Lucifer's Hammer

January: The Portent

The blue Mercedes turned into the big circular drive of the Beverly Hills mansion at precisely five after six. Julia Sutter was understandably startled. “Good God, George, it’s Tim! And dead on time.”

George Sutter joined her at the window. That was Tim’s car, yup. He grunted and turned back to the bar. His wife’s parties were always important events, so why, after weeks of careful engineering and orchestration, was she terrified that no one would show up? The psychosis was so common there ought to be a name for it.

Tim Hamner, though, and on time. That was strange. Tim’s money was third-generation. Old money, by Los Angeles standards, and Tim had a lot of it. He only came to parties when he wanted to.

The Sutters’ architect had been in love with concrete. There were square walls and square angles for the house, and softly curving free-form pools in the gardens outside; not unusual for Beverly Hills, but startling to easterners. To their right was a traditional Monterey villa of white stucco and red tile roofs, to the left a Norman chateau magically transplanted to California. The Sutter place was set well back from the street so that it seemed divorced from the tall palms the city fathers had decreed for this part of Beverly Hills. A great loop of drive ran up to the house itself. On the porch stood eight parking attendants, agile young men in red jackets.

Hamner left the motor running and got out of the car. The “key left” reminder screamed at him. Ordinarily Tim would have snarled a powerful curse upon Ralph Nader’s hemorrhoids, but tonight he never noticed. His eyes were dreamy; his hand patted at his coat pocket, then stole inside. The parking attendant hesitated. People didn’t usually tip until they were leaving. Hamner kept walking, dreamy-eyed, and the attendant drove away.

Hamner glanced back at the red-coated young men, wondering if one or another might be interested in astronomy. They were almost always from UCLA or Loyola University. Could be… Reluctantly he decided against it and went inside, his hand straying from time to time to feel the telegram crackle under his fingers.

The big double doors opened onto an enormous area that extended right through the house. Large arches, rimmed by red brick, separated the entry from the living areas: a mere suggestion of walls between rooms. The floor was continuous throughout: brown tile laid with bright mosaic patterns. Of the two hundred and more guests expected, fewer than a dozen were clustered near the bar. Their talk was bright and cheery, louder than necessary. They looked isolated in all that empty space, all that expanse of tables with candles and patterned tablecloths. There were nearly as many uniformed attendants as guests. Hamner noticed none of this. He’d grown up with it.

Julia Sutter broke from the tiny group of guests and hurried to meet him. There was a tight look around her eyes: Her face had been lifted, and was younger than her hands. She made a kissing motion a fraction of an inch from Tim’s cheek and said, “Timmy, I’m glad to see you!” Then she noticed his radiant smile.

She drew back a little and her eyes narrowed. The note of mock concern in her voice covered real worry. “My God, Timmy! What have you been smoking?”

Tim Hamner was tall and bony, with just a touch of paunch to break the smooth lines. His long face was built for melancholy. His mother’s family had owned a highly successful cemetery-mortuary, and it showed. Tonight, though, his face was cracked wide apart in a blazing smile, and there was a strange light in his eyes. He said, “The Hamner-Brown Comet!”

“Oh!” Julia stared. “What?” That didn’t make sense. You don’t smoke a comet. She tried to puzzle it out while her eyes roved to her husband — was he having a second drink already? — to the door — when were the others coming? The invitations had been explicit. The important guests were coming early — weren’t they? — and couldn’t stay late, and—

She heard the low purr of a big car outside, and through the narrow windows framing the door saw half a dozen people spilling out of a dark limousine. Tim would have to take care of himself. She patted his arm and said, “That’s nice, Timmy. Excuse me, please?” A hasty intimate smile and she was gone.

If it bothered Hamner it didn’t show. He ambled toward the bar. Behind him Julia went to welcome her most important guest, Senator Jellison, with his entourage. He always brought everyone, administrative assistants as well as family. Tim Hamner’s smile was blazing when he reached the bar.

“Good evening, Mr. Hamner.”

“Good it is. Tonight I’m walking on pink clouds. Congratulate me, Rodrigo, they’re going to name a comet after me!”

Michael Rodriguez, laying out glasses behind the bar, missed a beat. “A comet?”

“Right. Hamner-Brown Comet. It’s coming, Rodrigo, you can see it, oh, around June, give or take a few weeks.” Hamner took out the telegram and opened it with a snap.

“We will not see it from Los Angeles,” Rodriguez laughed. “What may I serve you tonight?”

“Scotch rocks. You could see it. It could be as big as Halley’s Comet.” Hamner took the drink and looked about. There was a group around George Sutter. The knot of people drew Tim like a magnet. He clutched the telegram in one hand and his drink in another, as Julia brought the new guests over and introduced them.

Senator Arthur Clay Jellison was built something like a brick, muscular rather than overweight. He was bulky, jovial and blessed with thick white hair. He was photogenic as hell, and half the people in the country would have recognized him. His voice sounded exactly as it did on TV: resonant, enveloping, so that everything he said took on a mysterious importance.

Maureen Jellison, the Senator’s daughter, had long, dark red hair and pale clear skin and a beauty that would have made Tim Hamner shy on any other night; but when Julia Sutter turned to him and (finally!) said, “What was that about a—”

“Hamner-Brown Comet” Tim waved the telegram. “Kitt Peak Observatory had confirmed my sighting! It’s a real comet, it’s my comet, they’re naming it after me!”

Maureen Jellison’s eyebrows went up slightly. George Sutter drained his glass before asking the obvious question. “Who’s Brown?”

Hamner shrugged; his untasted drink slopped a little onto the carpet, and Julia frowned. “Nobody’s ever heard of him,” Tim said. “But the International Astronomical Union says it was a simultaneous sighting.”

“So what you own is half a comet,” said George Sutter.

Tim laughed, quite genuinely. “The day you own half a comet, George, I’ll buy all those bonds you keep trying to sell me. And buy your drinks all night.” He downed his scotch rocks in two swallows.

When he looked up he’d lost his audience. George was headed back to the bar. Julia had Senator Jellison’s arm and was steering him toward new arrivals. The Senator’s administrative assistants followed in her wake.

“Half a comet is quite a lot,” Maureen said. Tim Hamner turned to find her still there. “Tell me, how do you see anything through the smog?”

She sounded interested. She looked interested. And she could have gone with her father. The scotch was a warm trace in his throat and stomach. Tim began telling her about his mountain observatory, not too many miles past Mount Wilson but far enough into the Angeles Mountains that the lights from Pasadena didn’t ruin the seeing. He kept food supplies there, and an assistant, and he’d spent months of nights watching the sky, tracking known asteroids and the outer moons, letting his eye and brain learn the territory, and forever watching for the dot of light that shouldn’t be there, the anomaly that would…

Maureen Jellison had a familiar glazed look in her eyes. He asked, “Hey, am I boring you?”

She was instantly apologetic. “No, I’m sorry, it was just a stray thought.”

“I know I sometimes get carried away.”

She smiled and shook her head; a wealth of deep red hair rippled and danced. “No, really. Dad’s on the Finance Subcommittee for Science and Astronautics. He loves pure science, and I caught the bug from him. I was just… You’re a man who knows what he wants, and you’ve found it. Not many can say that.” She was suddenly very serious.

Tim laughed, embarrassed; he was only just getting used to the fact. “What can I do for an encore?”

“Yes, exactly. What do you do when you’ve walked on the moon, and then they cancel the space program?”

“Why… I don’t know. I’ve heard they sometimes have troubles…”

“Don’t worry about it,” Maureen said. “You’re on the moon now. Enjoy it.”

The hot dry wind known as the Santa Ana blew across the Los Angeles hills, clearing the city of smog. Lights glittered and danced in the early darkness. Harvey Randall, his wife, Loretta, beside him, drove his green Toronado with the windows open, relishing the summer weather in January. When they arrived at the Sutter place he turned the car over to the red-jacketed attendant, and paused while Loretta adjusted her smile before moving through the big front doors.

They found the usual mob scene for a Beverly Hills party. A hundred people were scattered among the little tables, and another hundred in clumps; a mariachi group in one corner played gay background music and the singer, deprived of his microphone, was still doing pretty well telling everyone about the state of his corazon. They greeted their hostess and parted: Loretta found a conversation, and Harvey located the bar by searching out the thickest cluster of people. He collected two gin and tonics.

Bits of conversation ricocheted around him. “We didn’t let him on the white rug, you see. So the dog had the cat ‘treed’ in the middle of the rug and was pacing sentry duty around the perimeter…”

“…was this beautiful young chick one seat ahead of me on the plane. A real knockout, even if all I could see was her hair and the back of her head. I was thinking of a way to meet her when she looked back and said, ‘Uncle Pete! What are you doing here?’ ”

“…man, it’s helped a lot! When I call and say it’s Commissioner Robbins, I get right through. Haven’t had a customer miss a good option since the Mayor appointed me.”

They stuck in his mind, these bits and pieces of story. For Harvey Randall it was an occupational hazard of the TV documentary business; he couldn’t help listening. He didn’t want to, really. People fascinated him. He would have liked to follow up some of these glimpses into other minds.

He looked around for Loretta, but she was too short to stand out in this crowd. Instead he picked out high-piled hair of unconvincing orange-red: Brenda Tey, who’d been talking to Loretta before Harvey went to the bar. He made for that point, easing past shoals of elbows attached to drinks.

“Twenty billion bucks, and all we got was rocks! Those damn big rockets, billions of dollars dropped into the drink. Why spend all that money out there when we could be—”

“Bullshit,” said Harvey.

George Sutter turned in surprise. “Oh. Hello, Harv… It’ll be the same with the Shuttte. Just the same. It’s all money thrown down the drain—”

“That turns out not to be the case.” The voice was clear, sweet and penetrating. It cut right through George’s manifesto, and it couldn’t be ignored. George stopped in midsentence.

Harvey found a spectacular redhead in a green one-shoulder party gown. Her eyes met his when he looked at her, and he looked away first. He smiled and said, “Is that the same as bullshit?”

“Yes. But more tactful.” She grinned at him, and Harvey let his own smile stay in place instead of fading away. She turned to the attack. “Mr. Sutter, NASA didn’t spend the Apollo money on hardware. We bought research on how to build the hardware, and we’ve still got it. Knowledge can’t go into the drink. As for the Shuttle, that’s the price to get out there where we can really learn things, and not much of a price at that…”

A woman’s breast and shoulder rubbed playfully against Harvey’s arm. That had to be Loretta, and it was. He handed her her drink. His own was half gone. When Loretta started to speak he gestured her silent, a little more rudely than he usually did, and ignored her look of protest.

The redhead knew her stuff. If careful reason and logic could win arguments, she won. But she had a lot more: She had every male’s eye, and a slow southern drawl that made every word count, and a voice so pure and musical that any interruption seemed stuttered or mumbled.

The unequal contest ended when George discovered that his drink was empty and, with visible relief, broke for the bar.

Smiling triumph, the girl turned toward Harvey, and he nodded his congratulations.

“I’m Harvey Randall. My wife, Loretta.”

“Maureen Jellison. Most pleased.” She frowned for half a second. “I remember now. You were the last U.S. newsman in Cambodia.” She shook hands, formally, with Harvey and Loretta. “And wasn’t your newscopter shot down over there?”

“Twice,” Loretta said proudly. “Harvey brought his Air Force pilot out. Fifty miles of enemy lines.”

Maureen nodded gravely. She was fifteen years younger than the Randalls, and seemed very self-possessed. “So now you’re here. Are you natives?”

“I am,” Harvey said. “Loretta’s from Detroit—”

“Grosse Pointe,” Loretta said automatically.

“—but I was born in L.A.” Harvey could never quite bring himself to tell Loretta’s half-truth for her. “We’re scarce, we natives.”

“And what do they have you doing now?” Maureen asked.

“Documentaries. News features, mostly,” Harvey said.

“I know who you are,” Loretta said in some awe. “I just met your father. Senator Jellison.”

“That’s right.” Maureen looked thoughtful, then grinned broadly. “Say, if you do news features there’s somebody you ought to meet. Tim Hamner.”

Harvey frowned. The name seemed familiar, but he couldn’t place it. “Why?”

Loretta said, “Hamner? A young man with a frightening grin?” She giggled. “He’s a teensy bit drunk. He wouldn’t let anyone else talk. At all. He owns half a comet.”

“That’s him,” Maureen said. Her smile made Loretta feel part of a conspiracy.

“He also owns a lot of soap,” Harvey said.

It was Maureen’s turn to look blank.

“I just remembered,” Harvey said. “He inherited the Kalva Soap Company.”

