Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven

  “Ye gods!” he shouted. “That’s ice water”

  She splashed water onto his dry chest and hair. “Come on, it won’t hurt you.”

  He waded grimly out into the stream. The water was swift, out away from the banks, and the bottom was rocky. He had trouble keeping his feet, but he followed her upstream to a narrow gap between two boulders. The water plunged out swiftly there, threatening to dump both of them. It was just chest-deep for Harvey. “That cools you off fast,” he said.

  They paddled around in the pool, watching small trout dart near the surface. Harvey looked for larger fish, but they were keeping out of sight. The stream looked perfect for trout, deep pools below small rushing falls. The banks were overhung with trees except for two places where they’d been cleared, obviously by someone who liked fly fishing and had opened the banks out for his back cast.

  “I think I’m turning blue,” Maureen shouted finally. “You finished?”

  “Tell the truth, I was done ten minutes ago.”

  They climbed out onto another of the enormous white boulders, the contours smoothed by floodwaters. The sun, low as it was, felt good on Harvey’s chilled body, and the rock was still hot from old sunlight. “I’ve been needing this,” he said.

  Maureen turned over on belly and elbows to look at him. “Which? The freezing water, or the acrophobia, or the climbing your legs off?”

  “All of the above. And not interviewing anyone today, I needed that, too. I’m glad your father didn’t make it. Tomorrow — shazam! I’m Harvey Randall again.”

  She had changed back into the tan slacks. Harvey came out to find she’d also made drinks.

  “Stay for dinner?” she asked.

  “Well… Sure, but can I take you out somewhere?”

  She grinned. “You haven’t sampled the wild night life of Springfield and Porterville. You’ll do better here. Besides, I like to cook. If you want, you can help clean up.”

  “Sure—”

  “Not that there’s much cooking involved,” Maureen said. She took steaks out of the freezer. “Microwave ovens and frozen food. The civilized way to gourmet meals.”

  “That thing’s got more controls than an Apollo.”

  “Not really. I’ve been in an Apollo. Hey, you have too, haven’t you?”

  “I saw the mock-up,” Harvey said, “not the real thing. Lord, I’d like to do that. Watch the comet from orbit. No atmosphere to block it out.”

  Maureen didn’t answer. Randall sipped at his scotch. There was an edge on his hunger. He searched the freezer and found frozen Chinese vegetables to add to the meal.

  After dinner they sipped coffee on the porch, in wide chairs with wide, flat arms to hold the mugs. It was chilly; they needed jackets. They talked slowly, dreamily: of the astronauts Maureen knew; of the mathematics in Lewis Carroll; of social politics in Washington. Presently Maureen went into the house, turned off all the lights and came back out feeling her way.

  It was incredibly dark. Randall asked, “Why did you do that?”

  A disembodied voice answered, “You’ll see in a few minutes.” He heard her take her chair.

  There was no moon, and the stars lit only themselves. But gradually he saw what she meant. When the Pleiades came over the mountains he didn’t recognize them; the cluster was fiercely bright. The Milky Way blazed, yet he couldn’t see his own coffee cup,

  “There are city people who never see this,” Maureen said.

  “Yeah. Thanks.”

  She laughed. “It could have been clouded over. My powers are limited.”

  “If we could… No, I’m wrong. I was thinking, if we could show them all what it looks like — all the voters. But you see star scenes on the newsstands all the time, paintings of star clusters and black holes and multiple systems and anything you could find out there. You’d have to take the voters up here, a dozen at a time, and show them. Then they’d know. It’s all out there. Real. All we have to do is reach out.”

  She reached out (her night vision had improved that much) and took his hand. He was a bit startled. She said “Won’t work. Otherwise the main support for NASA would come from the farming community.”

  “But if you’d never seen it like this… Ahh, you’re probably right.” He was very aware that they were still holding hands. But it would stop there. “Hey, do you like interstellar empires?” Harmless subject.

  “I don’t know. Tell me about interstellar empires.”

