Lucifer's Hammer

“Loretta—”

“—and we don’t drink that kind of thing, and nobody could eat that meat unless they were starving to death. So you think we’ll be starving. Don’t you?”

“No. Honey, it’s hundreds to one against—”

“Harvey, please. Stay home today. Just this once. I never make a fuss about you being off somewhere all the time. I didn’t complain when you volunteered for another tour in Vietnam. I didn’t complain when you went to Peru. I didn’t complain when you took three weeks extra in Alaska. I’ve never said anything about having to raise your boy, who’s smarter than I am only he’s seen less of his father than Ralph Harris ever saw of his. I know your job means more to you than I do, but please, Harvey, don’t I mean something to you?”

“Of course you do.” He grabbed her and pulled her to him. “Lord, is that how you feel? The job doesn’t mean more than you do.” It’s just the money, he thought. And I can’t say that. I can’t say that I don’t need the money, you do.

“Then you’ll stay?”

“I can’t. Really can’t. Loretta, these documentaries have been good. Really good. Maybe I’ll get an offer from ABC. They’ll need a new science feature editor pretty soon, and that’s real folding money. And there’s a real chance of a book…”

“You’ve been up all night, Harvey, you’re in no shape to go anywhere. And I’m scared.”

“Hey.” He hugged her tightly and kissed her hard. And it’s all my fault, he told himself. How could she not be scared, after all the stuff I bought? But I can’t miss Hammer Day… “Look. I’ll send somebody else down to City Hall.”

“Good!”

“And I’ll have Charlie and Manuel meet me at UCLA.”

“But why can’t you stay here?”

“Got to do something, Loretta. Manly pride if nothing else. How can T tell people I sat at home in the root cellar after telling everybody else there wasn’t any danger? Look, I’ll get some interviews, and the Governor’s in town for a charity thing at Los Angeles Country Club, I’ll go over there just after the thing has gone by. And I won’t ever be more than ten or fifteen minutes from here. If anything happens, I’ll come home fast.”

“All right. But you still haven’t eaten your breakfast. It’s getting cold. And I filled your Thermos, and put a beer in the TravelAII.”

He ate quickly. She sat and watched him the whole time, not eating anything at all. She laughed when he made jokes, and she told him to be careful when he drove down the hill.

Communications were still bad. Mostly they spoke into recorders. It would be important to get their observations because the instruments weren’t going to be much use. Too much sandblasting. They had preserved the big telescope that could be attached to the color TV, though, and they’d record the video as well as try to send it back to Earth.

“Solar power’s down to about twenty-five percent,” Rick Delanty reported.

“Save the batteries,” Baker said.

“Rojj.”

It was getting warm in the spacecraft, but they needed the power for the recorders and other instruments.

Leonilla Malik spoke rapid-fire Russian into a mike. Jakov played with the transmitter controls, trying to get some response from Baikunyar. No luck. Leonilla continued to record. She had moored herself oddly, twisting to watch the observation port and still see the instrument board. Rick tried to follow what she was saying, but she was using too many unfamiliar words. Waxing lyrical, Rick thought. Letting her poetic streak have its way. Why not? How else could you describe being inside a comet?

They now knew less about Hamner-Brown’s path than Houston did. The last report from Houston was a miss by one thousand kilometers, but Rick wondered. Was that based on his visual observation? Because if it was, it meant only that that particular mountain would be that far off, and the cloud of solid gup was large. Not that large, though. Surely not that large.

“We are effectively inside the coma,” Leonilla was saying. “This is not especially evident. The chemical activity is long past. But we see the shadow of the Earth like a long tu

Rick caught that last phrase. Nice, he thought. If I get a chance to broadcast live to Earth, I’ll use it.

They all had work, which they did while they chattered into recorders. Rick had a hand-held camera, a Canon, which he worked like a madman, changing lenses and film as rapidly as he could. He hoped the automatic features were in good order, and forced himself to take a few frames with widely different speeds and apertures, just in case.

The status board inexorably ticked off seconds.

The long lens gave a good view through the observation port. Rick saw: half a dozen large masses, many more small ones and a myriad of tiny glinting points, all enmeshed in pearly fog. He heard Baker’s voice behind him. “Duck’s-eye view of a shotgun blast.”

“Good phrasing,” Rick said.

“Yeah. Hope it’s not too good.”

“I have lost all signal from the radar,” Pieter Jakov said.

“Roger. Give it up and make visuals,” Baker said. “Houston, Houston, are you getting anything from the inside TV?”

“…roger, Hammerlab… JPL… Sharps is in love, send more… higher-power transmission…”

“I’ll put on higher power when the Hammer’s closer,” Baker said. He didn’t know if they heard. “We’re saving the batteries.” He looked up at the status board. Ten minutes before the solid objects got to closest approach. Twenty minutes maybe for it all to pass. A half-hour. “I’ll increase transmitter power in five minutes; say again, increase to full power transmission in five minutes.”

CLANG!

“What the fuck was that?” Baker demanded.

“Pressure remains unchanged,” Jakov said. “Pressure holding in all three capsules.”

“Good,” Rick muttered. They’d closed the airlocks to Apollo and Soyuz; it seemed a reasonable precaution. Rick stood by with the meteor patches anyway. Hammerlab was by far the largest target.

And just how did the engineers estimate the size that a meteor patch ought to be? Rick wondered. From their size — about the maximum-size hole it would be worth repairing? Anything bigger would finish them anyway? To hell with it. He went back to his photographs. Through the Canon lens he looked into a galaxy of foamy ice, a tremendous, slow shotgun blast that was visibly coming toward them, spreading around Hammerlab rather than sliding sideways. “Jesus, Joh

“Rojj. Pieter, get the main telescope uncovered. I’m going to full power. We’ll send transmissions from here on in. Houston, Houston, visual indicates Earth is in the path of outer edges of nucleus; I say again, Earth is in the path of outer nucleus. Impossible to estimate size of objects that may strike Earth.”

“Make certain that message gets through,” Leonilla Malik said. “Pieter, see that Moscow knows as well.” There was urgency and fear in her voice.

“Eh?” Rick Delanty said.

“It is passing east of the Earth,” Leonilla said. “The United States will be more exposed, but there will be more objects close to the Soviet Union. The opportunities for deliberate misinterpretation are too great. Some fanatic—”

“Why do you say this?” Jakov demanded.

“You know it is true,” she shouted. “Fanatics. Like the madmen who had my father killed because Great Stalin was not immortal! Do not pretend they do not exist.”

“Ridiculous,” Jakov snorted, but he went to the communications console, and Rick Delanty thought he spoke urgently.