“May be, but he’s prouder of the comet,” Maureen said. “I don’t blame him. Dear old Dad could have been President once, but he’s never come close to discovering a comet.” She scanned the room until she spotted her target. “The tall man in the suit with white and maroon in it. You’ll know him by his smile. Get anywhere near him and he’ll tell you all about it.”

Harvey felt Loretta tugging at his arm, and reluctantly looked away from Maureen. When he looked back someone else had snared her. He went to fetch another pair of drinks.

As always, Harvey Randall drank too much and wondered why he came to these parties. But he knew; Loretta saw them as a way to participate in his life. She didn’t enjoy his field trips. The one attempt to take her on a hike with their son had been a disaster. When she went with him on location she wanted to stay in the best hotels, and if she dutifully came to the small bars and gathering places Harvey preferred, it was obvious that she was working hard to hide her unhappiness.

But she was very much at home at parties like this one, and tonight’s had been especially good. She even managed a private conversation with Senator Jellison. Harvey left her with the Senator and went to find more drinks. “Light on the gin, Rodriguez. Please.”

The bartender smiled and mixed the drink without comment. Harvey stood with it. Tim Hamner was alone at one of the little tables. He was looking at Harvey, but the eyes were dreamy; they saw nothing. And that smile. Harvey made his way across the room and dropped into the other chair at the table. “Mr. Hamner? Harvey Randall. Maureen Jellison said I should say ‘Comet.’ ”

Hamner’s face came alight. The grin broadened, if that were possible. He took a telegram out of his pocket and waved it. “Right! The sighting was confirmed this afternoon. Hamner-Brown Comet.”

“You skipped a step.”

“She didn’t tell you anything? Well! I’m Tim Hamner. Astronomer. Well, not professional, but my equipment’s professional. And I work at it — anyway. I’m an amateur astronomer. A week ago I found a smear of light not far from Neptune. A dim smear. It didn’t belong there. I kept looking at it, and it moved. I studied it long enough to be sure, and then I reported it. It’s a new comet. Kitt Peak just confirmed it. The IAU is naming it after me — and Brown.”

For just that moment, envy flashed through Harvey Randall like a lightning strike. It was gone as quickly; he made it go, shoving it into the bottom of his mind where he could pull it up and look at it later. He was ashamed of it. But without that flash he would have asked a more tactful first question. “Who’s Brown?”

Hamner’s face didn’t change. “Gavin Brown is a kid in Centerville, Iowa. Ground his own mirror to build his telescope. He reported the comet at the same time I did. The IAU rules it a simultaneous sighting. If I hadn’t waited to be certain…” Hamner shrugged and continued, “I called Brown this afternoon. Sent him a plane ticket, because I want to meet him. He didn’t even want to come until I promised to show him around the solar observatory at Mount Wilson. That’s all he really cares about! Sunspots! He found the comet by accident!”

“When will we see this comet? That is,” Harvey backtracked, “will it be visible at all?”

“Much too early to ask. Wait a month. Watch the news.”

“I’m not supposed to watch the news. I’m supposed to report the news,” said Harvey. “And this could be news. Tell me more.”

Hamner was eager to do that. He rattled on, while Harvey nodded with a broadening grin. Beautiful! You didn’t have to know what all the words meant to know the equipment was expensive, and probably photogenic to boot. Expensive and elaborate equipment, and the kid with a bent pin for a hook and a willow stick for a rod had caught just as big a fish as the millionaire!

Millionaire. “Mr. Hamner, if this comet turns out to be worth a documentary—”

“Well, it might. And the discovery would be. How amateur astronomers can be important…”

Hooked, by God! “What I was going to ask was, if we can make a documentary on the comet, would Kalva Soap be interested in sponsoring it?”

The change in Hamner was subtle, but it was there. Harvey instantly revised his opinion of the man. Hamner had a lot of experience with people after his money. He was an enthusiast, but hardly a fool.

“Tell me, Mr. Randall, didn’t you do that thing on the Alaskan glacier?”

“Harvey. Yes.”

“It stunk.”

“Sure did,” Harvey agreed. “The sponsor insisted on control. And got it. And used it. I didn’t inherit control of a big company.” And to hell with you, too, Mr. Timothy Comet Hamner.

“But I did. And this would be worth doing. You did the Hell’s Gate Dam story too, didn’t you?”

“Yes.”

“I liked that one.”

“So did I.”

“Good.” Hamner nodded several times. “Look, this could be worth sponsoring. Even if the comet never becomes visible, and I think it will. Lord knows they spend enough of the advertising budget sponsoring crap that nobody wants to watch. Might as well tell a story worth telling. Harvey, you need a refill.”

They went to the bar. The party was thinning out fast. The Jellisons were just leaving, but Loretta had found another conversation. Harvey recognized a city councilman who’d been after Harvey’s station to do a show on a park that was his current goal. He probably thought Loretta would influence Harvey — which was correct — and that Harvey had influence over what the network and its Los Angeles station did — which was a laugh.

Rodriguez was busy for the moment and they stood at the bar. “There’s all kinds of excellent new equipment for studying comets,” Hamner said. “Including a big orbital telescope only used once, for Kahoutek. Scientists all over the world will want to know how comets differ, how Kahoutek was different from Hamner-Brown. Lot of scientists right here. Cal Tech, and the planetary astronomers at JPL. They’ll all want to know more about Hamner-Brown.”

Hamner-Brown resonated in his mouth, and Tim Hamner obviously loved the taste. “You see, comets aren’t just something pretty up in the sky. They’re left over from the big gas cloud that formed the solar system. If we could really learn something about comets — maybe send up a space probe — we’d know more about what the original cloud of gas and dust was like before it fell in on itself and made the Sun and the planets and moons and things like that.”

“You’re sober,” Harvey said in wonder.

Hamner was startled. Then he laughed. “I meant to get drunk just to celebrate, but I guess I’ve been talking instead of drinking.” Rodriguez came over and put drinks in front of them. Hamner lifted his scotch rocks in a salute.

“The way your eyes glow,” Harvey said, “I thought you must be drunk. But what you say makes a lot of sense. I doubt we could get a space probe launched, but what the hell, we could try. Only you’re talking about more than a single documentary for something like that. Listen, is there a chance? I mean, could we send a probe into the comet? Because I know some people in the aerospace industry, and…”

And, thought Harvey, that would be a story. Who can I get for editor? he wondered. And Charlie Bascomb’s available to do camera…

“Jellison, too,” Hamner said. “He’d be for it. But look, Harv, I know a lot about comets, but not that much. It’s all guesswork right now. Be a few months before Hamner-Brown gets to perihelion.” He added quickly, “Closest point to the Sun. Which isn’t the same as the closest point to the Earth…”

“How close will that be?” Harvey asked.

Hamner shrugged. “Haven’t analyzed the orbit yet. Maybe close. Anyway, Hamner-Brown will be moving fast when it rounds the Sun. It will have fallen all the way from the halo, out there beyond Pluto, a long way. You understand, I won’t really be computing the orbit. I’ll have to wait for the professionals, just like you.”

Harvey nodded. They lifted their glasses and drank.

“But I like the idea,” Hamner said. “There’s going to be a lot of scientific pressure for studies of Hamner-Brown, and it wouldn’t hurt to push the idea with the general public. I like it.”

“Of course,” Harvey said carefully, “I’d have to have a firm commitment on sponsorship before I could do much work on this. Are you sure Kalva Soap would be interested? The show might pull a good audience — but it might not.”

Hamner nodded. “Kahoutek,” he said. “They were burned on that one before. Nobody wants to be disappointed again.”

“Yeah.”

“So you can count on Kalva Soap. Let’s get across why it’s important to study comets even if you can’t see them. Because I can promise the sponsorship, but I can’t promise the comet will deliver. It might not be visible at all. Don’t tell people anything more than that.”

“I have a reputation for getting my facts straight.”

“When your sponsor doesn’t interfere,” Hamner said.

“Even then, I have my facts straight.”

“Good. But right now there aren’t any facts. Hamner-Brown is pretty big. It has to be, or I couldn’t have seen it out that far. And it looks to get pretty close to the Sun. It has a chance of being spectacular, but really, it’s impossible to tell. The tail could stretch way-y-y out, or it could just blow away. It depends on the comet.”

“Yeah. Look,” Harvey said, “can you name one newsman who lost his reputation because of Kahoutek?” He nodded at the puzzled look that got. “Right. None. No chance. The public blamed the astronomers for blowing it all out of proportion. Nobody blamed the news people.”

“Why should they? You were quoting the astronomers.”

“Half the time,” Harvey agreed. “But we quoted the ones who said exciting things. Two interviews. One man says Kahoutek is going to be the Big Christmas Comet. Another says, well, it’s going to be a comet, but you might not see it without field glasses. Guess which tape gets shown on the six o’clock news?”

Hamner laughed. He was draining his glass when Julia Sutter came over.

“Busy, Tim?” she asked, but didn’t wait for an answer. “Your cousin Barry is making a fool of himself out in the kitchen. Can you get him to go home?” She spoke low and urgently.

Harvey hated her. Was Hamner sober? Would he remember any of this in the morning? Damn.

“Be right with you, Julia,” Hamner said. He broke free and made his way back to Harvey. “Just remember, our series on Hamner-Brown is going to be honest. Even if it costs ratings. Kalva Soap can afford it. When do you want to start?”

Maybe there was some justice in the world after all. “Right away, Tim. I want some footage of you and Gavin Brown up at Mount Wilson. And his comments when you show him your setup.”

Hamner grinned. He liked that. “Right. Call you tomorrow.”

Loretta slept quietly in the other bed.

Harvey had been staring at the ceiling long enough. He knew this feeling. He would have to get up.

He got up. He made cocoa in a big mug and carried it into his study. Kipling greeted him with tail-thumping joy, and he rubbed the German shepherd’s ears absently as he opened the drapes. Los Angeles was semidark below. The Santa Ana had blown away the smog. Freeways were rivers of moving light even at this late hour. Other major streets were marked by a grid of lights whose yellow-orange brilliance Harvey noticed for the first time. Hamner had said they played hell with the seeing at Mount Wilson Observatory.

The city stretched away endlessly. High-rise apartments in shadowed darkness. Blue squares of still-lit swimming pools. Cars. Bright flashing light winking at intervals, the police helicopter on patrol. He left the window and went to the desk, picked up a book, set it down; scratched the dog’s ears once more; and very gently, because he didn’t trust himself to move rapidly, put the cocoa on the desk.

He’d never had any trouble getting to sleep in the mountains on camping trips. He’d get into his sleeping bag just after dark and sleep all night. It was only in the city that he had insomnia. For years he’d tried to fight it by lying rigid on his back. These nights he got up and stayed up until he was sleepy. Only he didn’t usually have trouble on Wednesdays.

Wednesdays, he and Loretta made love.

He’d tried to fight that habit once, but that was years ago; and yes, Loretta would come to his bed on a Monday night; but not always, and never in the afternoon when it was light; and it was never as good on a Tuesday or a Saturday because on Wednesdays they knew it was coming, they were ready. By now the habit had set like concrete.

He shook away those thoughts and concentrated on his good fortune. Hamner had meant it. The documentary would be made. He thought about problems. They’d need an expert on low-light photography; probably time-lapse for the comet itself. This would be fun. Have to thank Maureen Jellison for putting me onto Hamner, he thought. Nice girl. Vivid. More real than most of the women I meet. Too bad Loretta was standing right there…

He submerged that thought so quickly that he was barely aware of it. It was a habit he’d developed long ago. He knew too many men who talked themselves into hating their wives when they didn’t really dislike them at all. The grass wasn’t always greener on the other side of the fence; a lesson that he’d learned from his father and never forgotten. His father had been an architect and builder, always close to the Hollywood set but never quite catching the big contracts that would make him rich; but he’d gone to plenty of Hollywood parties.

He’d also had time to take Harvey up into the mountains, and on those long camping hikes he would tell Harvey about producers and stars and writers who spent more than they earned and built themselves images that could never be satisfied. “Can’t be happy,” Bert Randall would say. “Keep thinking somebody else’s wife is better in bed, or just prettier at parties, and talk to themselves enough that they believe it. This whole damn town’s got itself believing its own press agents, and nobody can live up to those dreams.”

And it was all true. Dreams could be dangerous. Better to concentrate on what you had. And, Harvey thought, I have a lot. A good job, a big house, a swimming pool…

None of it paid for, and you can’t do what you want on the job, a malicious voice said inside his head.

Harvey ignored it.

The comets were not alone in the halo.