  Harv pointed, and leaned close so she could sight down his arm. Where the Milky Way thickened and brightened, in Sagittarius, that was the galactic axis. “That’s where the action is, in most of the older empires. The stars are a lot closer together. You find Trantor in there, and the Hub worlds. It’s risky building in there, though. Sometimes you find that the core suns have all exploded. The radiation wave hasn’t reached us yet.”

  “Isn’t Earth ever in control?”

  “Sure, but mostly you find Earth had one big atomic war.”

  “Oh. Maybe I shouldn’t ask, but just where are you getting your information?”

  “I used to read the science fiction magazines. Then around age twenty I got too busy. Let’s see, the Earthcentered empires tend to be small, but… a small fraction of a hundred billion suns. You get enormous empires without even covering one galactic arm.” He stopped. The sky was so incredibly vivid! He could almost see the Mule’s warships sweeping out from Sagittarius. “Maureen, it looks so real.”

  She laughed. He could see her face now, pale, without detail.

  He slid onto the broad arm of her chair and kissed her. She moved aside, and he slid in beside her. The chair held two, barely.

  There is no harmless subject.

  There was a point at which he might have disengaged. The thought that stopped him was: tomorrow, shazam! I’m Harvey Randall again.

  Inside the house it was utterly black. She led him by the hand, by touch and memory, to one of the bedrooms. They undressed each other. Their clothes, falling, might as well have fallen out of the universe. Her skin was warm, almost hot. For a moment he wished he could see her face, but only for a moment.

  There was gray light when he woke. His back was cold. They lay tangled together on a made bed. Maureen slept calmly, deeply, wearing a slight smile.

  He was freezing. She must be too. Should he wake her up? His slow brain found a better answer. He disentangled himself, gently. She didn’t wake. He went to the other of the twin beds, pulled off the bedclothes, took them back and spread them over her. Then — with the full conviction that he was about to climb under the covers with her — he stood without moving for almost a minute.

  She wasn’t his wife.

  “Shazam,” Harvey said softly. He scooped up an armload of his clothes, careful to miss nothing. He padded out into the living room. He was starting to shiver. The first door he tried was another bedroom. He dumped the clothes on a chair and went to bed.

  Not dead, but transmuted! The comet is glorious in its agony. The streamer of its torn flesh reaches millions of miles, a wake of strange chemicals blowing back toward the cometary halo on a wind of reflected light. Perhaps a few molecules will plate themselves across the icy surfaces of other comets.

  Earth’s telescopes find the comet blocked by the blazing sun itself. Its exact orbit is still uncertain.

  The glory of the tail is reflected sunlight, but more than sunlight glows in the coma. Some chemicals can lie intimately mixed at near absolute zero, but heat them and they burn. The coma seethes in change.

  The head grows smaller every day. Here, ammonia boils from the surface of an ice-and-dust mixture; the hydrogen has long since boiled out. The mass contracts, and its density increases. Soon there will be little but rock dust cemented together by water ice. There, a stone monolith the size of a hill blocks the path of a gas pocket that grows hourly warmer, until something gives. Gas blasts away into the coma. The stony mass pulls slowly away, tumbling. The orbit of Hamner-Brown has been changed minutely.
>
  June: One

  The lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangeal’s call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we who remain alive shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.

  Paul of Tarsus, First Thessalonians

  There at the top of the great disintegrating totem pole, there in that tiny space at the tip, Rick Delanty lay on his back with his smile blinking on and off. His carefully enunciated voice gave no hint of that. It sounded just like Johnny’s; and Johnny Baker wore the slight frown of a man doing delicate work.

  “Switch to internal power.”

  “Internal power check. In the green.”

  “T minus fifteen minutes, and counting.”

  Whenever he glanced over at Rick, at that wavering smile, then Johnny’s lips twitched at the corners. But Johnny Baker had been up before; he could afford to be supercilious. Fifteen minutes, and no glitches. It would take a man his whole life to write down all the glitches that could stop an Apollo launch.

