Lucifer's Hammer

by Larry Niven

  “Fuck that!” Alim slapped at Gay’s hands, scattering paper and weed. “You crazy? In the middle of a job and four houses to go? Give me that! All of it! You want a party, fine, we’ll have a fine party when we’re home free!”

  They didn’t like it, but they passed the bags to Alim and he stashed them in the pockets of his baggy combat jacket. He slapped their butts and they went, carrying heavy bedsheet sacks.

  He hadn’t gotten it all. It didn’t matter. At least they wouldn’t be blowing the tops of their heads off till this was over.

  Alim picked up a radio and a Toast-it-Oven and followed them out. He blinked in the daylight. Gay was in the back, adjusting tarpaulins. Harold started the motor. Good. Alim stopped with the truck door open to look down the driveway.

  He saw a tall tree on the lawn casting two sharp shadows.

  And that smaller tree: two shadows. He looked down and saw his own two shadows, one moving. Alim looked up and saw it, a second sun dropping down the sky, dropping below the hill. He blinked; he squeezed his eyes shut, hard. The violet afterimage blocked everything.

  He climbed in. “Get going,” he said. While the truck rolled down the drive he started the CB. “Come in, Jackie. Come in, Jackie. Jackie, you motherfucker, answer me!”

  “Who’s that? Alim Nassor?”

  “Yeah. Did you see it?”

  “See what?”

  “The comet, the Hammer of God! I saw it fall! I watched it burn its way down the sky till it hit! Jackie, listen good, ’cause these CB things ain’t gonna be any good in a minute. We’ve been hit. It’s all gonna come true, and we got to link up.”

  “slim, you must’ve found something real special. Coke, maybe?”

  “Jackie, it’s real, the whole world been hit. There’s gonna be earthquakes and tidal waves. You call everyone you can and tell them we meet at… the cabin up near Grapevine.

  We got to stick together. We won’t drown because we’re too high, but we got to meet.”

  “slim, this is crazy. I got two houses to go, we got lots of stuff, and you come on like the end of the world?”

  “Just call someone, Jackie! Someone’s got to have seen it! Look, I got to call the others while we still got the CB.” Alim switched off.

  They were still in the driveway. Harold was the color of wet ashes. He said, “I saw it too. George… Alim, do you think we’re too high to drown? I don’t want to drown.”

  “We’re about as high as we can get. We got to go down before we get to Grapevine. Get movie’, Harold. We want to be across the low spots before it rains too much.”

  Harold took off, fast. Alim reached for the CB. Were they really too high to drown? Was anybody, anywhere?

  Hot Fudge Tuesdae: One

  I ran to the rock to hide my face,

  but the rock cried out, NO HIDING PLACE!

  No hiding place down here…

  The crest of the Santa Monica Mountains was a thoroughly inconvenient place to live. Shopping centers were far away. Roads were an adventure. Driveways tended to be nearly vertical in spots. Yet there were many houses up here, and it was only indirectly due to population pressure.

  Population pressure produced the cities.

  The view from the crest on Monday night was incredible; unique. Downslope on one side was Los Angeles; downslope on the other, the San Fernando Valley. At night the cities became carpets of multicolored light stretching away forever. Freeways were rivers of light moving through seas of light. It looked like the whole world had turned to city, and loved it!

  Yet there were vacant patches on the crest. Mark and Frank and Joanna left Mulholland Drive at sunset, took their motorcycles up the side of a hill. They camped in a rocky area out of sight of wandering fuzzmobiles, a couple of blocks distant from the houses on both sides.

  Frank Stoner walked around the crest of the hill, looked at the slopes on both sides, then nodded to himself. Undevelopable. Too much danger of mudslides. Not that it mattered a damn why no one had built a house here, but Frank Stoner didn’t like unanswered questions. He came back to where Joanna and Mark were setting up the Svea backpacker stove.

  “We may have nervous neighbors,” Frank said. “Let’s get dinner over while there’s light. After dark, no flashlights and no fires.”

  “I don’t see — ” Mark began.

