Lucifer's Hammer
Page 72
Harry Stimms was alive! Now, what would he take for that IOU? A job at the power plant? Stimms must have mechanical skills, and the power plant boys owed Tim. Failing that…could he promote a pregnant cow? That’d be worth $250,000 easy. Tim gazed into the sky, enjoying himself.
A clear thin line crossed the sky, the tip of it moving forward even as he watched. For a second he still did not know what it was. Shout a warning! But what did we used to call that?
“C-contrail! Jet plane!”
They’d heard something from Colorado Springs: that some of the aircraft had survived. Harvey and Maureen would have to come to terms with Colorado Springs when they got back from visiting a septic tank in Tujunga. But though they’d heard it on the radio, it was not the same as seeing that clean white line across the sky. He’d forgotten how beautiful that could be.
Tim waved solemnly at the plane. “You can fly,” he said. His voice rose. “You can fly. But we control the lightning.”
■
The asteroid was a child of the maelstrom: a rough nugget of nickel-iron with some stony strata, three miles along its long axis.
No man had ever seen a mastodon when the passing of mighty Jupiter plucked the nugget from its orbit and flung it out toward interstellar space.
It was on the second lap of its long, narrow elliptical orbit. The iron surface was frosted with strange ices now, as it passed the peak of the curve and began to coast back toward the Sun.
And the black giant was there. Its ring of cometary snowballs glowed broad and beautiful in starlight. Infrared light traced bands and whorls in its stormy surface. It was the only major mass out here between the stars, and the asteroid curved toward it and increased speed.
Infrared light bathed and thawed the frosted iron. The ringed planet grew huge.
The asteroid plunged through the plane of the ring at twelve miles per second. Battered and pocked with glowing craters, it receded, carrying in its own small gravitational field a spray of icy masses from the ring. They came like attendants, ahead and behind, in a pattern like the curved arms of a spiral galaxy.
The asteroid and a score of comets pulled free of the black giant and began their long fall into the maelstrom.