  Delanty kept smiling. They’d picked him! He’d gone through the training, and the simulators, and then off to Florida. Two days ago he’s been doing barrel rolls and loops and Immelmanns and dives above Florida and the Bahamas. That final loosening-up flight two days before a launch was just too firm a tradition to get rid of. It worked the tension out of the chosen astronauts and laid it on the ground crew, who could go nuts wondering if their crew would smear themselves in a jet trainer, after all that careful planning…

  “T minus one minute, and counting.”

  Those final, hurried, crammed hours ended when Wally Hoskins led him up the elevator and arranged him, clumsy in his pressure suit, within the Apollo capsule. After that he could lie on his back with his knees above his head, waiting for the glitch. But the glitch hadn’t come yet, and it looked like they were going, it really—

  “Five. Four. Three. Two. One. Ignition. First motion…”

  Going!

  “We have lift-off…”

  The Saturn rose in thunder and hellfire. A hundred thousand official visitors and more, newsmen, science fiction writers with scrounged press passes, dependents of astronauts, VIPs and friends…

  “There he goes,” Maureen Jellison said.

  Her father looked at her curiously. “We mostly call those ships ‘she.’ ”

  “Yes. I suppose so,” Maureen said. Why do I think I’ll never see him again?

  Behind her the Vice-President was muttering, just loud enough to hear. “Go, go, you bird — ” He looked up with a start, realized others were listening, and shrugged. “GO, BABY!” he shouted.

  It did something to the watchers. The power of the thundering rocket, the knowledge that had gone into it; to the older watchers it was something impossible, a comicbook incident from their childhood. To the younger ones it was inevitable and to be expected, and they couldn’t understand why the older people were so excited. Space ships were real and of course they worked…

  Inside the Apollo the astronauts smiled the rictus smile of a cadaver, as several gravities pulled their facial muscles back onto their cheeks. Eventually the first stage shut down and fell away, and the second stage did the same, and the third stage gave them a final push… and Rick Delanty, in free fall, was still smiling.

  “Apollo, this is Houston. You’re looking good,” the voice said.

  “Roger, Houston.” Delanty turned to Baker. “Now what, General?”

  Baker grinned self-consciously. He’d been promoted, just before the launch, so that he’d be the same rank as the Soviet kosmonaut.

  “On one condition,” the President had said when he handed Baker his stars.

  “Yes, sir?” Baker asked.

  “You don’t tease your Russian counterpart about his name. Resist the temptation.”

  “Yes, Mr. President.”

  But it was going to be hard. Pieter Jakov didn’t have a double meaning in Russian — but Comrade General Jakov spoke very good English, as Baker knew from their orientation meeting at Houston. He’d also met the other one, a dish — but only in Russia. She’d been officially too busy to come to the U S.

  “Now we find that bloody garbage can, Lieutenant Colonel Delanty,” Baker said. “Great up here, isn’t it?”

  “You know it.” Delanty peered out, eyes wide in wonder. They had showed it all to him, many times, in simulators. There were movies, and the other astronauts talked incessantly of space: they put him in wet suits underwater to simulate no-gravity. But none of that mattered. This was real.

  There was the absolute black of space ahead, stars shining brightly, although the Sun lit the Earth below. There were Atlantic islands, and coming up ahead was the coastline of Africa, looking just like a map with bits of cotton stuck on it for clouds. Later, to the north, was Spain, and the Mediterranean Sea, and after a while the dark green slash across the wastelands of Egypt, the Nile with all its bends and crooks.

  And then they were in sunset, and the lights of the fabled cities of India lay below.

  They were above the darkness covering Sumatra when Delanty got the blip on his radar screen. “There it is,” he said. “Hammerlab.”

  “Rojj,” Baker acknowledged. He looked at the Doppler; they were slowly drawing up to the capsule. They’d catch up to it in dawn over the Pacific, just as Houston’s computer had predicted. They waited. Finally Baker said, “Unlimber the cage. We’ve got to catch our house.” He thumbed the downlink set on. “Goldstone, this is Apollo. Hammerlab is in visual range, we are beginning final rendezvous maneuver.”

