Larry Niven - Lucifer's Hammer

Sometimes he used as many as four diversions, with traffic jams thrown in; they only took spreading some bread among the kids to get them playing in the streets. Alim Nassor was a natural leader. He hadn’t been busted since juvenile days, except for that last one where an off-duty cop had come out of a laundromat. Who’d have thought that brother was a pig? He still wondered if he should have shot it out. Anyway, he hadn’t. He’d run into an alley and ditched the gun and the mask and the bag. Lawyers could take care of those. The only other evidence was the honky storekeeper’s identification, and there were ways to talk him out of testifying…

Time. Alim got out of the car. The mask looked like a face from ten feet away you wouldn’t know it was a mask at all. The gun was under his windbreaker. Windbreaker and mask would be gone five minutes after the job. Alim’s mind closed down, shutting out past and future. He walked across at an intersection. No jaywalking, nothing to attract attention. The store was empty.

It went down nice. No problems. He had the money and was on the way out when the brother came in.

A man Alim had known for years. What was that bastard doing over in this part of town? Nobody from Boyle Heights ought to be here below Watts! Aw, shit. But that brother knew. Maybe from his walk, maybe anything, shit, he knew.

It took him a second to make up his mind. Then Alim turned, aimed and fired. A second shot to be certain. The man went down, and the old storekeeper’s eyes were big with horror, and Alim fired three times more. One more robbery wouldn’t have upset anyone, but the pigs worked hard on murder. Best leave no witnesses. Too bad, though.

He came out fast, and didn’t go to the stolen car across the street. Instead he walked a fast half-block, went through an alleyway and came out on another street. His arm still tingled with that unique, atavistic thrill. Man was made to use a club. and a gun is the ultimate in clubs. Point and make a fist, and if the enemy is close enough to see his face, one blow will knock him over dead. Power! Alim knew people who had got hooked on that sensation.

His brother (mother’s son, not just blood) waited for him in a car that wasn’t hot. They drove off just at the speed limit, fast enough not to attract attention, slow enough not to get busted.

“Had to waste two,” Alim said.

Harold winced, but his voice was cool. “Too bad. Who were they?”

“Nobody. Nobody important.”

They loaded them up well in the Green Room. Two ushers and an astonishingly pretty hostess poured their glasses full as soon as they were half empty, so that Tim Hamner had drunk more than he liked. At that, he thought, I’m well off compared to Arnold. Arnold was a best-selling writer, and Arnold never talked about anything that wasn’t in his books. When Tim told him Hamner-Brown was now visible to the naked eye, Arnold didn’t know what Tim was talking about; when Tim told him, Arnold wanted to meet Brown.

One of the ushers signaled and Tim got unsteadily to his feet. The stairs hadn’t seemed so steep when he came down them. He arrived onstage to hear the last of Johnny’s smoothly professional monologue and to bask in the audience applause.

Johnny was in full form, joking with the other guests. Tim remembered from the monitor downstairs that Sharps of JPL had been giving a lecture on comets, and that Johnny seemed to know a great deal about astronomy. The other guest, a dowager whose breast equipment had, twenty years ago, given a new word to the English language, kept interrupting with off-color jokes. The dowager was quite drunk. Tim remembered that her name was Mary Jane, and that no one ever called her by her stage name anymore. At her age and weight it would have been ridiculous.

The opening chatter got Tim through a terrible moment of stage fright. Then Johnny turned to him and asked, “How do you discover a comet? I wish I’d done that.” He seemed quite serious.

“You wouldn’t have time,” Tim said. “It takes years. Decades sometimes, and no guarantees, ever. You pick a telescope and you memorize the sky through it, and then you spend every night looking at nothing and freezing your can off. It gets cold in that mountain observatory.”

Mary Jane said something. Johnny was alarmed but didn’t show it. The sound man with his earphones gave Johnny a high sign. “Do you like owning a comet?” Johnny asked.

“Half a comet,” Tim said automatically. “I love it.”

“He won’t own it long,” Dr. Sharps said.

“Eh? How’s that?” Tim demanded.

“It’ll be the Russians who own it,” Sharps said. “They’re sending up a Soyuz to have a close look from space. When they get through, it will be their comet.”

That was appalling. Tim asked, “But can’t we do something?”

“Sure. We can put up an Apollo or something bigger. We’ve got the equipment sitting around getting rusty. We even did the preliminary work. But the money has run out.”

“But you could put something up,” Johnny asked, “if you had the money?”

“We could be up there watching Earth go through the tail. It’s a shame the American people don’t care more about technology. Nobody cares a hang as long as their electric carving knives work. You ever stop to think just how dependent we are on things that none of us understand?” Sharps gestured dramatically around the TV studio.

Johnny started to say something — about the housewife who ran a home computer as a hobby — and changed his mind. The studio audience was listening. There was a careful silence that Johnny had long since learned to respect. They wanted to hear Sharps. Maybe this would be one of the good nights, one of the shows that ran over and over, Sundays, anniversaries…

“Not just the TV,” Sharps was saying. “Your desk. Formica top. What is Formica? Anyone know how it’s made? Or how to make a pencil? Much less penicillin. Our lives depend on these things, and none of us knows much about them. Not even me.”

“I always wondered what makes bra straps snappy,” Mary Jane said.

Johnny jumped in to give the show back to Sharps. “But tell me, Charlie, what good will it do to study that comet? How will that change our lives?”

Sharps shrugged. “It may not. You’re asking what good new research does. And all I can answer is that it always has paid off. Not the way you thought it would, maybe. Who’d have thought we’d get a whole new medical technology out of the space program? But we did. Thousands are alive right now because the human-factors boys had to develop new instruments for the astronauts. Johnny, did you ever hear of the Club of Rome?”

Johnny had, but the audience would need reminding. “They were the people who did computer simulations to find out how long we could get along on our natural resources. Even with zero population growth—”

“They tell us we’re finished,” Sharps broke in. “And that’s stupid. We’re only finished because they won’t let us really use technology. They say we’re running out of metals. There’s more metal in one little asteroid than was mined all over the world in the last five years! And there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids. All we have to do is go get ’em.”

“Can we?”

“You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Johnny, out there in space it’s raining soup, and we don’t even know about soup bowls.”