Larry Niven - Lucifer's Hammer

“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.

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…