  Joanna broke in impatiently. “Look, these houses are a long way from the nearest police station. People wandering up here would tend to make them nervous. We do not need to spend the night before Hot Fudge Sundae at Malibu Sheriff Station.” She went back to reading the directions on the freeze-dried dinner they’d brought. She was not a good cook; but if she left it to Mark, he’d do it however he felt, which might turn onto well and might not. Following the directions was sure to produce something edible, and she was hungry.

  She looked at the two men. Frank Stoner towered over Mark. A big man, strong, physically attractive. Joanna had felt that before. He’d be damned good in bed.

  She’d felt that before, but she hadn’t found herself thinking she was teamed up with the wrong man before. The thought puzzled her. Living with Mark was a lot of fun. She didn’t know if she was in love with Mark, because she wasn’t sure what love was, but they were compatible in bed, and they didn’t often get on each other’s nerves. So why this sudden pash for Frank Stoner?

  She emptied the beef Stroganoff into a cooking pot and grinned down at it so the others couldn’t see. They’d want to know why she was grinning, and it wasn’t something she wanted to explain. If she wondered why she was getting the hots for Frank Stoner…

  But it bothered her. Joanna had a very good education, courtesy of her upper-middle-class parents. She didn’t make much use of it, but it had left her with considerable curiosity, particularly about people — which included herself.

  “This is just about perfect,” Mark said.

  Frank grunted disapproval.

  “No? Why not? Where else?” Mark demanded. He’d picked this spot and was proud of it.

  “Mojave is better,” Frank said absently. He laid out his sleeping bag and sat on it. “But that’s a long way to go for nothing. Still… we’re on the wrong plate.”

  “Plate?” Joanna said.

  “It’s plate tectonics,” Mark said. “You know, the continents float around on top of the melted rock inside the Earth.”

  Frank listened absently. No point in correcting Mark. But the Mojave was certainly a better place. It was on the North American plate. Los Angeles and Baja California were on another. The plates joined at the San Andreas Fault, and if the Hammer fell the San Andreas would sure as hell let go. It would shake both plates, but the North American would get it less.

  It was just an exercise anyway. Frank had checked with JPL; the odds of the Hammer hitting Earth were low. You were in more danger on the freeway. This business of camping out was for drill, but it was Stoner’s nature that if he did anything, he did it right. He’d made Joanna bring her own bike, although she preferred riding behind Mark on his. Take all three; we might lose one.

  “All for drill,” Frank said. “But maybe the drill’s worth the effort.”

  “Eh?” Joanna had the stove going now. It roared in the late afternoon.

  “Nothing silly about being ready for the collapse of civilization,” Frank said. “Next time it won’t be the Hammer, it’ll be something else. But it’ll be something. Read your newspapers.”

  That’s it, Joanna thought. He’s got me thinking that way. And that’s why… it sure made more sense to be teamed up with Frank Stoner than Mark Czescu if civilization was coming to an end.

  And Frank had wanted to go to the Mojave. Only Mark talked him out of it. Mark couldn’t quite admit to Hammer Fever. It would look silly.

  They ate earlier than they usually did. Frank insisted. When they finished, there was just enough light to boil out the cooking pots. Then they lay down on their sleeping bags in near darkness, watching the glow die out over the Pacific, until the ni
ght grew cool and they climbed in. Joanna had brought her own bag and hadn’t zipped it together with Mark’s, although they usually did on camp-outs.

  The light died in the west. One by one the stars came out. At first there were only stars. Then the turning sky brought a luminous film up from the east. It blended with the glowing lights over Los Angeles, grew brighter, until by midnight it was brighter than L.A., as bright as a good northern aurora. Still it thickened and brightened until only a few stars showed through the Earth-enveloping tail of Hamner-Brown Comet.

  To keep themselves awake, they talked. Crickets talked around them. They had slept that afternoon, though neither Frank nor Mark would tell that to the others. It would have been an admission that each was in his thirties and feeling it. Frank told stories about the ways the world might end. Mark kept interrupting to make points of his own, adding details, or anticipating what Frank would say and saying it first.