Local eddies near the center of the maelstrom — that whirling pool of gas which finally collapsed to form the Sun — had condensed into planets. The furious heat of the newly formed star had stripped the gas envelopes from the nearest, leaving nuggets of molten rock and iron. Worlds further out had remained as great balls of gas which men would, in a billion years, name for their gods. There had also been eddies very distant from the whirlpool’s axis.

One had formed a planet the size of Saturn, and it was still gathering mass. Its rings were broad and beautiful in starlight. Its surface churned with storms, for its center was furiously hot with the energy of its collapse. Its enormous orbit was tilted almost vertically to the plane of the inner system, and its stately path through the cometary halo took hundreds of thousands of years to complete.

Sometimes a comet would stray too near the black giant and be swept into its ring, or into the thousands of miles of atmosphere. Sometimes that tremendous mass would pluck a comet from its orbit and swing it out into interstellar space, to be lost forever. And sometimes the black planet would send a comet plunging into the maelstrom and hellfire of the inner system.

They moved in slow, stable orbits, these myriads of comets that had survived the ignition of the Sun. But when the black giant passed, orbits became chaos. Comets that fell into the maelstrom might return partially vaporized, and fall back, again and again, until nothing was left but a cloud of stones. But many never returned at all.

January: Interlude

On a clear day the view stretched out forever. From his vantage point on the top floor of the San Joaquin Nuclear Project, Site Supervisor Barry Price had an excellent view of the vast lozenge-shaped saucer that had once been an inland sea, and was now the center of California’s agricultural industry. The San Joaquin Valley ran two hundred miles to his north, fifty to the south. The uncompleted nuclear-power complex stood on a low ridge twenty feet above the totally flat valley — the highest hill in sight.

Even at this early hour there was a bustle of industrial activity. His construction crews worked a full three shifts, through the night, on Saturdays and Sundays, and if Barry Price had had his way they’d have worked Christmas and New Year’s too. In their latest flurry of activity they’d finished Number One reactor and had a good start on Number Two; others had begun excavation for Three and Four, and none of it did any good. Number One was finished, but the courts and lawyers wouldn’t let him turn it on.

His desk was buried in paper. His hair was cut very short, his mustache was neatly trimmed and thin as a razor’s edge. He wore what his ex-wife had called his engineering uniform: khaki trousers, khaki shirt with epaulets, khaki bush jacket with more epaulets; pocket calculator swinging from his belt (when his hair was all brown it had been a slide rule), pencils in his breast pockets, notebook in its own pocket sewed to the jacket. When forced to — as he increasingly was by court appearances, command performances before the Mayor of Los Angeles and its Commissioners of Water and Power, testimony before Congress and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission or the State Legislature — he reluctantly put on a gray flannel suit and tie; but on his home turf he gratefully changed back to field clothing, and he was damned if he’d dress up for visitors.

His coffee cup was empty, dead empty, and there went his last excuse. He keyed the intercom. “Dolores, I’m ready for our visiting firemen.”

“Not here yet,” she said.

Reprieved. For a little while. He went back to his papers, hating what he was doing. As he worked he muttered to himself. “I’m an engineer, dammit. If I’d wanted to spend all my time with legal briefs or sitting in a courtroom, I’d have been a lawyer. Or a mass murderer.”

Increasingly he regretted taking the job. He was a powersystems man, and a damned good one; he’d proved that by becoming Pennsylvania Edison’s youngest plant supervisor and keeping the Milford nuclear plant operating with the highest efficiency factor and best safety record in the country. And he’d wanted this position, to be in charge of San Joaquin and get the plant on line, four thousand megawatts of clean electric power when the project was completed. But his job was to build, to operate, not to explain. He was at home with machinery; more than that, with construction people, power operators, linemen and switchyard workers, his enthusiasm for nuclear power was infectious and spread through all those who worked for him — and so what? he thought sourly. Nowadays he spent all his time on paper work.

Dolores came in with more urgent memos that had to be answered. Every one of them was a job for a public-relations type, and every one of them came from people important enough to demand the time of the supervising engineer. He hefted the stack of memoranda and documents she dropped into his IN basket. “Look at this crap,” he said. “And every bit of it from politicians.”

She winked. “Illegitimi non carborundum,” she said.

Barry winked back. “It ain’t easy. Dinner?”

“Sure.”

He felt the anticipation from the bright promise in her quick smile. Barry Price sleeps with his secretary! I suppose, he thought, I suppose the Department would get upset if they knew. And to hell with them.

He felt the quiet: The building should be humming with the faint vibrations of turbines, the feel and sound of megawatts pouring into the grid, feeding Los Angeles and its industries; but there was nothing. Below him was the rectangular building that contained the turbines, beautiful machines, a paean to man’s ingenuity, weighing hundreds of tons and balanced to micrograms, able to spin at fantastic speeds and not vibrate at all… Why couldn’t people understand? Why didn’t everyone appreciate the beauty of fine machinery, the magnificence?

“Cheer up,” Dolores said, reading his thoughts. “The crews are working. Maybe this time they’ll let us finish.”

“Wouldn’t that make the news?” Barry asked. “Actually, I’d rather it didn’t. The less publicity we have, the better off we are. And that’s crazy.”

Dolores nodded and went to the windows. She stared across the San Joaquin Valley toward the Temblor Range thirty miles away. “Haze out there,” she said. “One of these days…”

“Yes.” That was a cheerful thought. Southern California had to have power, and with natural-gas shortages the only ways were coal and nuclear — and there was no way at all to burn coal and not get some haze and smog. “We’ve got the only clean way to go,” Barry said. “And we’ve won every time the public got to vote. You’d think even lawyers and politicians would get the message.” He knew he was preaching to the converted, but it helped to talk to someone, anyone, who would be sympathetic, who understood.

A light went on at his desk and Dolores flashed a parting smile before hastening out to greet the visiting delegation from the State Assembly. Barry prepared for another long day.

Morning rush hour in Los Angeles: streams of cars, all moving, thin smell of smog and exhaust fumes despite last night’s Santa Ana wind; patches of morning mist from the coast dying as warmer winds from inland swept them away. There was this about the morning rush hour: The freeways were jammed, but not necessarily with idiots. Most drove the same route at the same time every morning. They knew the ropes. You could see it at the off ramps, where nobody had to swerve across lanes; and at the on ramps, where the cars seemed to take turns.

Eileen had noticed it more than once. Despite the stand-up comics who had made California drivers the joke of the world, they were much better on freeways than any people she had seen anywhere else — which meant that she could drive with half her attention. She knew the ropes, too.

Her routine seldom varied now. Five minutes to finish a last cup of coffee before she got to the freeway. Stow the cup in the little rack she’d got from J. C. Whitney, and use the hairbrush for another five minutes. By then she was awake enough to do some real work. It would take another half-hour to get to Corrigan’s Plumbing Supplies in Burbank, and she could get a lot done with the dictaphone in that time. It improved her driving, too. Without the dictaphone she would be tense and nervous, pounding the dash in helpless frustration at every minor trafiic jam.

“Tuesday. Get on Corrigan’s back about the water filters,” her voice said back to her. “We’ve had two customers install the damned things without knowing there were parts missing.” Eileen nodded. She’d taken care of that already, and smoothed out the rage of a guy who’d looked like a barge tender and turned out to be related to one of the biggest developers in the valley. It just went to show, you could never kiss off a deal just because it looked like a one-item sale. She hit the rewind, then recorded: “Thursday. Have the warehouse people check every one of those filters in stock. Look for missing Leed nuts. And send a letter to the manufacturer.” She returned to PLAYBACK.

Eileen Susan Hancock was thirty-four years old. She was on the thin side of very pretty, and the reason showed in her hands, which were always in motion, and in her smile, which was nice, but which flashed always too suddenly, as if she’d turned on a light bulb, and in her walk. She had a tendency to leave people behind.

Somebody had once told her that was symbolic: She left people behind both physically and emotionally. He hadn’t said “intellectually,” and if he had she wouldn’t have believed him, but it was largely true. She’d been determined to be something more than a secretary long before there was anything like a women’s rights movement; and she’d managed that despite the responsibilities of a younger brother to raise.

If she ever talked about it, she laughed at how trite the situation was: Older sister puts younger brother through college but can’t go herself; helps younger brother get married, but never marries herself; and none of it was really true. She’d hated college. Maybe, she sometimes thought (but never said to anyone), a very good college, a place where they make you think, maybe that would have worked out. But to sit in a classroom while a timeserver lectured from a book that she’d already read, to teach her nothing she didn’t already know — it had been sheer hell, and when she dropped out the reasons weren’t financial.

And as to marriage, there wasn’t anybody she could live with. She’d tried that once, with a police lieutenant ( and watched how nervous he was to have her living there without benefit of City Hall license), and what had been a good relationship came apart inside a month. There had been another man, but he had a wife he wasn’t going to leave, and a third, who’d gone east for a three-month assignment that hadn’t ended after four years; and…

And I’m doing all right, she told herself when she thought about such things.

Men called her “hyperthyroid” or “the nervous type,” depending on education and vocabulary, and most didn’t try to keep up with her. She had an acid wit that she used too much. She hated dull talk. She talked much too fast, otherwise her voice was pleasant with a touch of throatiness derived from too many cigarettes.

She’d been driving this route for eight years. She took the curve of the four-level interchange without noticing; but once, years before, she had swept her car down that curve, then pulled off at the next ramp and parked her car and strolled back to stare at that maze of concrete spaghetti.

She’d been laughing at her own picture of herself as a gawking tourist, but she’d stared anyway.

“Wednesday,” the recorder told her. “Robin’s going to come through on the Marina deal. If he does, I stand to be Assistant General Manager. If he doesn’t, no chance. Problem…”

Eileen’s ears and throat were red in advance, and her hands shifted too often on the steering wheel. But she heard it through. Her Wednesday voice said, “He wants to sleep with me, it’s clear it wasn’t just repartee and games. If I cool him, do I blow the sale? Do I go to the mat with him to clinch the deal? Or am I missing something good because of the implications?”

“Shit-oh-dear,” Eileen said under her breath. She ran the tape back and recorded over that segment. “I still haven’t decided whether to accept Robin Geston’s dinner invitation. Memo: I should keep this tape cleaner. If anyone ever stole the recorder, I wouldn’t want to burn his ears off. Anyone remember Nixon?” She switched the recorder off, hard.

But she still had the problem, and she still felt burning resentment at living in a world where she had that kind of problem. She thought of how she’d word the letter to the goddamn manufacturer who’d sent out the filters without checking to see that all the parts were enclosed, and that made her feel a little better.

It was late evening in Siberia. Dr. Leonilla Alexandrovna Malik was finished for the day. Her last patient had been a four-year-old girl, child of one of the engineers at the space development center here in the Soviet northern wastes.

It was midwinter, and the wind blew cold from the north. There was snow piled outside the infirmary, and even inside she could feel the cold. Leonilla hated it. She had been born in Leningrad, so she was no stranger to severe winters; but she kept hoping for a transfer to Baikunyar, or even Kapustin Yar on the Black Sea. She resented being required to treat dependents, although of course there was little she could do about it; there weren’t many with pediatric training up here. Still, it was a waste. She had also been trained as a kosmonaut, and she kept hoping she’d get an assignment in space.

Perhaps soon. The Americans were said to be training women astronauts. If the Americans looked likely to send a woman into space, the Soviet Union would do it also, and quickly. The last Soviet experiment with a woman kosmonaut had been a disaster. (Was it really her fault? Leonilla wondered. She knew both Valentina Tereskovna and the kosmonaut she’d married, and they never talked about why her spacecraft had tumbled, ruining the chance for the Soviet Union to make the first space docking in history.) Of course, Valentina was much older, Leonilla thought. That had been in primitive times. Things were different now. The kosmonauts had little to do anyway; ground control made all the important decisions. A silly design philosophy, Leonilla thought, and her kosmonaut colleagues (all male, of course) shared this view, but not loudly.

She put the last of her used instruments into the autoclave and packed her bag. Kosmonaut or not, she was also a physician, and she carried the tools of the trade most places she went, just in case she might be needed. She put on the fur cap and heavy leather coat, shuddering a little at the sound of the wind outside. A radio in the next office had a news program, and Leonilla paused to listen when she heard a key word.

Comet. A new comet.

She wondered if there would be plans to explore it. Then she sighed. If there was a space mission to study the comet, it wouldn’t include her. She had no skills for that. Pilot, physician, life-support-systems engineer; those she could do. But not astronomy. That would be for Pieter or Basil or Sergei.

Too bad, really. But it was interesting. A new comet.

