by Larry Niven
She was in on this from the beginning. It’s her life too. Not fair to lock her out. But she just won’t understand. I can get Mark off a subject! He’ll drink my beer and talk about something else, if I make it plain enough. But I can’t talk to Loretta like that… What I need is a drink.
Loretta washed his back for him, and then they dried each other with the big towels. She was still trying to tell him how to handle the situation at the studio. She knew something was wrong, and as usual she probed at it, trying to understand, trying to help.
Myriads of orbits later, when true humans were spreading through a world held fast in the grip of an ice age, the black planet came again.
The comet was larger now. It had grown, snowflake by isolated snowflake, over a thousand million years, until it was four and a half miles across. But now its surface warmed in a bath of infrared heat. Within the comet’s tissues, pockets of hydrogen and helium vaporized and seeped through the crust. The tiny sun was eclipsed. The ringed black disk covered a third of the sky, leaking the heat of its birth.
Then it had passed, and calm returned.
The comet had healed from a previous pass. Centuries, millennia, what are they in the cometary halo? But time had come at last to this comet. The black giant’s passing had stopped it cold in its orbit.
Slowly, urged by the faint tugging of the Sun’s gravity, it began to drop toward the maelstrom.
February: Two
It appears that the inner planets have ceaselessly been bombarded since their formation. Mars, Mercury, and Earth’s Moon have undergone repeated strikes by objects ranging in size from micrometeorites to whatever cracked the Moon and created the large lava basin called Oceanus Procellarum.
Although it was originally thought that Mars, because it was at the edge of the asteroid belt, experienced a higher rate of meteoric bombardment, examination of Mercury indicates that Mars is not exceptional, and the inner planets have approximately equal probabilities of being struck…
Mariner Preliminary Report
The TravelAll was crammed with equipment: cameras, tape recorders, lights and reflectors, battery belts; the myriad paraphernalia of the roving TV interview. Charlie Bascomb, cameraman, was in the back with the sound man, Manuel Arguilez; everything normal, except that Mark Czescu was in the front seat when Harvey came out of the NBS offices.
Harvey beckoned to Mark. They walked across the studio lot toward Mercedes Row, where the executives parked. “Look,” Harvey said, “your job title is Production Assistant. That theoretically makes you management. It has to be that way because of union rules.”
“Yeah — ” Mark said.
“But you aren’t management. You’re a gofer.”
“I’m hip.” Mark sounded hurt.
“Don’t get upset and don’t get huffy. Just understand. My crew has been with me a long time. They know the game. You don’t.”
“I know that, too.”
“Fine. You can be a big help. Just remember, what we don’t need is—”
“Is me telling everybody how to do their job.” He flashed a big grin. “I like working for you. I won’t blow it.”
“Good.” Harvey detected no signs of irony in Mark’s voice It made him feel better. He had been worried about this interview — it had to be said, but that didn’t make it easier. One of his associates had once remarked that Mark was like a jungle, all right but you had to chop him back every now and then or he’d grow all over you.
The TravelAII started instantly. It had been through a lot with Harvey Randall: from the Alaska pipeline to the lower tip of Baja, even into Central America. They were old friends, the TravelAII and Harvey: a big three-seat International Harvester four-wheel drive, truck motor, ugly as sin, and utterly reliable. He drove in silence to the Ventura Freeway and turned toward Pasadena. Traffic was light.
“You know,” Harvey said, “we’re always complaining how nothing works, but here we are going fifty miles for this interview, and we count on being there in less than an hour. When I was a kid a fifty-mile trip was something you packed lunches for and hoped you’d make it by dark.”
“What’d you have, a horse?” Charlie asked.
“No, just L.A. without the freeways.”
“Yuk.”
They drove through Glendale and turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. Charlie and Manuel talked about bets they’d lost a few weeks before.
“I thought Cal Tech owned JPL,” Charlie said.
“They do,” Mark told him.
“Sure put it way the hell far from Pasadena.”
