Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven, Jerry Pournelle

  He put the water on. “Let’s get it together,” he called. “Time to be finishing up. Stuff your bags and lace your boots. I 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.

  The Revelation of Saint John the Divine

  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.

  Carl Sagan, The Cosmic Connection:

  An Extraterrestrial Perspective

  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.”

  “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, Johnny,” Rick said. He cranked up the resolution on the telescope and peered into the murk. “Leonilla, can you lend a hand? Slave the output onto the telemetry—”

  “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 envelop the Earth without noticing.”

  “Don’t be silly,” a familiar voice crackled. “Gravity…rip it to pieces…” Charlie Sharps’ 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 manned ships that good. If anyone built them at all. And when it was done, Rick Delanty would be a tired old man.

  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, Johnny?” Rick demanded.

  “Houston and JPL get a miss distance of nine thousand kilometers,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “I don’t. Feeding your data into the onboard I come up with about a quarter of that. They’ve got more computing power down there, but we’ve got better data.”

  “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 antenna,” Baker said.

  “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,” Johnny Baker said. “And I’ve said no.”

  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 Johnny Baker crawling out on the broken Spacelab wing, of a man out in that hostile environment risking
the loneliest death ever—that had given the space program almost as big a boost as Neil Armstrong’s giant leap.

  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 red-painted 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,” Johnny was saying. “Sand. We’re being sandblasted.” He frowned at the status board. “And we’re losing efficiency in the solar cells. Pieter, cap all the optical instruments! We’ll have to save ’em for closest approach.”

  “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,” Johnny Baker said. “We’ve been looking for sideways drift. Well, we found it, but is it enough? Maybe we ought to terminate this mission.”

  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—”

  “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 I 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 TravelAll.”

  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 tunnel leading through the tail.”

  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 feature
s 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.