Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven

  They had broken off work for dinner. Rick Delanty ate steadily, his attention on the glory beyond the windows. They had all lost weight — they always did — but Rick was already nine pounds light, and was trying to make up for it. (Considerable ingenuity had gone into devising a gadget to find a human’s weight in null-gravity.)

  “So long as you’ve got your health,” Rick said, “you’ve got everything. Wow, it’s good not to vomit.”

  He got puzzled looks from the kosmonauts, who had never watched American TV commercials. Baker ignored him. The Sun exploded over the world’s edge. Rick closed his eyes for a few moments, then opened them to watch dawn’s blue-and-white arc roll toward them. Yesterday’s hurricane pattern still squatted on the Indian Ocean like a sea monster on an ancient map. Typhoon Hilda. Far to the left was Everest and the Himalaya massif. “That’s a sight I’m never going to get tired of.”

  “Yes.” Leonilla joined him at the viewport. “But it seems so very fragile. As if I could reach out and… run my thumb across the land, leaving a path of destruction hundreds of kilometers wide. That is an uneasy feeling.”

  Johnny Baker said, “Hold that thought. The Earth is fragile.”

  “You are worried about the comet?” Her expression was hard to read. Russian face and body language is not quite the same as American.

  “Forget the comet. The more you know, the more fragile we are,” said Johnny. “A nearby nova could sterilize everything on Earth except the bacteria. Or the Sun might flare up. Or cool off a lot. Our galaxy could become a Seyfert galaxy, exploding and killing everything.”

  Leonilla was amused. “We need not worry for thirty-three thousand years. Speed of light, you know.”

  Johnny shrugged. “So it happened thirty-two thousand, nine hundred years ago. Or we could do it to ourselves. Chemical garbage killing the ocean, or heat pollution—”

  Rick said, “Not so fast. Heat pollution could be the only thing saving us from the glaciers. Some people think the next Ice Age started a few centuries back. And we’re running out of coal and oil.”

  “Sheesh! You can’t win.”

  “Atomic wars. Giant meteor impacts. Supersonic aircraft destroying the ozone layers,” said Pieter Jakov. “Why are we doing this?”

  “Because we aren’t safe down there,” Baker said.

  “The Earth is large, and probably not as delicate as it looks,’ Leonilla said. “’But man’s ingenuity… sometimes that is what I fear.”

  “Only one answer,” Baker said. He was very serious now. “We’ve got to get off. Colonize the planets. Not just here, planets in other systems. Build really big spacecraft, more mobile than planets. Get our eggs into a lot of baskets, and it’s less likely that some damn fool accident — or fanatic — will wipe us out just as the human race is becoming something we can admire.”

  “What is admirable?” Jakov said. “I think you and I would not agree. But if you are running for President of the United States, you have my support. I will make speeches for you, but they will not let me vote.”

  “That’s a pity,” said Johnny Baker, and thought for a moment of John Glenn, who had run for office, and won. “Back to the salt mines. Who’s going out for samples this morning?”

  The nucleus of Hamner-Brown was thirty hours away. In the telescopes it showed as a swarm of particles, with a lot of space in between. The scientists at JPL were excited at the discovery, but for Baker and the others it was a pain in the ass. It wasn’t easy to get Doppler shift on the solid masses, because everything was immersed in the tail, and the gas and dust was streaming away at horrendous speeds, riding the pressure of raw sunlight. The masses were approaching Earth at around fifty miles per second. Finding a sideways drift was even more difficult.

  “Still coming straight at us,” Baker reported.

  “Surely there is some lateral motion,” Dan Forrester’s voice said.

  “Yeah, but it’s not measurable,” Rick Delanty told him. “Look, Doc, we’re giving you the best we’ve got. It’ll have to do.”

  Forrester was instantly apologetic. “I’m sorry. I know you’re doing all you can. It’s just that it’s hard to make the projection without better data.”

  And then they had to spend five minutes soothing Forrester’s ruffled feathers and assuring him they weren’t mad at him.

  “There are times when geniuses drive me crazy,” Johnny Baker said.