“Used to test jet engines there,” Mark said. “JPL. Jet Propulsion Laboratories, right? Everybody thought they’d blow up, so they made Cal Tech put the labs out in the Arroyo.” He waved to indicate the houses outside. “Then they built the most expensive suburb in this end of L.A. just around it.”
The guard was expecting them. He waved them into a lot near one of the large buildings. JPL nestled into its arroyo and filled it with office buildings. A big central steel and glass tower looked strangely out of place among the older Air-Force standard “temporary” structures erected twenty years before.
There was a PR flack waiting for them. She led them through the routine: Sign in, wear badges. Inside, it looked like any other office building, but not quite: There were stacks of IBM cards in the corridors, and almost no one wore coats or ties. They passed a ten-foot color globe of Mars gathering dust in a corner. No one paid any attention to Harvey and his people; it wasn’t unusual to see TV crews.
JPL had built the Pioneer and Mariner space probes, had set Viking down on Mars.
“Here we are,” the PR flack said.
The office looked good. Books on the wall. Incomprehensible equations on the blackboards. Books on every flat surface in view, IBM print-outs all over the expensive teak desk.
“Dr. Sharps, Harvey Randall,” the flack said. She hovered near the door.
Charles Sharps wore glasses that curved around to cover his whole field of view; very modernistic, vaguely insectile against his long pale face. His hair was black and straight, worn short. His fingers played with a felt-tip pen, or fished into his pockets, always moving. He looked to be about thirty, but might have been older, and he wore a sport jacket and tie.
“Now let’s get this straight,” Sharps said. “You want a lecture on comets. For yourself or for the public?”
“Both. Simple for me camera, as much as I can understand for me. If it’s not too much trouble.”
“Too much trouble?” Sharps laughed. “How could it be too much trouble? Your network tells NASA you want to do a documentary on space, and NASA sends up red rockets. Right, Charlene?”
The PR flack nodded. “They asked us to cooperate—”
“Cooperate.” Sharps laughed again. “I’d jump through hoops if I thought it would help get a budget. When do we start?”
“Now, please,” Harvey said. “The crew will set up while we chat. Just ignore them. I take it you’re the resident expert on comets.”
“I suppose so,” Sharps said. “Actually I like asteroids, but somebody has to study comets. I gather you’re interested mainly in Hamner-Brown.”
“Right.”
Charlie caught Harvey’s eye. They were ready. Harvey gave them the nod. Manuel listened and watched the indicator, and said, “Speed.”
Mark stepped in front of the camera. “Sharps interview, take one.” The chalkboard came together with a loud clack! Sharps jumped. They always did, first time. Charlie busied himself with the camera. He kept it aimed at Sharps; they’d film Harvey asking the questions later, when Sharps wasn’t around.
“Tell me, Dr. Sharps, will Hamner-Brown be visible to the naked eye?”
“Don’t know,” Sharps said. He sketched something unlikely on the IBM print-out in front of him. The sketch might have been of a pair of mating Loch Ness monsters. “A month from now we’ll know much better. We already know it’s going to get as close to the Sun
as Venus, but — ” He broke off and looked at the camera “What level do you want this at?”
“Anything you like,” Harvey said. “Make me understand, then we can decide how to tell the public.”
Sharps shrugged. “All right. So there’s the solar system out there.” He waved toward one wall. A big chart of the planets and their orbits hung next to the blackboard. “Planets and moons, always where they should be. They do a great complicated dance around each other. Every planet, every moon, every little rock in the asteroid belt, all dancing to Newton’s song of gravity. Mercury got a little out of step and we had to revise the universe to make it fit.”
“How’s that?” Harvey asked. And I’d have preferred to do the poetry myself, but what the hell…
“Mercury. Orbit changes just a little every year. Not much, but more than Newton says it should. So a man named Einstein found a good explanation, and incidentally managed to make the universe a stranger place than it was before.”
“Oh. I hope we don’t need relativity to understand comets—”
“No, no. But there’s more than gravity to a comet’s orbit. That’s surprising, isn’t it?”
“Yes. Are we going to have to revise the universe again?”