On Earth there was plague. Three billion years after the planet’s formation there came a virulent mutation, a form of life that used sunlight directly. The more efficient energy source gave the green mutant a hyperactive, murderous vigor; and as it spread forth to conquer the world, it poured out a flood of oxygen to poison the air. Raw oxygen seared the tissues of Earth’s dominant life and left it as fertilizer for the mutant.

That was a time of disaster for the comet, too. The black giant crossed its path for the first time.

Enormous heat had been trapped in the planet’s formation; it would be pouring out to the stars for a billion years to come.

A flood of infrared light boiled hydrogen and helium from the comet’s tissues. Then the intruder passed, and calm returned. The comet cruised on through the cold black silence, a little lighter now, moving in a slightly changed orbit.

February: One

Westwood Boulevard was not even remotely on the way between the offices of the National Broadcasting System and the Randall home near Beverly Glen, which was the main reason Harvey Randall liked the bars there. He wasn’t likely to run into any of the network officials and he wasn’t likely to find any of Loretta’s friends.

Students wandered along the wide street. They came in assortments: bearded and wearing jeans; clean-cut with expensive jeans; deliberately weird, and young-fogey conservative, and everything between. Harvey strolled with them. He passed specialty bookstores. One was devoted to gay lib. Another called itself the Macho Adult Bookstore and meant it. And another catered to the science-fiction crowd. Harvey made a mental note to go in there. They’d probably have a lot of stuff about comets and astronomy geared to a general readership; after he read that he could go to the UCLA campus store and get the really technical material.

Past the sisterhood place was a plate-glass window. Letters in Gothic script said SECURITY FIRST FEDERAL BAR Inside were stools, three small tables, four booths, a pinball machine and a jukebox. The walls were decorated with whatever the customers preferred, a supply of marking pens lay on the bar, and the walls were whitewashed at intervals. Paint peeled away in places to reveal comments made years before, a kind of pop-culture archeology.

Harvey moved into the dimness like a tired old man. As his eyes adjusted he spotted Mark Czescu on a stool. He pulled himself up next to Czescu and propped elbows on bar.

Czescu was thirty-odd, almost ageless, a perpetual young man about to launch himself on his career. Harvey knew Mark had been in the Navy for four years, and had tried several colleges, starting at UCLA and working down through community junior colleges. He sometimes called himself a student even yet, but no one believed he’d ever finish. He wore biker’s boots, old jeans, a T-shirt and a crumpled Aussie digger hat. He wore his black hair long and his black beard full. There was ground-in dirt under his nails and fresh streaks of grease on the jeans, but his hands and clothes had been freshly washed for all of that; he just didn’t have any pathological need to be scrubbed pink.

When Mark wasn’t smiling he had a dangerous look, despite the respectable beer belly. He smiled at lot; but he could take some things very seriously, and he sometimes moved with a tough crowd. They were part of his image: Mark Czescu could run with the real bikers if he wanted to, but he didn’t want to. Just now he looked concerned. “You don’t look good,” he said.

“I feel like killing somebody,” said Harvey.

“You feel that way, I could maybe find somebody,” Mark said. He let it trail off.

“No. They’re my bosses. They’re all of them my bosses, damn their innumerable souls.” Harvey ordered a pitcher and two glasses, and ignored Mark’s suggestion. He knew Mark couldn’t arrange a real murder. It was part of the Czescu image, to know more than you did about whatever subject came up. It usually amused Harvey, but just now he wasn’t in the mood for games.

“I want something from them,” Harvey said. “And they know they’re going to give it to me. How the hell can they not know? I’ve even got the sponsor wired! But the sons of bitches have to play games. If one of them fell off a balcony tomorrow, I’d be in for an extra month breaking in a new one, and I can’t afford the time.” It didn’t hurt to humor Czescu; the guy could be useful, and a lot of fun — and maybe he could arrange a murder. You never really knew.

“So what are they going to give you?” Mark asked.

“A comet. I’m going to make a whole series of documentaries about a new comet. The guy who discovered it chances to own seventy percent of the company that will sponsor the documentaries.”

Czescu chortled. Harvey nodded agreement. “It’s a beautiful setup. Chance to make the kind of films I really want to do. And to learn a lot. Not like that last shit, interviewing doomsters, everybody with his own private vision of the end of the world. I wanted to cut my throat and get it over with before that one was finished.”

“So what’s wrong?”

Harvey sighed, and drank more beer, and said, “Look. There are about four guys who could really tell me to go take a flying frig and make it stick. But that’d be a mistake, right? The New York people won’t put up with blowing a sponsored series. They’re going to buy the show. But how will anyone know they’ve got the power to say no if they don’t hesitate and demand I write up treatments and do budget estimates and all that crap? None of that shit gets used, but they’ve got to have a sound basis for decisions.’ Four fucking prima donnas who actually have the power.

“Okay, I could live with them. But then there are a couple of dozen who couldn’t stop a Time for Beany revival, but they want to show how important they are, too. So to show each other they could really stop the show if they wanted to, they raise as many objections as they can. Got the best interests of the sponsors in mind, right? Don’t want to get Kalva Soap mad, right? Bullshit. But I’ve got to put up with it.” Harvey was suddenly aware of what he sounded like, “Look, let’s change the subject.”

“Right. You’ve noticed the name of this place?”

“Security First Federal Bar. Cute. Stolen from George Carlin. About time, too.”

“Right! Now maybe some others will pick up the idea. Can you see Crazy Eddie’s Insurance?”

“Why not? They bought cars from Madman Muntz. How about Fat Jack’s Cancer Clinic?”

“Fat Jack’s Cancer Clinic and Mortuary,” Czescu said.

The tightness in Harvey’s neck and shoulders was going away. He drank more beer, then went to a booth where he could lean against something. Mark followed and took the opposite seat.

“Hey, Harv, when we making another run? Your bike still work?”

“Yeah.” A year ago — no, dammit, two years and more — he’d said the hell with it and let Mark Czescu lead him on a ride up the coast, drinking in little bars, talking to other drifters, camping where they felt like it. Czescu took care of the bikes, and Harvey paid the bills, not that they amounted to much. It had been a time of no worries. “The bike works, but I won’t get a chance to use it. When this series gets going it’ll take full time.”

“Anything I can get in on?” Mark asked.

Harvey shrugged. “Why not?” Mark often worked on Harvey’s shows. He carried cameras or clipboards and did maintenance or just plain acted as gofer. “If you’ll shut up once in awhile.”

“I’m hip.”

The bar was filling up. The jukebox ran out of sound, and Mark got up. “Something just for you,” he said. He retrieved his twelve-string guitar from behind the bar and took a chair at the end of the room. This, too, was part of his routine: Czescu sang for drinks and meals in bars. On their run up the coast Mark had got them free steaks in half the places between L.A. and Carmel. He was good enough to be professional, but he wouldn’t discipline himself; whenever he got a regular gig it didn’t last a week. To Mark, those who made steady money were magicians with a secret that he couldn’t quite learn.

Mark strummed an experimental chord, then began a prologue. The tune was the old cowboy number, “Cool Clear Water.”

Harvey laughed approval. A fat man at the bar sent over a pitcher of beer and Mark acknowledged with a toss of his head.

There was a short break as Mark picked at the guitar. The chords jangled, obviously wrong, but obviously right too, as if Mark were searching for something he could never find.

The guitar stopped and Mark said in a plonking voice, “Almost as much as you get from an old Bogart movie.”

“Leonard Bernstein conducts the London Symphony Orchestra and the Rolling Stones in a dazzling display of

“Folks, tonight we have a debate between the president of the United Farm Workers versus twenty-two hungermaddened housewives armed with butcher knives. It’s

Jesus, thought Harvey. Jesus, I’d like to play a recording of that in a goddamn executive council meeting at the network. Harvey leaned back to enjoy his moment. It wouldn’t be long before he had to go home to dinner, and Loretta, and Andy, and Kipling, and the home he loved but whose price was just so damned high.

The Santa Ana still blew, hot and dry across the Los Angeles basin. Harvey drove with open windows, his coat thrown onto the seat beside him, tie atop the pile. Headlights picked up green hillsides among bare trees, palm trees at intervals. He drove in the full summery darkness of a California February and he noticed nothing unusual about it.

He hummed Mark’s song as he drove. One day, he thought. One day I’ll slip a tape of that onto the Muzak system so three-quarters of the business people in Los Angeles and Beverly Hills will have to listen to it. Half concentrating, he daydreamed in fragments that shattered when some car ahead slowed and the flare of brake lights surged like a wave.

At the top of the hill he turned right onto Mulholland, right again onto Benedict Canyon, downhill slightly, then right onto Fox. Fox Lane was one of a cluster of short curved streets lined with fifteen-year-old houses. One of them belonged to Harvey, courtesy of Pasadena Savings and Loan. Further down Benedict Canyon was the turn onto Cielo Drive, where Charlie Manson had proved to the world that civilization was neither eternal nor safe. After that Sunday morning of horror in 1969 there was not a gun or a guard dog to be had in Beverly Hills. Back orders for shotguns stretched delivery time to weeks. And ever since, despite Harvey’s pistol and shotgun and dog, Loretta wanted to move. She was searching for safety.

Home. A big white house with green roof, trimmed front lawn, a big tree and small porch. It had a good resale value, because it was the least expensive house on the block; but least expensive is a relative thing, as Harvey well knew.

His house had a conventional driveway, not a big circular entry like the house across the street. He took the corner at a good clip, slowed in the drive, and zapped the garage door with the radio-beam widget. The door swung up before he could reach it; perfect timing, and Harvey scored a mental point with himself. The garage door closed behind him and he sat for a moment in darkness. Harvey didn’t like driving in rush hours, and he drove the rush hour twice nearly every day of his life. Time for a shower, he thought. He got out of the car and walked back down the drive toward the kitchen door.

“Hey, Harv?” a baritone voice bellowed.

“Yo,” Harvey answered. Gordie Vance, Randall’s neighbor on the left, was coming across his lawn with a rake trailing behind him. He leaned on the fence, and Harvey did the same, thinking as he did of cartoons of housewives chatting this way; only Loretta didn’t like Marie Vance, and would never be seen leaning on a back fence anyway. “So, Gordie. How are things at the bank?”

Gordie’s smile wavered. “They’ll keep. Anyway you’re not ready for a lecture on inflation. Listen, can you get away on the weekend? Thought we’d take the scouts up for a snow hike.”

“Boy, that sounds good.” Clean snow. It was hard to believe that no more than an hour away, in the Angeles Forest Mountains, was deep snow and wild, whistling wind in the evergreens, while they stood here in their shirt sleeves in the dark. “Probably not, Gordie. There’s a job coming up.” Christ, I hope there’s a job coming up. “You better not count on me.”

“What about Andy? Thought I’d use him as patrol leader this trip.”

“He’s a little young for that.”

“Not really. And he’s got experience. I’m taking some new kids on a first hike. Could use Andy.”

“Sure, he’s up on his schoolwork. Where are you going?”

“Cloudburst Summit.”

Harvey laughed. Tim Hamner’s observatory wasn’t far from there, although Harvey had never seen it. He must have hiked past it a dozen times.

They discussed details. With the Santa Ana blowing there’d be melt-off on all but the top elevations, but there would certainly be snow on the north slopes. A dozen scouts and Gordie. It sounded like fun. It was fun. Harvey shook his head ruefully. “You know, Gordo, when I was a kid it was a good week’s hike to Cloudburst. No road. Now we drive it in an hour. Progress.”

“Yeah. But it is progress, isn’t it? I mean, now we can get there and still keep a job.”

“Sure. Damn, I wish I could go.” By the time they’d driven up — an hour — and hiked in and got the gear out of their backpacks and set up camp, and got damp wood burning and their backpack stoves going, the freeze-dried mountain food always tasted like ambrosia. And coffee, at midnight, standing in a shelter out of the wind and listening to it whistle above… But it wasn’t worth a comet. “Sorry.”

“Right. Okay, I’ll check with Andy. Go over his gear for me, will you?”

“Sure.” What Gordie meant was, “Don’t let Loretta pack for your son. It’s hard enough hiking at that altitude without all the crap she’d make him carry. Hot-water bottles. Extra blankets. Once even an alarm clock.”

Harvey had to go back for his jacket and tie. When he came out of the garage he went another way, into the backyard. He’d thought of asking Gordie, “How do you feel about calling it ‘Gordo’s Bank and Kaffeeklatsch’?” From the look on Gordie’s face when the bank was mentioned, it wouldn’t go over. Some kind of trouble there. Private trouble.