  “Easy way to fix that,” Delanty said. “Just give him what he wants. You don’t hear no complaints about my observations.”

  “Shove it,” Baker said.

  Delanty rolled his eyes. “Where?” He drifted over to Baker. “Here, I’ll punch in the numbers. Just read ’em off.”

  When they finished the morning observations and had a few moments to relax, Pieter Jakov coughed apologetically. “There is a question,” he said. “I have wanted to ask it for a long time. Please do not take it wrong.”

  It struck Johnny that Pieter had waited until Leonilla had gone into the Soyuz and closed the hatchway. “Go ahead.”

  Pieter’s eyes tracked back and forth between the two Americans. “Our newspapers tell us that in America the blacks serve the whites, the whites rule the blacks. Yet you seem to work together very well. So, bluntly: Are you equal?”

  Rick snorted. “Hell no. He outranks me.”

  “But otherwise?” Pieter suggested.

  Rick’s face would have looked serious enough, except to another American. “General Baker, can I be your equal?”

  “Eh? Oh, sure, Rick, you can be my equal. Why didn’t you say something before?”

  “Well, you know, it’s a delicate subject.”

  Pieter Jakov’s expression wasn’t cryptic at all. Before he could explode, Johnny asked, “Do you really want a serious lecture on race relations?”

  “Please yourself.”

  “How does Leonilla pee in free fall?”

  “Hm. I… see.”

  “See what?” Leonilla came wriggling back through the double hatch.

  “A minor discussion,” Johnny said. “No state secrets involved.”

  Leonilla clung to a handhold and studied the three men. John Baker was tapping numbers into a programmable hand computer, Pieter Jakov grinned broadly, watching in apparent admiration… but they all wore that broad, irritating, I’ve got-a-secret grin. “They give you good equipment,” said the kosmonaut. “There are not many things that we do better in space than you do.”

  Delanty seemed to have trouble with his breathing. Baker said quickly, “Oh, this pocket computer isn’t NASA issue. It’s mine.”

  “Ah. Are they expensive?”

  “Couple of hundred bucks,” Baker said. “Um, that’s a lot in rubles, not so much in terms of what people make. Maybe a week’s pay for the average guy. Less for somebody who’d actually have a use for it.”

  “If I had the money, how long would it take to get one?” Leonilla asked.

  “About five minutes,” Baker said. “Down there, in a store. Up here it might be a while.”

  She giggled. “I meant down there. They have… those… in stores, to buy?”

  “If you’ve got the money. Or good credit. Or even not-so good credit,” Baker said. “Why? You want one? Hell, we’ll find a way to get you one. You too, Pieter?”

  “Could that be arranged?”

  “Sure. No problem,” Baker said. “I’ll call the PR man at Texas Instruments. They’ll give you a pair of them for the publicity. Help ’em sell more. Or would you rather have a Hewlett-Packard? Those use a different kind of notation, but they’re fast—”

  “That is what is confusing,” Pieter said. “Two companies, two different rivals making such fine equipment. Wasteful.”

  “Maybe wasteful,” Rick Delanty said, “but I can take you into any damn electronics store in the country and buy one.”

  “No politics,” Johnny Baker warned.

  “This ain’t politics.”

  There was an awkward silence. Pieter Jako
v drifted over to the UV camera with its digital readouts. He ran a hand lovingly over it. “So precise. So intricately machined, and the complex electronics. It is a real pleasure to work with your American machinery.” He gestured around Hammerlab, at the containers of growing crystal, at the cameras and radars and recorders. “It is amazing how much we have learned on this short mission, thanks to your excellent equipment. As much, I think, as on any of our previous Soyuz flights.”

  “As much?” Leonilla Malik’s voice was sarcastic. “More.” Her voice held a bitterness that snapped three heads around in surprise. “Our kosmonauts go along for the ride. As passengers, to prove that we can send men into space and sometimes bring them down alive. For this mission we had nothing to contribute but food and water and oxygen — and one launch to your two.”

  “Somebody had to bring the lunch,” Rick Delanty said. “Pretty good, too.”