“What? No, it’s simpler than that. Look…” Sharps jumped to his feet and was at the blackboard. He looked for chalk and muttered “Here you go.” Mark took chalk from his pocket and handed it.
“Thanks.” Sharps sketched a white blob, then a parabolic curve. “That’s the comet. Now let’s put in planets.” He drew two circles. “Earth and Venus.”
“I thought planets moved in elliptical orbits,” Harvey said.
“So they do, but on any scale you could draw you can’t see the difference. Now look at the comet’s orbit. Both arms of the curve look just the same, coming in and going out. Textbook parabola, right?”
“Right.”
“But here’s what the comet really looks like when it falls away from the Sun. A dense nucleus, a coma of fine dust and gas” — he was drawing again — “and a plume of dusty gas streaming away from the Sun. Ahead of the comet, going out. The tail. A big tail, a hundred million miles long, sometimes. But it’s nearly a vacuum. It has to be — if it were thick, there wouldn’t be enough matter in the comet to fill that much space.”
“Sure.”
“Okay, and again like the textbooks. Material boils out of the head of the comet into the coma. It’s a thin gas, tiny particles, so tiny that sunlight can push them around. Light pressure from the Sun makes them stream away, so the tail always faces away from the Sun. Okay? Tail follows the comet going in, leads it coming out. But—
“The stuff boils out unevenly. When the comet first falls into the system, it’s a solid mass. We think. Nobody really knows. We have several models that fit the observations. Me, I like the dirty-snowball model. The comet’s made of rocks and dust, the dirt, balled up with ices and frozen gases. Some water ice. Methane. Carbon dioxide — dry ice. Cyanogen and nitrogen, all kinds of stuff. Pockets of these gases thaw and blast out to one side or the other. Like jet propulsion, and it changes the orbit.” Sharps was at work with the chalk, holding it sideways. When he finished, the incoming arm had jogs and jiggle in it, and the outgoing arm was blurred into a wide sweep not unlike the comet’s tail. “So we don’t know how close to Earth it’s coming.”
“I see. And you don’t know how big the tail will be.”
“Right. But this seems to be a new comet. Maybe it’s never made the trip down close to the Sun before. Not like Halley’s Comet, which comes every seventy years and gets smaller each time. Comets die a little every time they pass near the Sun. They lose all that tail material forever. So each time the tail’s smaller, until eventually there’s nothing left but the nucleus, and that comes as a handful of rocks. Meteor showers. Some of our best shooting stars are pieces of old comets falling onto Earth.”
“But this one’s new—”
“That’s right. So it ought to have a spectacular tail.”
“I seem to remember people said that about Kahoutek.”
“And I seem to remember they were wrong. Wasn’t there an outfit selling commemorative medals that would show Kahoutek exactly as it appeared? You see there’s no way to know. But my guess is that Hamner-Brown will be quite a sight. And it ought to pass fairly close to Earth.”
Sharps drew a dot within the blur of the comet’s outgoing course. “There’s where we’ll be. Of course we won’t see a lot until the comet passes the Earth, because until it gets by we’ll be looking straight into the Sun to see it. Hard to observe then. But when it’s passed us, it should be quite a sight. There have been comets with tails across half the sky. See them in daytime. We’re overdue for a big comet this century.”
“Hey, doc,” Mark said. “You’ve got Earth right in that thing’s path. Could it hit us?”
Harvey turned to look daggers at Mark.
Sharps was laughing. “Chances are zillions to one against it. You see the Earth as a dot on the blackboard. Actually, if I drew this to scale you wouldn’t be able to see the Earth in the drawing. Or the comet nucleus either. So what’s the chance that a couple of pinpoints will come together?” He frowned at the board. “Of course, the tail is likely to go where we do. We might be in it for weeks.”
“What does that do?” Harvey asked.
“We went through the tail of Halley’s Comet,” Mark said. “Didn’t hurt a thing. Pretty lights, and—”
This time Harvey’s look was enough.
“Your friend’s right,” Sharps said.
I knew that. “Dr. Sharps, why do all the astronomers get so excited about Hamner-Brown?” Harvey asked.