Andy was in the backyard, across the pool, playing basketball solitaire. Randall stood quietly watching him. In zero time, in what must have been a year but felt like a week, Andy had changed from a boy into a… into a stick figure, all arms and legs and hands, long bones poised behind a basketball. He launched it with exquisite care, danced to catch the rebound, dribbled, and fired again for a perfect score. Andy didn’t smile; he nodded in somber satisfaction.

Kid’s not bad, Harvey thought.

His pants were new, but they didn’t reach his ankles. He’d be fifteen next September, ready for high school; and there was nothing for it but to send him to Harvard School for Boys, certainly the best in Los Angeles; only the school wanted a fortune just to hold a place, and the orthodontist wanted thousands now and more later. And there was the funny noise from the pool pump, and the electronics club Andy was involved in, it wouldn’t be long before the boy wanted a micro-computer for himself and who could blame him?… And… Randall went inside, quietly, glad that Andy hadn’t noticed him.

A teen-age boy used to be an asset. He could work in the fields — drive a team, or even a tractor. The pressure could be shared, shifted to younger shoulders. A man could ease off.

There was wrapping paper in the kitchen wastebasket. Loretta had been shopping again. Christmas had been on charge accounts, and those bills would be coming to roost on his desk. He’d already heard the stock-market report on the radio. The market was down.

Loretta was nowhere around. Harvey went into the big dressing room off the bathroom and stripped, got into the shower. Hot water beat down on his neck, draining away tension. His mind was turned off; he imagined himself as meat being massaged by hydraulic pressure. Only. If only his mind would really turn off.

Andy has a conscience. God knows I never tried to make him feel guilty. Discipline, sure. Punishment, standing in a corner, even a formal spanking, but when it’s over it’s over, no lingering guilt… but he knows guilt anyway. If Andy knew what he’s costing me in dollars and cents — and in the years of my life. If he ever knew what it does to the way l have to live, the shit I put up with to keep that goddamn job and win the bonuses that keep us afloat… What would Andy do if he knew? Run away? Get a job as a street sweeper in San Francisco to try to pay me back? He damned well is not going to know.

A voice in the roar of water. Huh? Randall came out of the internal world and found Loretta smiling through the glass shower door. She mouthed, “Hi. How’d it go?”

He waved. Loretta took it as an invitation. Randall watched her undress slowly, lasciviously, and slide through the glass door quick so the water wouldn’t splash out… and it wasn’t Wednesday. Harvey folded her in his arms. The water beat down on them, and they kissed. And it wasn’t Wednesday.

She asked, “How’d it go?”

He had read her lips the first time, but she couldn’t guess that. Now he had to answer. “I think they’ll do it.”

“I don’t see why not. It doesn’t make sense. If they wait, CBS will take it.”

“Right.” The magic went out of the shower/orgy scene, poof.

“Isn’t there any way to tell them how silly they’re being?”

“No.” Harvey fiddled with the shower head. The water expanded to a fine spray.

“Why not?”

“Because they know. Because they’re not playing the same game we are.”

“It all depends on you. If you insist on doing it your way, just once…” Loretta’s hair darkened and dampened under the shower. She held him in her arms and looked up into his face, looked for the strengthening of purpose that would mean she’d convinced him: that he would stand by his principles and force his superiors to face the consequences of their mistakes.

“Yeah. It all depends on me. Which makes me the obvious target if anything goes wrong. Turn around and I’ll do your back.”

She turned her back. Harvey reached for the soap. His will loosed its hold on the muscles of his face. His soapy hands made patterns in the slippery contours of Loretta’s back… slowly, every move a caress… but he was thinking, Don’t you know what they’d do to me? They’d never fire me, but one day my office is an inside broom closet, the next day the rug is gone. Then my phone doesn’t work. By the time I quit, everyone in the industry has forgotten I exist. And we’re still spending every cent I make.

He had always loved Loretta’s back. He searched his mind for growing lust… but he felt nothing.

She was in on this from the beginning. It’s her life too. Not fair to lock her out. But she just won’t understand. I can get Mark off a subject! He’ll drink my beer and talk about something else, if I make it plain enough. But I can’t talk to Loretta like that… What I need is a drink.

Loretta washed his back for him, and then they dried each other with the big towels. She was still trying to tell him how to handle the situation at the studio. She knew something was wrong, and as usual she probed at it, trying to understand, trying to help.

Myriads of orbits later, when true humans were spreading through a world held fast in the grip of an ice age, the black planet came again.

The comet was larger now. It had grown, snowflake by isolated snowflake, over a thousand million years, until it was four and a half miles across. But now its surface warmed in a bath of infrared heat. Within the comet’s tissues, pockets of hydrogen and helium vaporized and seeped through the crust. The tiny sun was eclipsed. The ringed black disk covered a third of the sky, leaking the heat of its birth.

Then it had passed, and calm returned.

The comet had healed from a previous pass. Centuries, millennia, what are they in the cometary halo? But time had come at last to this comet. The black giant’s passing had stopped it cold in its orbit.

Slowly, urged by the faint tugging of the Sun’s gravity, it began to drop toward the maelstrom.

February: Two

The TravelAll was crammed with equipment: cameras, tape recorders, lights and reflectors, battery belts; the myriad paraphernalia of the roving TV interview. Charlie Bascomb, cameraman, was in the back with the sound man, Manuel Arguilez; everything normal, except that Mark Czescu was in the front seat when Harvey came out of the NBS offices.

Harvey beckoned to Mark. They walked across the studio lot toward Mercedes Row, where the executives parked. “Look,” Harvey said, “your job title is Production Assistant. That theoretically makes you management. It has to be that way because of union rules.”

“Yeah — ” Mark said.

“But you aren’t management. You’re a gofer.”

“I’m hip.” Mark sounded hurt.

“Don’t get upset and don’t get huffy. Just understand. My crew has been with me a long time. They know the game. You don’t.”

“I know that, too.”

“Fine. You can be a big help. Just remember, what we don’t need is—”

“Is me telling everybody how to do their job.” He flashed a big grin. “I like working for you. I won’t blow it.”

“Good.” Harvey detected no signs of irony in Mark’s voice It made him feel better. He had been worried about this interview — it had to be said, but that didn’t make it easier. One of his associates had once remarked that Mark was like a jungle, all right but you had to chop him back every now and then or he’d grow all over you.

The TravelAII started instantly. It had been through a lot with Harvey Randall: from the Alaska pipeline to the lower tip of Baja, even into Central America. They were old friends, the TravelAII and Harvey: a big three-seat International Harvester four-wheel drive, truck motor, ugly as sin, and utterly reliable. He drove in silence to the Ventura Freeway and turned toward Pasadena. Traffic was light.

“You know,” Harvey said, “we’re always complaining how nothing works, but here we are going fifty miles for this interview, and we count on being there in less than an hour. When I was a kid a fifty-mile trip was something you packed lunches for and hoped you’d make it by dark.”

“What’d you have, a horse?” Charlie asked.

“No, just L.A. without the freeways.”

“Yuk.”

They drove through Glendale and turned north on Linda Vista to go past the Rose Bowl. Charlie and Manuel talked about bets they’d lost a few weeks before.

“I thought Cal Tech owned JPL,” Charlie said.

“They do,” Mark told him.

“Sure put it way the hell far from Pasadena.”

“Used to test jet engines there,” Mark said. “JPL. Jet Propulsion Laboratories, right? Everybody thought they’d blow up, so they made Cal Tech put the labs out in the Arroyo.” He waved to indicate the houses outside. “Then they built the most expensive suburb in this end of L.A. just around it.”

The guard was expecting them. He waved them into a lot near one of the large buildings. JPL nestled into its arroyo and filled it with office buildings. A big central steel and glass tower looked strangely out of place among the older Air-Force standard “temporary” structures erected twenty years before.

There was a PR flack waiting for them. She led them through the routine: Sign in, wear badges. Inside, it looked like any other office building, but not quite: There were stacks of IBM cards in the corridors, and almost no one wore coats or ties. They passed a ten-foot color globe of Mars gathering dust in a corner. No one paid any attention to Harvey and his people; it wasn’t unusual to see TV crews.

JPL had built the Pioneer and Mariner space probes, had set Viking down on Mars.

“Here we are,” the PR flack said.

The office looked good. Books on the wall. Incomprehensible equations on the blackboards. Books on every flat surface in view, IBM print-outs all over the expensive teak desk.

“Dr. Sharps, Harvey Randall,” the flack said. She hovered near the door.

Charles Sharps wore glasses that curved around to cover his whole field of view; very modernistic, vaguely insectile against his long pale face. His hair was black and straight, worn short. His fingers played with a felt-tip pen, or fished into his pockets, always moving. He looked to be about thirty, but might have been older, and he wore a sport jacket and tie.

“Now let’s get this straight,” Sharps said. “You want a lecture on comets. For yourself or for the public?”

“Both. Simple for me camera, as much as I can understand for me. If it’s not too much trouble.”

“Too much trouble?” Sharps laughed. “How could it be too much trouble? Your network tells NASA you want to do a documentary on space, and NASA sends up red rockets. Right, Charlene?”

The PR flack nodded. “They asked us to cooperate—”

“Cooperate.” Sharps laughed again. “I’d jump through hoops if I thought it would help get a budget. When do we start?”

“Now, please,” Harvey said. “The crew will set up while we chat. Just ignore them. I take it you’re the resident expert on comets.”

“I suppose so,” Sharps said. “Actually I like asteroids, but somebody has to study comets. I gather you’re interested mainly in Hamner-Brown.”

“Right.”

Charlie caught Harvey’s eye. They were ready. Harvey gave them the nod. Manuel listened and watched the indicator, and said, “Speed.”

Mark stepped in front of the camera. “Sharps interview, take one.” The chalkboard came together with a loud clack! Sharps jumped. They always did, first time. Charlie busied himself with the camera. He kept it aimed at Sharps; they’d film Harvey asking the questions later, when Sharps wasn’t around.

“Tell me, Dr. Sharps, will Hamner-Brown be visible to the naked eye?”

“Don’t know,” Sharps said. He sketched something unlikely on the IBM print-out in front of him. The sketch might have been of a pair of mating Loch Ness monsters. “A month from now we’ll know much better. We already know it’s going to get as close to the Sun as Venus, but — ” He broke off and looked at the camera “What level do you want this at?”

“Anything you like,” Harvey said. “Make me understand, then we can decide how to tell the public.”

Sharps shrugged. “All right. So there’s the solar system out there.” He waved toward one wall. A big chart of the planets and their orbits hung next to the blackboard. “Planets and moons, always where they should be. They do a great complicated dance around each other. Every planet, every moon, every little rock in the asteroid belt, all dancing to Newton’s song of gravity. Mercury got a little out of step and we had to revise the universe to make it fit.”

“How’s that?” Harvey asked. And I’d have preferred to do the poetry myself, but what the hell…

“Mercury. Orbit changes just a little every year. Not much, but more than Newton says it should. So a man named Einstein found a good explanation, and incidentally managed to make the universe a stranger place than it was before.”

“Oh. I hope we don’t need relativity to understand comets—”

“No, no. But there’s more than gravity to a comet’s orbit. That’s surprising, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Are we going to have to revise the universe again?”

“What? No, it’s simpler than that. Look…” Sharps jumped to his feet and was at the blackboard. He looked for chalk and muttered “Here you go.” Mark took chalk from his pocket and handed it.

“Thanks.” Sharps sketched a white blob, then a parabolic curve. “That’s the comet. Now let’s put in planets.” He drew two circles. “Earth and Venus.”

“I thought planets moved in elliptical orbits,” Harvey said.

“So they do, but on any scale you could draw you can’t see the difference. Now look at the comet’s orbit. Both arms of the curve look just the same, coming in and going out. Textbook parabola, right?”

“Right.”

“But here’s what the comet really looks like when it falls away from the Sun. A dense nucleus, a coma of fine dust and gas” — he was drawing again — “and a plume of dusty gas streaming away from the Sun. Ahead of the comet, going out. The tail. A big tail, a hundred million miles long, sometimes. But it’s nearly a vacuum. It has to be — if it were thick, there wouldn’t be enough matter in the comet to fill that much space.”

“Sure.”

