Lucifer's Hammer

“Hammerlab, there appears to be something wrong with the Doppler data. JPL requests you get optical tracking on the largest piece you can find. Can do?”

“Can try, Houston.”

“I’ll get it, Joh

“Right,” she said.

“Mark, mark, I’m off, mark, mark…”

Baker continued his report. “Houston, that nucleus is pretty well spread out, and the coma is huge. I fed the angular diameter into the computer and I get a hundred and forty thousand kilometers. As big as Jupiter. It could envelope the Earth without noticing.”

“Don’t be silly,” a familiar voice crackled. “Gravity… rip it to pieces…” Charlie Sharps’s voice began to fade.

“Houston, we’re losing you,” Baker said.

“That’s not Houston, that’s Sharps at JPL,” Rick said without looking up from the scope. “Mark, mark…”

“It comes through Houston. Damn. The comet stuff is playing pure hell with the ionosphere. We’re going to have communications problems until that thing’s past. Better record every observation we can get, just in case they’re not going through.”

“Rojj,” Delanty said. He continued to stare into the telescope. Hamner-Brown’s nucleus was spread out before him. He was having trouble keeping the cross hairs exactly centered on the mass he’d picked. There wasn’t enough contrast to use an automatic tracking system; it had to be done by eye. Delanty smiled. Another blow for man-in-space. “Mark, mark… ~’

He saw thick, glowing dust in sluggish motion, and a handful of flying mountains, and many more smaller particles, all jumbled, without order, parts moving in random patterns as they responded to light pressure and continuing chemical activity. It was the primal stuff of chaos. His mouth watered with the need to take a spacecraft into that, land on one of the mountains and walk out for a look around. The fifty-mile per-second velocity of those mountains was not evident. But it would be decades before NASA could build ma

But this won’t be my last mission. We’ve got the Shuttle coming up, if those goddam congresscritters don’t turn it into pork for their own districts…

Pieter Jakov had been working with a spectroscope. He finished his observations and said, “They have set us a hectic schedule for this morning. I see that extravehicular activity for final check of external instruments is optional. Should we? There are two hours left.”

“Crazy Russian. No, we’re not going to EVA into that. A snowflake at that speed can’t hole the Hammerlab, but it can sure as hell leave a hole in your suit the size of your fist.” Baker frowned at the computer readouts. “Rick, that last optical. What did you pick?”

“A big mountain,” Rick said. “About the center of the nucleus, just as they asked. Why?”

“Nothing.” Baker thumbed the microphone. “Houston, Houston, did you get the optical readings?”

“…squeal… negative, Hammerlab, send again…”

“What the hell is it, Joh

“Houston and JPL get a miss distance of nine thousand kilometers,” Joh

— “Hell, two thousand kilometers is two thousand kilometers,” Delanty said. He didn’t sound confident.

“I wish we didn’t have a glitch in the main Doppler ante

“I will go out and work on it,” Jakov said.

“No.” Baker’s answer was abrupt; the commander speaking. “We haven’t lost anyone in space yet, and why start now?”

“Shouldn’t we ask ground control?” Leonilla asked.

“They put me in charge,” Joh

Pieter Jakov said nothing. Rick Delanty remembered that the Soviets had lost men in space: the three Soyuz pilots on reentry that the world knew about, and a number of others, known only by rumors and tales told at night over vodka. He wondered (not for the first time) if NASA had been too cautious. With fewer safety precautions the United States could have reached the Moon a little sooner, done a good deal more exploring, learned more — and, yes, created a martyr or two. The Moon had been too expensive in money, but too cheap in lives to gain the popularity it needed. By the time Apollo XI reached it, it was dull. Routine.

Maybe that’s what we ought to do. The picture of Joh

There was a ping. Then another, and red warning lights flared on the monitor board.

Rick Delanty didn’t think. He leaped for the nearest redpainted box. A square box, duplicate of others that were put at various places in Hammerlab. He opened it and took out several flat metal plates with goop on one side, then some larger, rubberlike patches. He looked to Baker for instructions.

“Not holed,” Joh

“Rojj,” Jakov said. He moved to the instruments.

Delanty stood by with the meteor patches. Just in case.

“It depends on just how large that nucleus is,” Pieter Jakov called from the far end of the space capsule. “And we have yet to get firm estimates of how widely the solid matter extends. I think it highly likely that the Earth — and we — will be hit by high-velocity gravel if nothing worse.”

“Yeah. That’s what I was thinking,” Joh

There was a moment of silence.

“Please, no,” Leonilla said.

“I second that,” Rick added. “You don’t want to either. Who does?”

“Not me,” Jakov said.

“Unanimous. But it’s hardly a democracy,” Baker said. “We’ve lost a lot of power. It’s going to get warm in here.”

“You stood it in Spacelab until you got the wing fixed,” Delanty said. “If you could take it before, you can take it now. And so can we.”

“Right,” Baker said. “But you will stand by those meteor patches.”

“Yes, sir.”

Minutes later Hamner-Brown’s nucleus dropped behind the Earth. The Moon rose in its ghostly net of shock waves. Leonilla passed out breakfast.

Dawn found Harvey Randall in an easy chair on the lawn, with a table to hold his cigarettes and coffee and another to hold the portable television. Dawn washed out the once-in-a-lifetime sky show and left him a little depressed, a little drunk, and not really ready to start a working day. Loretta found him in the same state two hours later.

“I’ve gone to work in worse shape,” he told her. “It was worth it.”

“I’m glad. Are you sure you can drive?”

“Of course I can.” That was an old argument.

“Where are you going to be today?”

He didn’t notice the worry in her voice. “I had a hell of a time deciding that. I really want to be everywhere at once. But hell, the regular network science team will be at JPL, and they’ve got a good crew in Houston. I think I’ll start at City Hall. Bentley Allen and staff calmly taking care of the city while half the populace runs for the hills.”

“But that’s all the way downtown.”

Now he heard it. “So?”

“But what if it hits? You’ll be miles away. How can you get back?”

“Loretta, it’s not going to hit us. Listen—”

“You’ve got the swimming pool filled with fresh water and I couldn’t use it yesterday and you covered it up!” Her voice rose. “You made a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of dried beef and you sent our boy into the mountains and you filled the garage with expensive liquor and—”