  “Yes, but it is all we brought. Once we had a space program—”

  Jakov interrupted in rapid-fire Russian. He spoke too rapidly for Johnny or Rick to follow, but what he was saying was obvious.

  She answered with a short, sharp syllable and then continued. “The basis of Marxism is objectivity, is it not? It is time to be objective. We had a space program once. Sergei Korolev was as great a genius as anyone who ever lived! He could have made our space arm the greatest instrument for knowledge in the world, but those madmen in the Kremlin wanted spectaculars! Khrushchev ordered circuses to shame the Americans, and instead of developing our capabilities we gave the world stunts! The first to have three men in orbit — by taking out all the scientific instruments and jamming a third man, a very small man, into a capsule built for two, for one orbit! Circuses! We might have been the first to the Moon, but now we have yet to go there.”

  “Comrade Malik!”

  She shrugged. “Is any of this news? No. I thought not. So we had our spectaculars, and we used up our opportunities to gain headlines, and today the best pilot in the Soviet Union cannot dock his spacecraft with a target the size of a comfortable dascha! And you offer to give us, give us as a promotion, something that the best engineers in the Soviet Union cannot build or buy for themselves.”

  “Hey, didn’t mean to get you upset,” Johnny Baker said.

  Jakov made a final remark in Russian and turned away in disgust. Rick Delanty shook his head in sympathy. What had got into her?

  They were quiet and formally polite until she went into the Soyuz. Baker and Delanty exchanged looks. They didn’t need to say more. Johnny Baker went to the corner where Jakov had busied himself. “Need to get something straight,” Johnny said.

  “Yes?”

  “You’re not going to get her in trouble, are you? I mean, there’s no need to report everything that gets said up here.”

  “Of course not,” Jakov agreed. He shrugged. “We are all men of the world. We know that every twenty-eight days women become irrational. What married man does not know?”

  “Yeah, that must be it,” Johnny Baker said, and exchanged another glance with Delanty.

  “And of course the State has been her parent,” Jakov said. “Her father and mother died when she was young. It is not surprising that she would like to see our country more advanced than it is.”

  ’’Sure.’’ Sure, Rick Delanty thought. Bullshit. If she had problems with her period she’d have told the Russian groundcontrol people and somebody else would have been sent up. Wouldn’t she? I’d have told them about space sickness if I’d known I was going to get it. I’m sure I would have…

  Whatever her problem, it would be wise to treat Leonilla Malik diffidently during the next day or so. Hell. And Hamner-Brown was so close!

  Barry Price laid down the telephone and looked up with excitement. Dolores had just come in with coffee. “Guess what happens next Tuesday!” he shouted in glee.

  “A comet hits the Earth.”

  “Huh? NO, no, this is serious. We go on line! I’ve got all the permissions, the last court suit was dismissed — San Joaquin Nuclear Plant becomes a fully operational facility.”

  She didn’t look as happy as he’d thought she would. “I suppose there’ll be some kind of ceremony?” she asked.

  “No, we keep a low profile — why?”

  “Because I won’t be here. Not unless you absolutely need me.”

  He frowned. “I always absolutely need you—”

  “Better get used to it,” she said. She patted her stomach. There was no sign of a bulge, but he knew. “Anyway, I’m going to see Dr. Stone in Los Angeles. Thought I’d stay over and visit Mother, and come back Tuesday night.”

  “Sure. Dee?”

  “Yes?”

  “You want to keep this baby, don’t you?”

  “Yes. I’m going to.”

  “Then marry me.”

  “No, thanks. We’ve both tried that before.”

  “Not with each other,” he said. He tried to sound convincing, but secretly was relieved. And yet… “Is it fair to the kid? Not having a father…”

  She giggled. “Not being parthenogenetic, I’m relatively certain he has one. And I’ve a good idea who he is.”

  “Oh, dammit, you know what I mean.”

  “Sure.” She put his coffee down on the desk and opened his calendar. “You have lunch with the Lieutenant Governor. Don’t forget.”

  “That moron. If there was anything that would get me out of my euphoric mood, you’ve just said it. But I’ll be nice. You can’t believe how nice I’ll be.”