  “Apollo, this is Houston, what did you say was in visual range, interrogative?”

  “Hammerlab,” Baker said. He looked over at Delanty and grinned. Officially it was Spacelab Two; but who called it that?

  They approached rapidly: slowly to the astronauts, who were themselves moving at 25,000 feet each second. Then it was time. Delanty flew the Apollo. Jets edged their craft closer to their target: a big steel garbage can, forty feet long and ten in diameter, with viewports along the sides, one airlock, and docking hatches at each end.

  “The economy-price spacelab,” Baker muttered. “It’s tumbling. I make that one rotation in four minutes, eight seconds.”

  First to match completely with Hammerlab: Fire the Apollo’s attitude jets in just the precise pattern, so that it would tumble with the target. Then move closer to the thing, waiting for the chance, until the big docking probe on Apollo could enter the matching hole in the end of Hammerlab… and they were in darkness again. Rick was amazed at how long it had taken him to fly what looked like far less than a mile. Of course they’d also come 14,000 miles in the same fifty minutes…

  When dawn came Rick was ready, and made one pass, and a second, and cursed, and eased forward and felt the slight contact of the two ships, and the instruments showed contact at center, and Rick drove forward, hard…

  “Virgin no more!” he shouted.

  “Houston, this is Apollo. We have docking. I say again, we have docking.” Baker said.

  “We know,” a dry voice said from below. “Colonel Delanty’s mike was live.”

  “Whoops,” Rick said.

  “Apollo, this is Houston, your partners are approaching, SOYUZ has you in visual. I say again, Soyuz has visual contact.”

  “Roger Houston.” Baker turned to Rick. “So now you stabilize this mother while I talk to friendly Asian brother — and sister. SOYUZ. SOYUZ, this is Apollo. Over.”

  “Apollo. this is SOYUZ.” a male voice said. Jakov’s English was grammatically perfect, and almost without accent. He’d studied with American-speaking teachers, not Britishers. “Apollo, we copy you five by five. Is your docking maneuver completed, interrogative? Over.”

  “We are docked with Hammerlab. It is safe to approach. Over.”

  “Apollo, this is Sovuz. By ‘Hammerlab’ do you mean Spacelab Two, interro
gative? Over.”

  Baker said. “Affirmative.”

  Delanty was aware that he was using too much fuel. No one but a perfectionist would have noticed that; the maneuver was well within the error program devised by Houston. But Rick Delanty cared.

  Eventually they were stable: Apollo, its nose buried in the docking port in one end of the garbage can that was Hammerlab, both now stable in space, not wobbling and not tumbling. The Apollo led, at 25,000 feet per second: Baker and Delanty, ass-backward around the Earth each ninety minutes.

  “Done,” Rick said. “Now let’s watch them try.”

  “Rojj,” Baker said. He activated a camera system. There was a cable connector in the docking mechanism, and the picture came through perfectly: a view of Soyuz, massive and closer than they’d expected, approaching Hammerlab from the far side. The Soyuz grew, nose on. It wobbled slightly in its orbit, showing its massive bulk: Soyuz was considerably larger than the Apollo. The Soviets had always had their big military boosters to assist their space program, while NASA designed and built special equipment.

  “That big mother better not have forgotten the lunch,” Delanty said. “Or it will get hungry up here.”

  “Yep.” Baker continued to watch.

  The Soyuz was vital to the Hammerlab mission. It had brought up most of the consumables. Hammerlab was packed with instruments and film and experiments; but there was food and water and air for only a few days. They needed SOYUZ to stay for Hamner-Brown’s approach.

  “Maybe it will anyway,” Johnny Baker said. He looked grimly at the screen, and at the maneuvering Soviet vehicle.

  Watching was painful.

  SOYUZ floundered like a dead whale in the tide. It nosed violently toward the camera and shied as violently back. It edged sideways, stopped — almost; tried again and drifted away.

  “And that’s their best pilot,” Baker muttered.

  “I didn’t look too good myself—”