  Joanna listened with increasing impatience. She fell silent, brooding. Mark always did that. It never bothered her before. Why was she getting pissed off at him now? Part of the same pattern. Wow, Joanna thought. Female instincts? Glom on to the strongest guy around? That didn’t make sense. It certainly wasn’t part of her philosophy. She was Joanna, fully liberated, her own person, in control of her life…

  The conflict made her think of other things. She wasn’t yet thirty, but she was getting there, and what had she done? What was she doing? She couldn’t just go on, making a few bucks when Mark was out of work, bopping around the country on a motorcycle. That was a lot of fun, but dammit, she ought to do something serious, one permanent thing…

  “I bet I can get the packs set so nobody can see the stove,” Mark was saying. “Jo, want to make coffee? Jo?”

  Full dawn found Frank and Joanna asleep. Mark smiled as if he’d won a contest. He enjoyed watching dawn break. It didn’t happen often enough these days. Today’s dawn still carried an elfin light, sunlight faintly thinned and transmuted by gases and dust brought inward from interstellar space.

  It occurred to Mark that if he started breakfast now, he could reach a telephone while Harv Randall could be expected to be still at home. Randall had invited him to join the news team on Hot Fudge Tuesdae, but Mark had dithered. He dithered now. He set up the stove and pans for breakfast, debated waking the others; then crawled back into his own bag.

  Frying bacon woke him.

  “Didn’t call Harv, huh?” Joanna said.

  Mark stretched elaborately. “Decided I’d rather be watching the news than making it. Know where the best view in the world is right now? Right in front of a television set.”

  Frank looked at him curiously. He turned his head to indicate the height of the Sun. When Mark didn’t get it, he said, “Look at your watch.”

  It was nearly ten! Joanna laughed at Mark’s expression.

  “Hell, we’ll miss it,” Mark complained.

  “No point in racing anywhere now,” Frank chortled. “Don’t worry, they’ll be showing instant replays all day.”

  “We could knock at one of the houses,” Mark suggested. But the others laughed at him! and Mark admitted he didn’t have the guts. They ate quickly, and Mark broke out a bottle of Strawberry Hill wine and passed it around. It tasted perfect, fruity flavor like morning juice, but with some authority.

  “Best pack up and — ” Frank stopped in midsentence.

  There was a bright light over the Pacific. Far away, and very high, and moving downward fast. A very bright light.

  The men didn’t speak. They just stared. Joanna looked up in alarm when Frank fell silent. She had never seen him startled by anything, and she whirled around quickly, expecting to see Charles Manson running at them with a chain saw. She followed their stare.

  A tiny blue-white dwarf sun sank rapidly in the South, setting far beyond the flat blue Pacific horizon. It left a burning trail behind it. In the moment after it was gone, something like a searchlight beam probed back along its path, rose higher, above the cloudless sky.

  Then nothing for one, two, three heartbeats.

  Mark said, “Hot—”

  A white fireball peeked over the edge of the world.

  “Fudge Tuesdae. It’s real. It’s all real.” The edge of a giggle was in Mark’s voice. “We’ve got to get moving—”

  “Bullshit.” Frank used just enough volume to get their attention. “We don’t want to be moving when the quakes hit. Lie down. Get your sleeping bag around you. Stay out in the open. Joanna, lie down here. I’ll tie you in. Mark, get over there. Further.”

  Then Frank ran to the bikes. He carefully laid the first one on its side, then rolled the next away from it and laid it down too. He moved quickly and decisively. He came back for the third bike and moved it away.

  Three white points glared at them, then winked out, one, two… The third and brightest must have touched down, far to the southeast. Frank glanced at his watch, counting the ticking seconds. Joanna was safe. Mark was safe. Frank brought his own bag and lay near them. He took out dark glasses. So did the others. The bulky sleeping bag made Frank look very fat. The dark glasses made his face unreadable. He lay stretched out on his back with his thick forearms behind his head. “Great view.”

  “Yeah. The Comet Wardens will love this,” Mark said. “I wonder where Harv went? I’m glad I decided not to get up and go join him. We ought to be safe here. If the mountains hold up.”

