Lucifer's Hammer

Frying bacon woke him.

“Didn’t call Harv, huh?” Joa

Mark stretched elaborately. “Decided I’d rather be watching the news than making it. Know where the best view in the world is right now? Right in front of a television set.”

Frank looked at him curiously. He turned his head to indicate the height of the Sun. When Mark didn’t get it, he said, “Look at your watch.”

It was nearly ten! Joa

“Hell, we’ll miss it,” Mark complained.

“No point in racing anywhere now,” Frank chortled. “Don’t worry, they’ll be showing instant replays all day.”

“We could knock at one of the houses,” Mark suggested. But the others laughed at him! and Mark admitted he didn’t have the guts. They ate quickly, and Mark broke out a bottle of Strawberry Hill wine and passed it around. It tasted perfect, fruity flavor like morning juice, but with some authority.

“Best pack up and — ” Frank stopped in midsentence.

There was a bright light over the Pacific. Far away, and very high, and moving downward fast. A very bright light.

The men didn’t speak. They just stared. Joa

A tiny blue-white dwarf sun sank rapidly in the South, setting far beyond the flat blue Pacific horizon. It left a burning trail behind it. In the moment after it was gone, something like a searchlight beam probed back along its path, rose higher, above the cloudless sky.

Then nothing for one, two, three heartbeats.

Mark said, “Hot—”

A white fireball peeked over the edge of the world.

“Fudge Tuesdae. It’s real. It’s all real.” The edge of a giggle was in Mark’s voice. “We’ve got to get moving—”

“Bullshit.” Frank used just enough volume to get their attention. “We don’t want to be moving when the quakes hit. Lie down. Get your sleeping bag around you. Stay out in the open. Joa

Then Frank ran to the bikes. He carefully laid the first one on its side, then rolled the next away from it and laid it down too. He moved quickly and decisively. He came back for the third bike and moved it away.

Three white points glared at them, then winked out, one, two… The third and brightest must have touched down, far to the southeast. Frank glanced at his watch, counting the ticking seconds. Joa

“Yeah. The Comet Wardens will love this,” Mark said. “I wonder where Harv went? I’m glad I decided not to get up and go join him. We ought to be safe here. If the mountains hold up.”

“Shut up,” Joa

The communications center at JPL was jammed with people: newsmen with special passes; friends of the Director; and even some people, like Charles Sharps and Dan Forrester, who belonged there.

The TV screens were bright with pictures. Reception wasn’t as good as they’d have liked; the ionized tail of the comet roiled the upper atmosphere, and live TV pictures were apt to dissolve into wavy lines. No matter, Sharps thought. They’ll make onboard recordings in the Apollo, and we’ll recover them later. And there’ll be all those film pictures, taken through the telescope. We’ll learn more about comets in the next hour than we have learned in the last hundred thousand years.

That was a sobering thought, but Sharps was used to it. It was the same for the planets, for the whole solar system. Until men went — or sent probes — into space, they were guessing about their universe. Now they knew. And no other generation could ever discover so much, because the next generation would read it from textbooks, not from the universe itself. They would grow up knowing. Not like when I was growing up and we didn’t know anything, Sharps thought. God, what exciting times. I love it.

A digital clock ticked off the seconds. A glass panel with a world map showed the current position of the Apollo capsule.

Apollo-Soyuz, Sharps reminded himself, and he gri

Pity we’re having communications problems. Power losses on Hammerlab. Didn’t anticipate that. Should have. But we didn’t think it would be this close when we threw Hammerlab together.

“How close?” Sharps said.

Forrester looked up from his computer console. “Hard to say.” He played his fingers across the keys like E. Power Biggs at the Milan Cathedral organ. “If that last input hadn’t been garbled, I’d know. Best estimate is still around a thousand kilometers. If. If that garbled reading was right. And if the one I threw out because it didn’t fit the others is wrong. There are a lot of ifs.”

“Yeah.”

“Taking shots… number thirty-one filter… handheld…” They could barely recognize Rick Delanty’s voice.

“One of your accomplishments,” Dan Forrester said.

“Mine? Which one is this?”

“Getting the first black astronaut a mission,” Forrester said, but he said it absently, because he was studying squiggles on the oscilloscope above his console. He did something, and one of the TV pictures improved enormously.

Charlie Sharps looked at the approaching cloud. He saw it only as a batch of not very sharply focused grays, but one thing was evident — it wasn’t moving sideways at all. The seconds ticked on relentlessly.

“Where the devil is Hamner?” Sharps asked suddenly.

Forrester, if he heard, didn’t answer.

“…path of outer edges of nucleus; say again, Earth… Outer… impossible… may strike…” The voice faded.

“Hammerlab, this is Houston, we do not copy, use full power and say again; I say again, we do not copy.”

More seconds ticked off. Then, suddenly, the TV pictures on the screens swam, blurred and became clearer, in color, as Apollo used the main telescope and full transmission power.

“Jesus, it’s coming closer” Joh

The TV screens changed rapidly as Rick Delanty kept the main telescope trained on the comet head. The comet grew and grew, shapes appearing in the maelstrom of fog, larger shapes, details, lumps of rock, jets of streaming gas, all happening even as they watched. The picture swung on down, until the Earth itself was in view…

And flaming spots appeared on the Earth. For just one long moment, a moment that seemed to stretch out forever, the pictures stayed there on the TV screen: Earth, with bright flashes, light so bright that the TV couldn’t show it as more than bright smears and lapses of detail.

The picture stayed in Charlie Sharps’s mind. Flashes in the Atlantic. Europe dotted with bright smears, all over, with a big one in the Mediterranean. A bright flash in the Gulf of Mexico. Any west of that wouldn’t be visible to the Apollo, but Dan Forrester was playing with the computer. All the data they had, from any source, was supposed to go into it. Speakers were screaming. Several of them, on different cha

“FIREBALL OVERHEAD!” someone’s voice shouted.

“Where was that?” Forrester called. His voice was just loud enough to go over the babble in the room.