“Okay, and again like the textbooks. Material boils out of the head of the comet into the coma. It’s a thin gas, tiny particles, so tiny that sunlight can push them around. Light pressure from the Sun makes them stream away, so the tail always faces away from the Sun. Okay? Tail follows the comet going in, leads it coming out. But—

“The stuff boils out unevenly. When the comet first falls into the system, it’s a solid mass. We think. Nobody really knows. We have several models that fit the observations. Me, I like the dirty-snowball model. The comet’s made of rocks and dust, the dirt, balled up with ices and frozen gases. Some water ice. Methane. Carbon dioxide — dry ice. Cyanogen and nitrogen, all kinds of stuff. Pockets of these gases thaw and blast out to one side or the other. Like jet propulsion, and it changes the orbit.” Sharps was at work with the chalk, holding it sideways. When he finished, the incoming arm had jogs and jiggle in it, and the outgoing arm was blurred into a wide sweep not unlike the comet’s tail. “So we don’t know how close to Earth it’s coming.”

“I see. And you don’t know how big the tail will be.”

“Right. But this seems to be a new comet. Maybe it’s never made the trip down close to the Sun before. Not like Halley’s Comet, which comes every seventy years and gets smaller each time. Comets die a little every time they pass near the Sun. They lose all that tail material forever. So each time the tail’s smaller, until eventually there’s nothing left but the nucleus, and that comes as a handful of rocks. Meteor showers. Some of our best shooting stars are pieces of old comets falling onto Earth.”

“But this one’s new—”

“That’s right. So it ought to have a spectacular tail.”

“I seem to remember people said that about Kahoutek.”

“And I seem to remember they were wrong. Wasn’t there an outfit selling commemorative medals that would show Kahoutek exactly as it appeared? You see there’s no way to know. But my guess is that Hamner-Brown will be quite a sight. And it ought to pass fairly close to Earth.”

Sharps drew a dot within the blur of the comet’s outgoing course. “There’s where we’ll be. Of course we won’t see a lot until the comet passes the Earth, because until it gets by we’ll be looking straight into the Sun to see it. Hard to observe then. But when it’s passed us, it should be quite a sight. There have been comets with tails across half the sky. See them in daytime. We’re overdue for a big comet this century.”

“Hey, doc,” Mark said. “You’ve got Earth right in that thing’s path. Could it hit us?”

Harvey turned to look daggers at Mark.

Sharps was laughing. “Chances are zillions to one against it. You see the Earth as a dot on the blackboard. Actually, if I drew this to scale you wouldn’t be able to see the Earth in the drawing. Or the comet nucleus either. So what’s the chance that a couple of pinpoints will come together?” He frowned at the board. “Of course, the tail is likely to go where we do. We might be in it for weeks.”

“What does that do?” Harvey asked.

“We went through the tail of Halley’s Comet,” Mark said. “Didn’t hurt a thing. Pretty lights, and—”

This time Harvey’s look was enough.

“Your friend’s right,” Sharps said.

I knew that. “Dr. Sharps, why do all the astronomers get so excited about Hamner-Brown?” Harvey asked.

“Man, we can learn a lot from comets. Things like the origins of the solar system. They’re older than Earth. Made out of primordial matter. This comet may have been out there way past Pluto for billions of years. Present theory says the solar system condensed from a cloud of dust and gas, an eddy in the interstellar medium. Most of that blew away when the Sun started to burn, but some is still in the comet. We can analyze the tail. The way we did with Kahoutek. Kahoutek was no disappointment to astronomers. We used tools we’d never had before. Skylab. Lots of things.”

“And that was useful?” Harvey prompted.

“Useful? It was magnificent! We should do it again!” Sharps’s hands waved around in dramatic gestures. Harvey glanced quickly at his crew. The camera was rolling, and Manuel had that contented look a sound man has when things are going well in his phones.

“Could we get something like Skylab up there in time?” Harvey asked.

“Skylab? No. But Rockwell’s got an Apollo capsule we could use. And we’ve got the equipment here at the labs. There are big military boosters around, things the Pentagon doesn’t need anymore. We could do it, if we started now, and we weren’t chicken about it.” Sharps’s face fell. “But we won’t. Too damn bad, too. We could really learn something from Hamner-Brown that way.”

The cameras and sound equipment were packed away and the crew went out with the PR lady. Harvey was saying his farewells to Sharps.

“Want some coffee, Harvey? You’re in no hurry, are you?” Sharps asked.

“Guess not.”

Sharps punched a button on the phone console. “Larry. Get us some coffee, please.” He turned back to Harvey. “Damnedest thing,” he said. “Whole nation depends on technology. Stop the wheels for two days and you’d have riots. No place is more than two meals from a revolution. Think of Los Angeles or New York with no electricity. Or a longer view, fertilizer plants stop. Or a longer view yet, no new technology for ten years. What happens to our standard of living?”

“Sure, we’re a high-technology civiliz—”

“Yet…” Sharps said. His voice was firm. He intended to finish. “Yet the damned fools won’t pay ten minutes’ attention a day to science and technology. How many people know what they’re doing? Where do these carpets come from? The clothes you’re wearing? What do carburetors do? Where do sesame seeds come from? Do you know? Does one voter out of thirty? They won’t spend ten minutes a day thinking about the technology that keeps them alive. No wonder the research budget has been cut to nothing. We’ll pay for that. One day we’ll need something that could have been developed years before but wasn’t — ” He stopped himself. “Tell me, Harv, will this TV thing of yours be big or will it get usual billing for a science program?”

“Prime time,” Harvey said. “A series, on the value of Hamner-Brown, and incidentally on the value of science. Of course, I can’t guarantee people won’t turn to reruns of ‘I Love Lucy.’ ”

“Yeah. Oh — thank you, Larry. Put the coffee right here.”

Harvey had expected styrofoam cups and machine coffee. Instead, Sharps’s assistant brought in a gleaming Thermos pitcher, silver spoons and sugar-and-cream service on an inlaid teak tray.

“Help yourself, Harvey. It’s good coffee. Mocha-Java?”

“Right,” the assistant said.

“Good.” He waved dismissal. “Harv, why this sudden change of heart by the networks?”

Harvey shrugged. “Sponsor insists on it. The sponsor happens to be Kalva Soap. Which happens to be controlled by Timothy Hamner. Who happens—”

Harvey was cut off by shrieks of laughter. Sharps’s thin face contorted in glee. “Beautiful!” Then he looked thoughtful. “A series. Tell me, Harv, if a politician helped us with the study — helped a lot — could he be worked into the series? Get some favorable publicity?”

“Sure. Hamner would insist on it. Not that I’d object—”

“Marvelous.” Sharps lifted his coffee cup. “Cheers. Thanks, Harv. Thanks a lot. I think we’ll be seeing more of each other.”

Sharps waited until Harvey Randall had left the building. He sat very still, something unusual for him, and he felt excitement in the pit of his stomach. It might work. It just might. Finally he punched the intercom. “Larry, get me Senator Arthur Jellison in Washington. Thanks.”

Then he waited impatiently until the phone buzzed. “He’ll talk to you,” his assistant said.

Sharps lifted the phone. “Sharps here.” Another wait while the secretary got the Senator.

“Charlie?”

“Right,” Sharps said. “Art, I’ve got a proposition for you. Know about the comet?”

“Comet? Oh. Comet. Funny you mention that. I met the guy who discovered it. Turns out he was a heavy contributor, but I never met him before.”

“Well, it’s important,” Sharps said. “Opportunity of the century—”

“That’s what they said about Kahoutek—”

“God damn Kahoutek! Look, Art, what’s the chance we could get funding for a probe?”

“How much?”

“Well, take two cases. Second best is anything we can get. The lab can cobble up an unmanned black box, something that goes on a Thor-Delta—”

“No problem. I can get you that,” Jellison said.

“But that’s second best. What we need is a manned probe. Say two men in an Apollo with some equipment instead of the third man. Art, that comet’s going to be close. From up there we could get good pictures, not just the tail, not just the coma, there’s a fair chance we could get pix of the head! Know what that means?”

“Not really, but you just told me it’s important.” Jellison was silent for a moment. “Sorry. I really am, but there’s no chance. Not one chance. Anyway, we couldn’t put up an Apollo if we had the budget—”

“Yes we can. I just checked with Rockwell. Higher-risk mission than NASA likes, but we could do it. We’ve got the hardware—”

“Doesn’t matter. I can’t get you a budget for that.”

Sharps frowned at the phone. The sick excitement rose in his stomach. Arthur Jellison was an old friend, and Charlie Sharps did not like blackmail. But… “Not even if the Russkis are putting up a Soyuz?”

“What? But they’re not—”

“Oh, yes, they are,” Sharps said. And it’s not a lie, not really. Just an anticipation—

“You can prove that?”

“In a few days. Rely on it, they’re going up to look at Hamner-Brown.”

“I will be dipped in shit.”

“I beg your pardon, Senator?”

“I will be dipped in shit.”

“Oh.”

“You’re playing games with me, aren’t you, Charlie?” Jellison demanded.

“Not really. Look, Art, it’s important. And we need another manned mission anyway, just to keep up interest in space. You’ve been after a manned flight—”

“Yeah, but I had no chance of getting one.” There was more silence. Then Jellison said, more to himself than Sharps, “So the Russkis are going. And no doubt they’ll make a big deal of it.”

“I’m sure they will.”

Another silence. Charlie Sharps almost held his breath “Okay,” Jellison said. “I’ll nose around the Hill and see what kind of reactions I get. But you better be giving it to me straight.”

“Senator, in a week you’ll have unmistakable evidence.”

“All right. I’ll give it a try. Anything else?”

“Not just now.”

“Okay. Thanks for the tip, Charlie.” The phone went dead.

Abrupt he is, Sharps thought. He smiled thinly to himself, then punched the intercom button again. “Larry, I want Dr. Sergei Fadayev in Moscow, and yes, I know what time it is over there. Just get him on for me.”

The legend of Gilgamesh was a handful of unconnected tales spreading through the Earth’s Fertile Crescent in Asia… and the comet was nearly unchanged. It was still far outside the maelstrom. The orbit of the runaway moon called Pluto would have looked like a quarter held nearly on edge, at arm’s length. The Sun, an uncomfortably bright pin point, still poured far less heat across the comet’s crust than had the black giant at its worst. The crust was mostly water ice now; it reflected most of the heat back to the stars.

Yet time passed.

Mars swallowed its water in another turn of its long, vicious weather cycle. Men spread across the Earth, laughing and scratching. And the comet continued to fall. A breath of the solar wind, high-velocity protons, flayed its crust. Much of the hydrogen and helium in its tissues had seeped away. The maelstrom came near.

March: One

Mark Czescu looked up at the house and whistled. It was California Tudor, off-white stucco with massive wood beams inset at angles. They’d be real wood. Some places, like Glendale, had the same style of house with plywood strips to fake it, but not Bel Air.

The house was large on a large lot. Mark rang the front door bell. Presently it was opened by a young man with long hair and pencil-thin mustache. He looked at Mark’s Roughrider trousers and boots and at the large brown cases Mark had set on the porch. “We don’t need any,” he said.

“I’m not selling any. I’m Mark Czescu, from NBS.”

“Oh. Sorry. You’d be surprised how many peddlers we get. Come on in. My name’s George, I’m the houseboy.” He lifted one of the cases. “Heavy.”

“Yeah.” Mark was busy looking around. Paintings. A telescope. Globes of Earth,’ Mars and the Moon. Glass statuary. Steuben crystal. Trip toys. The front room had been set up as for a theater party, couches facing the TV. “Must have been a bitch moving that stuff,” Mark said.

“Sure was. Here, put that in here. Anything tricky about it?”

“Not if you know video recorders.”

“I ought to,” George said. “I’m a drama student. UCLA. But we haven’t had that course yet. You better show me.”

“Will you be running it tonight?”

“Nah. I’ve got a rehearsal. Wild Duck. Good part. Mr. Hamner will do it.”

“Then I’ll show him.”

“You’ll have to wait, then. He’s not home yet. Want a beer?”

“That’d go nice.” Mark followed George to the kitchen. A big room, gleaming chrome and Formica everywhere; two double sinks, two gas ovens, two ranges. A large counter held trays of canapes covered with Saran Wrap. There was a desk and bookshelves which held cookbooks, the latest Travis McGee thrillers and Stanislavski’s An Actor Prepares. Only the thrillers and Stanislavski showed any signs of use. “I’d have thought Hamner would find himself an astronomy student—”

“Last guy here was,” George said. He got out beer. “They fought a lot.”

“So Hamner fired him.”

“No, he sent him up to his place in the mountains. Hamner likes to fight, but not when he’s at home. He’s easy to work for. And there’s color TV in my room, and I get to use the pool and sauna.”

“Hard to take.” Mark sipped at the beer. “This must be one swinging party pad.”

George laughed. “Like hell. The only parties are when I bring in a show cast. Or like tonight, relatives.”