“Man, we can learn a lot from comets. Things like the origins of the solar system. They’re older than Earth. Made out of primordial matter. This comet may have been out there way past Pluto for billions of years. Present theory says the solar system condensed from a cloud of dust and gas, an eddy in the interstellar medium. Most of that blew away when the Sun started to burn, but some is still in the comet. We can analyze the tail. The way we did with Kahoutek. Kahoutek was no disappointment to astronomers. We used tools we’d never had before. Skylab. Lots of things.”
“And that was useful?” Harvey prompted.
“Useful? It was magnificent! We should do it again!” Sharps’s hands waved around in dramatic gestures. Harvey glanced quickly at his crew. The camera was rolling, and Manuel had that contented look a sound man has when things are going well in his phones.
“Could we get something like Skylab up there in time?” Harvey asked.
“Skylab? No. But Rockwell’s got an Apollo capsule we could use. And we’ve got the equipment here at the labs. There are big military boosters around, things the Pentagon doesn’t need anymore. We could do it, if we started now, and we weren’t chicken about it.” Sharps’s face fell. “But we won’t. Too damn bad, too. We could really learn something from Hamner-Brown that way.”
The cameras and sound equipment were packed away and the crew went out with the PR lady. Harvey was saying his farewells to Sharps.
“Want some coffee, Harvey? You’re in no hurry, are you?” Sharps asked.
“Guess not.”
Sharps punched a button on the phone console. “Larry. Get us some coffee, please.” He turned back to Harvey. “Damnedest thing,” he said. “Whole nation depends on technology. Stop the wheels for two days and you’d have riots. No place is more than two meals from a revolution. Think of Los Angeles or New York with no electricity. Or a longer view, fertilizer plants stop. Or a longer view yet, no new technology for ten years. What happens to our standard of living?”
“Sure, we’re a high-technology civiliz—”
“Yet…” Sharps said. His voice was firm. He intended to finish. “Yet the damned fools won’t pay ten minutes’ attention a day to science and technology. How many people know what they’re doing? Where do these carpets come from? The clothes you’re wea
ring? What do carburetors do? Where do sesame seeds come from? Do you know? Does one voter out of thirty? They won’t spend ten minutes a day thinking about the technology that keeps them alive. No wonder the research budget has been cut to nothing. We’ll pay for that. One day we’ll need something that could have been developed years before but wasn’t — ” He stopped himself. “Tell me, Harv, will this TV thing of yours be big or will it get usual billing for a science program?”
“Prime time,” Harvey said. “A series, on the value of Hamner-Brown, and incidentally on the value of science. Of course, I can’t guarantee people won’t turn to reruns of ‘I Love Lucy.’ ”
“Yeah. Oh — thank you, Larry. Put the coffee right here.”
Harvey had expected styrofoam cups and machine coffee. Instead, Sharps’s assistant brought in a gleaming Thermos pitcher, silver spoons and sugar-and-cream service on an inlaid teak tray.
“Help yourself, Harvey. It’s good coffee. Mocha-Java?”
“Right,” the assistant said.
“Good.” He waved dismissal. “Harv, why this sudden change of heart by the networks?”
Harvey shrugged. “Sponsor insists on it. The sponsor happens to be Kalva Soap. Which happens to be controlled by Timothy Hamner. Who happens—”
Harvey was cut off by shrieks of laughter. Sharps’s thin face contorted in glee. “Beautiful!” Then he looked thoughtful. “A series. Tell me, Harv, if a politician helped us with the study — helped a lot — could he be worked into the series? Get some favorable publicity?”
“Sure. Hamner would insist on it. Not that I’d object—”
“Marvelous.” Sharps lifted his coffee cup. “Cheers. Thanks, Harv. Thanks a lot. I think we’ll be seeing more of each other.”
Sharps waited until Harvey Randall had left the building. He sat very still, something unusual for him, and he felt excitement in the pit of his stomach. It might work. It just might. Finally he punched the intercom. “Larry, get me Senator Arthur Jellison in Washington. Thanks.”
