Lucifer's Hammer

Mark roared on ahead. As he drove he muttered to himself. Frank Stoner had said the Mojave was the place to be. Stoner knew everything. It was good enough for Mark. It was a place to go, and once there they could figure out what to do next. It was a destination.

But Harv would want to get his kid out. And that Vance woman wanted hers. Fu

They drove on through the rain, across the backbone of Los Angeles, and the rain kept them from seeing the destruction in the valleys to either side. The roads were clear of traffic, and the TravelAII got over the rapidly building piles of mud wherever the road dipped below the ridgeline. They were making miles, and Mark was pleased.

Randall dozed and woke, dozed and woke. The car seat jolted and tilted and jerked. Thunder and rain roared in his ears. His own ghastly memories kept pulling him almost awake. When lightning flashed he saw it again, his strobelit living room, crystal and silver intact, dog and wife dead on the Kashdan rug… When voices came he thought he was hearing his own thoughts:

“Yes, they were very close… she was completely dependent on him…”

The voices faded in and out. Once he was aware that the car had stopped, and there were three voices speaking in a tangle, but they might have been inside his head too.

“Wife is dead… wasn’t there… yes, she said she was going to ask him to stay home… lost his house and his job and everything he owned… not just his job, but whole profession. There won’t be any more television documentaries for a thousand years. Jesus, Mark, you’d be a basket case too.”

“I know, but… didn’t expect… curl up and die.”

Curl up and die, Randall thought. Yeah. He curled tighter in the car seat. The car began moving again and it jolted him. He whimpered.

Tuesday Afternoon

Unhappily where matters as basic as territorial defense are concerned, our higher brain centers are all too susceptible to the urgings of our lower ones. Intellectual control can help us just so far, but no further. In the last resort it is unreliable, and a single, unreasoned, emotional act can undo all the good it has achieved.

For two hours the Earth had turned, while Hammerlab made one circle and a fraction more. Europe and West Africa had moved from sunset to night.

Perhaps they were all afraid to speak. Rick knew he was. If he spoke, what would come out? Joh

It was hot in Hammerlab. Sweat didn’t run in free fall; it stayed where it formed. When Rick remembered he mopped it away with the soggy cloth clutched in his left hand. When tears formed they covered the eyes like thickening lenses. Blinking only distorted the lenses. They had to be mopped away; and then he saw.

Orange holes glowed on the dark Earth, like cigarettes poked through the back of a map. Hard to tell where each glowing spot was. City lights had disappeared across Europe, covered by clouds, or simply gone. Sea looked like land. Rick had watched land become sea in places: down the American East Coast, and across Florida, and deep into Texas. Texas. Could an Army helicopter move faster than a wall of water? But the winds! No, she was dead…

But he’d seen the strikes in daylight, and Rick remembered. The glow in the Mediterranean had died away. The smaller Baltic strike had been quenched almost immediately.

Much bigger strikes in the mid-Atlantic still showed. You saw only a diffuse pearly glow until Hammerlab was right above one. Then you looked down into’ the clear center of the tremendous hurricane: down through a clear pillar of live steam, into an orange-white glare. Three of these, and they were much smaller now. The sea was returning.

Four small bright craters scattered across the Sudan, and three in Europe, and a much larger one near Moscow, still shed their orange-white light back to space.

Joh

They looked at him as if he had interrupted a eulogy. Joh

“You must beg a ride home,” Pieter Jakov said, nodding. “Yes. We have room. Accept our hospitality.”

Leonilla Malik said, “We have no home. Where shall we go?”

“Moskva is not all of the Soviet Union,” Pieter said gently, reprovingly.

“Isn’t it?”

Rick was giving him no help. He was framed in the window, and Joh

“Ikara Sea. We did not see it. It would have been too far north. We only infer it from the way the clouds swept down.”

“The clouds swept down, right. That had to be an ocean strike. The clouds will keep coming down across Russia till the crater on the seabed is quenched. They’ll dump tens of millions of tons of snow all across the continent. White clouds and white snow. Any sunlight that falls will be reflected back to space for the next couple of hundred years. I…” Joh

Pieter Jakov’s face was cold. He said, “Perhaps Texas?”

Rick’s back flinched. Joh

“My family was in Moskva. They die by fire and the blast. Your family dies by water. You see, I know how you feel. But the Soviet Union has survived disasters before, and glaciers move slowly.”

“Revolution moves quickly,” Leonilla said.

“Eh?”

Leonilla spoke in rapid Russian. Pieter answered in kind.

Joh

Presently Leonilla switched to English. Almost briskly almost cheerfully, she said, “Glaciers move slowly, but revolutions move quickly. Most Party members, and everyone in the government, were Great Russians like me, like Pieter. Well, too much of Great Russia was under the strike. What will be happening now, as the Ukrainians, the Georgians, all the subject people, realize that Moscow no longer holds their lives? I have tried to convince Comrade General Jakov… What are you staring at?”

Rick Delanty turned to her, and she shied back. Facial expressions differ among races and cultures, but she knew murderous hate when she saw it. A moment later Rick moved; but only to give her room at the viewport.

There were dozens of tiny sparks above the black cloud cover of Hammerfall. More were coming through. A field of tiny rising sparks, fireflies in formation…

Leonilla lost her handhold. She drifted back across the width of Hammerlab, held by the hate in Rick’s eyes, unable to look away. Pieter saw that look and braced himself, one hand gripping hard to moor himself, the other fist clenched and ready, braced himself to defend the woman from a threat he didn’t understand.

And Joh