Mark eyed George carefully. Pencil mustache. Actor’s fine features. What the hell, he thought. “Hamner gay or something?”

“Christ, no,” George said. “No, he just doesn’t go out much. I fixed him up with the second lead in our last show Nice girl, from Seattle. Hamner took her out a couple of times, then nothing. Irene said he was polite and a perfect gentleman until they were alone, then he leaped at her.”

“She should have leaped back.”

“That’s what I said, but she didn’t.” George cocked his head to one side. “That’s Mr. Hamner coming now. I recognize the engine.”

Tim Hamner went to the side door and into the small suite that he thought of as his home. It was the part of the house he felt most comfortable in although he used the whole place. Hamner didn’t like his house. It had been chosen by the family money managers for resale value, and it had that; it gave him plenty of space to display the things he’d collected; but it didn’t seem like a home.

He poured himself a short scotch and sank into an Eames chair. He put his feet up on the matching footstool. It felt good. He’d done his duty. He’d gone to a directors’ meeting and listened to all the reports and congratulated the company president on the quarterly earnings. Tim’s natural inclination was to let those who liked playing with money do it, but he’d had a cousin who lost everything that way; it never hurt to let money managers know you were looking over their shoulders.

Thinking of the meeting reminded him of the secretary at the office. She’d chatted pleasantly with Tim before the meeting, but she’d pleaded a date when he asked her for dinner for tomorrow. Maybe she did have a date. She was polite enough. But she’d turned him down. Maybe, he thought, maybe I should have asked her for next Friday. Or next week. But then if she said no there’d have been no doubt about why.

He heard George talking with someone out in the living room and wondered idly who it might be. George wouldn’t disturb him until he came out; that was one nice thing about this house, he could have this suite to himself. But then Tim remembered. That would be the man from NBS! With the cut scenes, the ones Tim had liked but hadn’t got into the documentary. He got up in enthusiasm and began changing clothes.

Penelope Wilson arrived about six. She had never answered to Penny, her mother had insisted. Tim Hamner, looking at her through the spy-eye in the door, suddenly remembered that she had given up Penelope too. She’d taken to using her middle name, and Tim couldn’t remember it.

Be brave. He threw the door wide and, letting his agony show, cried, “Quick! What’s your middle name?”

“Joyce. Hello, Tim. Am I the first?”

“Yes. You look elegant.” He took her coat. He had known her forever: since grade school, anyway. Penelope Joyce had gone to the same girls’ prep school as Tim’s sister and half a dozen girl cousins. She had been the homely one, with her wide mouth and too-square jaw and a figure best described as sturdy. In college she had begun to bloom.

She was indeed elegant tonight. Her hair was long and wavy and complexly arranged. Her dress was clean of line and of a color and texture soft to the eye. Tim wanted to touch it. He’d lived with his sister long enough to know how long it must have taken to get that effect, even if he had no hint as to how it was done.

Wanting her approval was automatic. He waited as she inspected his living room, wondering to himself why he’d never invited her before. Finally she looked up with an expression Tim hadn’t seen her use since high school, when she’d decided she was judge of all morals. “Nice room,” she said approvingly. Then she giggled, ruining the pose.

“Glad you like it. Damned glad, in fact.”

“Really? Is my opinion so important?” She was still teasing him with facial expressions from their childhood.

“Yes. In a few minutes the whole damned family’s going to be here, and most of them haven’t seen this place. You think like they do, so if you like it, they will.”

“Hmm. I guess I deserted that.”

“Hey, I didn’t mean…” She was laughing at him again. He got her a drink and they sat.

“I’ve been wondering,” she mused. “We haven’t seen each other for two years at least. Why did you ask me here tonight?”

Tim was partly prepared for that. She had always been direct. He decided to be truthful. “I was thinking about who I wanted here tonight. A big ego thing, right? The show about my comet. And I thought of Gil Waters, the top of my class at Cate, and my family, and you. Then I realized I was thinking of all the people I wanted to impress most.”

“Me?”

“Right. We used to talk, remember? And I never could tell you what I wanted to do with my life. The rest of my family, everyone we grew up with, they make money, or collect art, or race cars, or do something. Me, I only wanted to watch the sky.”

She smiled. “I’m really flattered, Tim.”

“You really do look elegant. Your own creation?”

“Yes. Thank you.”

She was still easy to talk to. Tim was finding that a pleasant rediscovery when the doorbell rang. The others had come.

It was a pleasant evening. The caterers had done their job well, so there was no trouble with the food, even without George to help. Tim relaxed and found he was having fun.

They listened.

They never had before. They listened as Tim told them how it had been: the cold, dark hours of watching, of studying star patterns, of keeping the log; of endless hours poring over photographs; all with no result except the joy of knowing the universe. And they listened. Even Greg, who usually made no secret of how he felt about rich men who didn’t pay proper attention to their money.

It was only a family gathering in Tim’s living room, but he was elated, and nervous, and quiveringly alert. He saw Barry’s smile and headshake and read Barry’s mind from that: What a way to spend a life! He’s actually envying me, Tim thought, and it was delicious. Tim glanced up to catch his sister watching with wry amusement. Jill had always been able to tell what Tim was thinking. He’d been closer to her than either had been to their brother Pat.

But it was Pat who trapped him behind the bar and wanted to talk.

“Like your place,” Pat said. “Mom doesn’t know what to make of it.” He tilted his head to indicate where their mother was wandering around the room, looking at gadgets. At the moment she was fascinated by the Kalliroscope’s random and strange patterns. “Bet I know what she’s thinking. Do you?”

“Do I what?”

“Bring girls here. Have wild parties.”

“None of your goddamn business.”

Pat shrugged. “Too bad. Man, there are times when I wish I… to hell with it. But you really ought to take advantage. You won’t have forever. Mom will have her way.”

“Sure,” Tim said. Why the hell did Pat have to bring that up? His mother would, before the night was over. Timmy, why aren’t you married yet?

One day I’ll answer, Tim told himself. One day I’ll say it. “Because every time I find a girl I think I could live with, you scare her spitless and she runs away, that’s why.”

“I’m still hungry,” Penelope Joyce announced.

“Good Lord.” Jill patted her stomach. “Where do you put it? I want your secret. Only don’t tell me it’s your clothes. Greg says we can’t afford your creations.”

Penelope took Tim’s hand. “Come on, show me where the popcorn is. I’ll shake. You get the bowls.”

“But—”

“They’ll find their own drinks.” She led him to the kitchen. “Let them talk about you while you’re out here. They’ll admire you even more. After all, you’re the star tonight.”

“Think so?” He looked into her eyes. “I can never tell when you’re putting me on.”

“There’s luck. Where’s the butter?”

The show was great. Tim knew that when he saw his family watching it, watching him on television.

Randall had gone all over the world, showing amateur astronomers staring at the sky. “Most comets are discovered by amateurs,” Randall said. “The public rarely appreciates how much these skywatchers aid the big observatories. Of course, some amateurs aren’t amateur at all.” The scene cut to Tim Hamner showing off his mountain observatory, and his assistant, Marty, demonstrating equipment. Tim had thought the sequence would be too short, but when he watched his family watching him and it ended with them eager for more he realized that Harv Randall had been right. Always leave them wanting a little more…

“And,” Randall’s voice said, “some are more amateur than others.” The camera zoomed in on a smiling teen-age boy with a telescope. The instrument looked competent, but it was obviously home-built. “Gavin Brown, of Centerville, Iowa. Gavin, how did you happen to be looking for comets at the right time and place?”

“I wasn’t.” Brown’s voice was not pleasant. He was young, and shy, and he talked too loud. “I made some adjustments to the setting circles because I wanted to look at Mercury in the daytime, only you have to have everything adjusted right to find Mercury because it’s so close to the Sun, and—”

“So you found Hamner-Brown by accident,” Harvey Randall said.

Greg McCleve laughed. Jill gave her husband a sharp look.

“Tell me, Gavin,” Randall said. “Since you didn’t see the comet until well after Mr. Hamner did, but you reported it almost at the same instant — how did you know it was a new comet?”

“It was something that didn’t belong there.”

“You mean you know everything that does belong there?” Randall said. The screen showed a photograph of the sky around Hamner-Brown. It was full of stars.

“Sure. Doesn’t everybody?”

“He does, too,” Tim said. “He stayed here a week, and I swear, he can draw star maps from memory.”

“He stayed here?” Tim’s mother asked.

“Sure. In the spare room.”

“Oh.” Tim’s mother stared very hard at the set.

“Where’s George tonight?” Jill asked. “Another date? Mother, did you know that Tim’s houseboy has been dating Linda Gillray?”

“Pass the popcorn,” Penelope Joyce said. “Where is Brown now, Tim?”

“Back in Iowa.”

“Those commercials sell much soap?” Greg asked. He pointed at the set.

“Kalva does all right,” Tim said. “Twenty-six point four percent of the market last year—”

“Jeez, they must be better than I thought,” Greg said. “Who’s your advertising man?”

Then the program was on again. There wasn’t much more about Tim Hamner. Once discovered, Hamner-Brown Comet was the world’s. Now the star was Charles Sharps, who talked about comets and the importance of knowing the Sun and planets and stars. Tim wasn’t disappointed, but he thought the others were. Except for Pat, who watched Sharps and kept nodding. Once, Pat looked up and said, “If I’d had a science professor like him in my freshman year, I might have discovered a comet myself. Do you know him very well?”

“Sharps? Never met him. But I’ve got more of him on the video recordings,” Tim said. “There’s more of me, too.”

Greg pointedly glanced at his watch. “Got to be in the office at five A.M.,” he said. “The market’s going crazy. And after that show, it will be worse.”

“Huh?” Tim frowned. “Why?”

“Comets,” Greg said. “Signs in the sky. Portents of evil change. You’d be surprised how many investors take things like that seriously. Not to mention that diagram the professor drew. The one that showed the comet hitting Earth.”

“But it didn’t,” Pat protested.

’Tim! Could it?” his mother demanded.

“Of course not! Didn’t you listen? Sharps said it was billions to one,” Tim said.

“I saw it,” Greg said. “And he said comets did hit the Earth, sometimes. And this one will be close.”

“But he didn’t mean it that way,” Tim protested.

Greg shrugged. “I know the market. I’m going to be in the office when the big board opens—”

The phone rang. Tim looked puzzled. Before he could get up, Jill answered it. She listened for a moment, then looked puzzled as well. “It’s your answering service. They want to know whether they should put through a call from New York.”

“Eh?” Tim got up to take the phone. He listened. On me TV a NASA official was explaining how they might, just might, be able to get up a probe to study the comet. Tim put the phone down.

“You look dazed,” Penelope Joyce said.

“I am dazed. That was one of the producers. They want me to be a guest on the ‘Tonight Show.’ With Dr. Sharps, Pat, so I’ll meet him after all.”

“I watch Johnny every night,” Tim’s mother said. She said it admiringly. People who got on the “Tonight Show” were important.

Randall’s documentary ended in a blaze of glory, with photographs of the Sun and stars taken by Skylab, and a strong plea for a manned probe to explore Hamner-Brown Comet. Then came the last commercial, and Tim’s audience was leaving. Tim realized, not for the first time, just how far apart they’d grown. He really didn’t have much to say to the head of a stockbroker firm, or to a man who built town houses, even if they were his brother-in-law and his brother. He found himself mixing drinks for himself and Penelope (Joyce!) alone.

“It felt like opening night in a bad play,” Tim said.

“In Boston with an allegory and the Shriners are in town,” Joyce teased.

He laughed. “Hah. Haven’t seen Light Up the Sky since… by golly, since you were in that summer drama thing. And you’re right. That’s what it was like.”

`’Poo.”

“Poo?”

“Poo. You always did think like that, and there never was any reason to, and there isn’t one now. You can be proud Tim. What’s next? Another comet?”

“No, I don’t think so.” He squeezed lime into her gin and tonic and handed it to her. “I don’t know. I’m not strong enough on theory to do what I really want.”

“So learn the theory.”

“Maybe.” He came around and sat next to her. “But anyway, I made the history books. Skoal.”

She lifted her drink in salute. She wasn’t mocking him. “Skoal.”

He sipped at his drink. “I’ll follow it as far as it goes, whatever else I do. Randall wants another documentary, and we’ll do it, if the ratings aren’t too bad.”

“Ratings? You worry about ratings?”

“You’re teasing me again.”

“Not this time.”

“Hmm. All right. I’ll back another documentary. Because I want it. We’ll go heavy on the space probe. With enough publicity we might get the probe up, and somebody like Sharps really will understand comets. Thanks.”

