eclipse. There at the heart of the beast was a hint of graininess.

“Roger, Houston. We do have sideways motion relative to us. It should be coming onto your telemetry right now,” Baker was saying. “And there’s still activity, although that’s been dying out ever since the Hammer rounded the Sun. We got only one explosive event last watch, nothing big, not like the monster we observed yesterday.”