  “Good.” She turned to leave.

  “Hey,” he called, stopping her. “Look, let’s talk about it. When you get back from Los Angeles. I mean, it’s my kid too…”

  “Sure.” Then she was gone.

  “Hey, baby, that Hammer’s gonna waste this town.”

  “Bull-fucking-shit,” Alim Nassor said, and he smiled. “We’re gonna do the wasting.” He’d heard all the talk about what the comet was going to do. The preachers in their storefronts were getting big crowds, pulling in lots of bread. End of the world coming, make your peace with Sweet Jesus, and give money…

  More power to them. One thing that comet was doing — it was sucking the honkies right out of their houses. Alim’s cruises through Brentwood and Bel Air turned up lots of houses with milk bottles and old newspapers on the porches. He went through in an old pickup truck, lawn mowers and garden tools piled in back. Who’d look twice at black gardeners? So when they stopped to collect the papers and milk cartons nobody noticed. And now he had the addresses, and they’d cleaned up so nobody else would come try a ripoff…

  They’d go through Bel Air and Brentwood like a mowing machine. Alim Nassor had set it up with half a dozen burglary outfits, with men who weren’t so good at taking orders, but knew a good thing when they saw it. A Hammer of God didn’t come twice in a man’s lifetime.

  Some of these places had to be setups. Pigs on stakeout. There were ways to take care of that little problem, too. It only took planning. They even mowed some yards. Did good work and that way they could watch the whole block, see people piling stuff into trailers and taking off. Bel Air was half deserted. It was going to be easy pickings tonight! And afterward… maybe the political game could be played again. A lot of brothers would have bread, for awhile.

  Still… there were so many honkies moving out. Rich honkies, people who knew things. Down at City Hall everybody was nervous, too. Maybe that thing could really hit?

  Alim had gone through the newspapers and magazines. He could read pretty well. A little slow, but he could puzzle it out, and some of the drawings made it all clear. You didn’t want to be on low ground. Waves a thousand feet high! The cat who drew them had some imagination. He showed the L.A. City Hall part underwater, the tower rising out of the flood, and the County Administration and the Courthouse with their roofs just sticking up. All them pigs dead, wouldn’t that be something? But he sure didn’t want to be here when that happened.

  Maybe it wouldn’t, and all th
e honkies would come home. “Won’t they be surprised,” Alim murmured.

  “Huh?”

  “The honkies. Won’t they be surprised when they get home?”

  “Yeah. Why just these places? If we hit just the richest houses in a lot bigger territory, we—”

  “Shut up.”

  “Sure.”

  “I want us close to each other. If one of these places turns out to be full of pigs, we can call for help on the CB.”

  “Okay, sure.”

  Hammer of God. What if it was real? Where could they go? Not south, that was for sure. Politicians could talk about black-brown unity, but that was jive. Chicanos didn’t like blacks, blacks hated chicanos. There were clubs where you had to kill a black to join down there in chicano turf, and they were tough mothers, and the further south you went the more there were.

  “We take guns tonight,” he said. “We take all the guns.”

  Harold flinched, and the truck swerved a little. “You think we’ll get trouble?”

  “I just want to be ready,” Alim said. And if that fucking comet… Better to have guns and bullets, tonight and tomorrow. And take some food. He’d stash it himself, so as not to upset the brothers.

  At least they’d be high up, if it came.

  Patrolman Eric Larsen had come to Los Angeles from Topeka with a university degree in English and an urgent impulse to write for television and the movies. The need to support himself and a chance opportunity led him to the Burbank Police Department. He told himself it would be valuable experience. Look what Joseph Wambaugh had managed from a police career! And Eric could write; at least, he had a degree that said he could.

  Three years later he still hadn’t sold a script, but he had confidence, strange tales to tell and a considerably better understanding of both human nature and the entertainment industry. He’d also done a lot of growing up. He’d lived with a woman, been engaged twice and got over his inability to have casual friendships with girls, even though he hadn’t lost a strong tendency to idealize women. It hurt Eric to see young runaways exploited by the street people. He kept thinking of what they might have become.