  “Shut up,” Joanna said. “Shut up, shut up.” But she didn’t say it loud enough to hear. She whispered, and her whisper was drowned out by rumbling that rolled toward them, and then the mountains began to dance.

  The communications center at JPL was jammed with people: newsmen with special passes; friends of the Director; and even some people, like Charles Sharps and Dan Forrester, who belonged there.

  The TV screens were bright with pictures. Reception wasn’t as good as they’d have liked; the ionized tail of the comet roiled the upper atmosphere, and live TV pictures were apt to dissolve into wavy lines. No matter, Sharps thought. They’ll make onboard recordings in the Apollo, and we’ll recover them later. And there’ll be all those film pictures, taken through the telescope. We’ll learn more about comets in the next hour than we have learned in the last hundred thousand years.

  That was a sobering thought, but Sharps was used to it. It was the same for the planets, for the whole solar system. Until men went — or sent probes — into space, they were guessing about their universe. Now they knew. And no other generation could ever discover so much, because the next generation would read it from textbooks, not from the universe itself. They would grow up knowing. Not like when I was growing up and we didn’t know anything, Sharps thought. God, what exciting times. I love it.

  A digital clock ticked off the seconds. A glass panel with a world map showed the current position of the Apollo capsule.

  Apollo-Soyuz, Sharps reminded himself, and he grinned, because if the one hadn’t gone, the other wouldn’t have either. U.S.-Soviet rivalry was still good for something. Sometimes. To force U.S.-Soviet cooperation, if nothing else.

  Pity we’re having communications problems. Power losses on Hammerlab. Didn’t anticipate that. Should have. But we didn’t think it would be this close when we threw Hammerlab together.

  “How close?” Sharps said.

  Forrester looked up from his computer console. “Hard to say.” He played his fingers across the keys like E. Power Biggs at the Milan Cathedral organ. “If that last input hadn’t been garbled, I’d know. Best estimate is still around a thousand kilometers. If. If that garbled reading was right. And if the one I threw out because it didn’t fit the others is wrong. There are a lot of ifs.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Taking shots… number thirty-one filter… handheld…” They could barely recognize Rick Delanty’s voice.

  “One of your accomplishments,” Dan Forrester said.

  “Mine? Which one is this?”

  “Getting the first black ast
ronaut a mission,” Forrester said, but he said it absently, because he was studying squiggles on the oscilloscope above his console. He did something, and one of the TV pictures improved enormously.

  Charlie Sharps looked at the approaching cloud. He saw it only as a batch of not very sharply focused grays, but one thing was evident — it wasn’t moving sideways at all. The seconds ticked on relentlessly.

  “Where the devil is Hamner?” Sharps asked suddenly.

  Forrester, if he heard, didn’t answer.

  “…path of outer edges of nucleus; say again, Earth… Outer… impossible… may strike…” The voice faded.

  “Hammerlab, this is Houston, we do not copy, use full power and say again; I say again, we do not copy.”

  More seconds ticked off. Then, suddenly, the TV pictures on the screens swam, blurred and became clearer, in color, as Apollo used the main telescope and full transmission power.

  “Jesus, it’s coming closer” Johnny Baker’s voice shouted. “Like it’s going to hit…”

  The TV screens changed rapidly as Rick Delanty kept the main telescope trained on the comet head. The comet grew and grew, shapes appearing in the maelstrom of fog, larger shapes, details, lumps of rock, jets of streaming gas, all happening even as they watched. The picture swung on down, until the Earth itself was in view…

  And flaming spots appeared on the Earth. For just one long moment, a moment that seemed to stretch out forever, the pictures stayed there on the TV screen: Earth, with bright flashes, light so bright that the TV couldn’t show it as more than bright smears and lapses of detail.

  The picture stayed in Charlie Sharps’s mind. Flashes in the Atlantic. Europe dotted with bright smears, all over, with a big one in the Mediterranean. A bright flash in the Gulf of Mexico. Any west of that wouldn’t be visible to the Apollo, but Dan Forrester was playing with the computer. All the data they had, from any source, was supposed to go into it. Speakers were screaming. Several of them, on different channels, different sources, riding over the sudden static.