She put a hand on his arm. “You’re welcome. Run with it, Tim. Nobody else here tonight has done half of what they want to do. You’ve already got three-quarters, and a shot at the rest.”

He looked at her and thought, If I married her, Mom would heave a great sigh of relief. She was in that limited class of women. They all seemed to know his sister Jill; they’d gone east to college, and to New York during vacations; they’d broken the same rules; they were not afraid of their mothers; they were beautiful and frightening. The sex urge in a teen-age boy was too powerful, too easily twisted and repressed. It made the beauty of a young woman into a flame, and when that flame was coupled to total self-confidence… a girl like any of Jill’s friends could be a fearsome thing, to a boy who had never believed in himself.

Joyce wasn’t fearsome. She wasn’t pretty enough.

She frowned. “What are you thinking?”

God, no! He couldn’t answer that one! “I was remembering a lot.” Had he been deliberately left alone with Joyce? Certainly she had stayed after the others had left. If he made a pass now…

But he didn’t have the courage. Or, he told himself, the kindness. She was elegant, yes, but you don’t go to bed with a Steuben crystal vase. He got up and went to the video recorder. “Want to watch some of the other clips?”

For a moment she hesitated. She looked at him carefully, then just as carefully drained her glass and set it on the coffee table. “Thanks, Tim, but I’d better get some sleep. There’s a buyer coming in tomorrow.”

She was still smiling when she left. Tim thought it a bit forced. Or, he wondered, am I just flattering myself?

The maelstrom was intolerably crowded. Masses of all sizes whirled past each other, warping space into a complex topology that changed endlessly. The inner moons and planets were all scar tissue, worn craters beneath the atmospheres of Earth and Venus, naked ring walls and frozen lakes of magma spread across the faces of Mars, Mercury, Earth’s Moon.

Here was even the chance of escape. The gravity fields around Saturn and Jupiter could fling a comet hack out into the cold and the dark. But Saturn and Jupiter were wrongly placed, and the comet continued to fall, accelerating, boiling.

Boiling! Pockets of volatile chemicals burst and spurted away in puffs of dust and ice crystals. Now the comet moved in a cloud of glowing fog that might have shielded it from the heat, but didn’t. Instead the fog caught the sunlight across thousands of cubic miles and reflected it back to the comet head from every direction.

Heat at the surface of the nucleus seeped inward. More pockets of gas ruptured and fired like attitude jets on a spacecraft, tossing the comet head this way and that. Masses tugged at it as it passed. Lost and blind and falling. The dying comet dropped past Mars, invisible within a cloud of dust and ice crystals the size of Mars itself.

A telescope on Earth found it as a blurred point near Neptune.

March: Interludes

Fred Lauren made delicate adjustments to the telescope. It was a big instrument, a four-inch refractor on a heavy tripod. The apartment cost him too much money, but he had to have it for the location. His only furniture was a cheap couch, a few cushions on the floor, and the big telescope.

Fred watched a darkened window a quarter-mile away. She had to come home soon. She always did. What could she be doing? She’d left alone. No one had come for her. The thought frightened him, then made him sick. Suppose she had met a man somewhere? Had they gone for dinner, and then to his apartment? Even now he might be putting his filthy hands on her breasts. He would have hairy hands, rough, like a mechanic’s, and they would be sliding downward, caressingly down across the flat curve of her belly.

No! She wasn’t that kind. She wouldn’t let anyone do that to her. She wouldn’t.

But all women did. Even his mother. Fred Lauren shuddered. Unwanted, the memory came back, when he was just nine, when he’d gone in to ask his mother to say his prayers, and she’d been lying on the bed with the man he called Uncle Jack on top of her. She was moaning and writhing, and Uncle Jack had leaped from the bed.

“You little bastard, I’ll cut your goddamn balls off! You want to watch? You’ll sure to God watch? Stand there and if you say one word, I’ll cut your prick off!”

He’d watched. And his mother had let that man—

The window came alight. She was home! Fred held his breath. Was she alone? Was she?

She was carrying a big bag of groceries, which she took to the kitchen. Now she’ll have her drink, Fred thought. I wish she wouldn’t drink so much. She looks tired. He watched as the girl mixed a martini. She carried the pitcher with her to the kitchen. Fred didn’t follow with the telescope, although he could have. Instead he teased himself, waiting.

Her face was triangular, with high cheekbones and a small mouth and big dark eyes. Her long, flowing blond hair was tinted; her pubic hair was very dark. Fred had forgiven her that small deception, but he’d been shocked.

She came back with the pitcher and a glass spoon. There was a silver-handled martini spoon in the gift shop down the street, and Fred had often stared at it, trying to get up the nerve to buy it for her. Maybe she’d invite him to her apartment. Only she wouldn’t until he’d given her gifts, and he couldn’t do that because he knew what she liked and she’d want to know how he knew that. Fred Lauren reached out to touch her through the magic mirror of his telescope… but only in his mind, only in his hopeless yearning.

Now. Now she’d do it. She didn’t have many dresses good enough to wear to work. She worked in a bank, and although the banks let the girls wear trousers and all the ugly things girls were wearing lately, she didn’t. Not Colleen. He knew her name. He wanted to keep his money in her bank, but he didn’t dare. She dressed well to win promotions, and she’d been promoted to New Accounts, and Fred couldn’t talk to her there. He was proud of her promotion, but he wished she’d stayed a teller, because then he could come in and go to her window and…

She took off the blue frock and carefully hung it in the only closet. Her apartment was very small, only one room with a bathroom and kitchen alcove. She slept on the couch.

Her slip was frayed. He’d watched her mending the straps at night. Under the slip she wore lacy black underpants. He could see the color through the slip. Sometimes she wore pink ones with black stripes.

Soon she’d be taking her bath. Colleen took long baths; Fred could be knocking at her door before she finished. She’d open the door. She trusted people. Once she’d opened the door wearing nothing but a towel, and the man outside had been a telephone man, and another time it was the building superintendent, and Fred knew he could imitate the super’s voice. He’d followed the super to a bar and listened to him. She would open the door…

But he couldn’t do it. He knew what he’d do if she opened her door to him. He knew what would happen afterward. This would be his third time. Third sex offense. They’d lock him up with those men, those animals. Fred remembered what the caged men had called him and how they had used him; he whimpered, throttling the sound as if she might hear.

She put on her robe. Her dinner was in the oven, and she sat in the robe and turned on the TV set. Fred scurried across the room to turn on his own set and tune it to the same channel, then moved quickly back to the telescope. Now he could watch over her shoulder, watch her own TV, and hear the sound, and it was as if Fred and his girl were watching TV together.

It was a program about a comet.

The stocky man’s hands were large and smooth, slender, stronger than they looked. They moved over Maureen, knowingly, cunningly. “Purr,” said Maureen. She pulled him suddenly against her, and arched sideways, wrapping him in her long legs.

He gently pushed her away and continued to stroke her, playing her like… the attitude jets on a Lunar Lander. The bizarre image stuck in her mind, jarring. His lips moved against her breast, his tongue darting. Then it was time, and she could lose herself in him. She had no thought of technique now. But he had; he was always in control. He wouldn’t be finished until she was, and she could depend on it, and now there was no time for thought, only the waves of shuddering feeling.

She came home from a long way away.

They lay together, breathing each other’s breath. Finally he stirred against her. She caught a handful of curly hair and tilted his face up. Standing, he was just her height; astronauts are generally short. Lying above her, his head reached her throat. She lifted herself to kiss him, and sighed contentment.

But now her mind was turned on again. I wish I loved him, she said to herself. Why don’t I? Because he’s too invulnerable? “Johnny? Does your mind ever turn off?”

He thought it through before answering. “There’s a story they tell about John Glenn…” He rolled onto an elbow. “The space medicine boys were trying to find out what we could go through and still function. They had John Glenn wired with widgets so they could watch his heartbeat and perspiration while he went through a program on the Gemini flight simulator. Right in the middle of it they dropped a shitload of scrap iron onto a tilted iron plate, right behind him. The whole room rang with it, and it went on and on. Glenn’s heartbeat went blip!” Johnny’s finger sketched a tepee shape. “He never even twitched. He went through the whole sequence, and then he said, ‘You sons of bitches…’ ”

He watched her laugh, and then he said a bit sadly, “We can’t get distracted.” He sat up. “If we’re going to watch your program we ought to be getting up.”

“Yes. I suppose. You first.”

“Right.” He bent to kiss her again, then left the bed. She heard the shower running and thought of joining him. But he wouldn’t be interested now. She’d said the wrong thing, and now he’d be remembering his ruined career; ruined not by any mistake of his, but by America’s retreat from space.

She found his robe where he’d left it for her. Forethought. We can’t get distracted. One thing at a time, and do that perfectly. Whether it was crawling along a ruined Skylab and repairing it in orbit, or conducting a love affair, he did it right. And he was never in a hurry.

When they met, Baker had been in the Astronaut Office in Houston and was assigned as liaison to Senator Jellison and party. Johnny Baker had a wife and two teen-age kids, and had been a perfect gentleman, taking Maureen to dinner when the Senator was called away, keeping her company for the week the Senator was in Washington, taking her to the launch in Florida…

A perfect gentleman up to the time they’d had to go back to her motel room for her purse — and she still wasn’t sure who had seduced whom. She didn’t sleep with married men. She didn’t like sleeping with men she didn’t love, for that matter. But, love aside, he had something, and Maureen had no defense against it. He had a single goal and the ability to go after it no matter what.

And she was young and had been married once and had taken no vow of chastity and the hell with what you’re thinking, girl! Maureen rolled off the bed fast and switched on the TV with a vicious click. Just to break the chain of thought.

But I am not a tramp.

His divorce is final next week, and I had nothing to do with that. Ann never knew. Ann doesn’t know now. But maybe he wouldn’t have let her go? If that’s my fault, all right, but Ann never knew. We’re still good friends.

“He’s not the same anymore,” Ann had told her. “Not since he flew the mission. Before that it was always tough here, he was on training missions all the time, and I had only a little part of him — but I had something. And then he got his chance, and everything worked fine, and my husband’s a hero — and I don’t have a husband anymore.”

Ann couldn’t understand it. I can, Maureen thought. It wasn’t flying the mission, it was that there aren’t any more missions, and if you’re Johnny Baker and all your life you’ve worked and trained to do one thing, and nobody’s ever going to do that again…

One goal in life. Tim Hamner had a touch of that. Johnny had it, and maybe she had tried to borrow a piece of it. And now look: Johnny had used up his one goal, and the most important thing in Maureen Jellison’s life was a fight with a silly Washington hostess.

It still bothered her every time she thought of it.

Annabelle Cole was liberated. Six months ago it had been the threatened extinction of the snail skimmer; in six months more it might be the decline of artistic tradition among Australian blackfellahs. At the moment there was nothing for it but to blame men for everything bad that had ever happened. Nobody really minded. They didn’t dare. No mean amount of the world’s business was conducted at Annabelle’s parties.

Maureen must have been edgy the night Annabelle braced her for her father’s support. Annabelle wanted Congress to fund studies on artificial wombs, to free women from months of slavery to their suddenly altered bodies.

And I told her, Maureen thought. I told her that having babies was part of the sex act, and if she was willing to give up being pregnant she could give up fucking too. I said that! And I never had a baby in my life!

Dad might miss some important contacts through his daughter’s exercise in tact, but Maureen could handle that. In six months, when Annabelle found a new cause, Maureen would host a party and invite someone Annabelle had to meet. She had it all worked out. That was the problem: As if a fight with Annabelle Cole was the most important event in her life!

“I’ll fix some drinks,” Johnny called. “Best get your shower, the program’s on in a minute.”

“Yo,” she answered, and she thought: Him? Marry the man. Promote him a new career. Get him to run for office, or write his memoirs. He’d be good at anything he tried… but why couldn’t she find goals of her own?

The room was definitely a man’s room, with books, and models of the fighter planes Johnny Baker had flown, and a Skylab, with broken wings; and a large framed picture of a bulky-suited man crawling in space along one of those wings, a faceless, alien shape, disconnected from the spacecraft, risking the loneliest death ever if he let go for even an instant. The NASA medal hung below the picture.

Mementos of times past. But only the past. There were no pictures of the Shuttle, delayed once more; no reminders of the Pentagon, Johnny’s present assignment. Two pictures of the children, one with Ann in the background, short, browned, competent Ann, who already had a look of puzzled unhappiness in the photo.

His hand was wrapped around the glass, but he had forgotten glass and hand. Maureen could watch his face without his knowing it. Johnny Baker saw only the screen.

Parabolic orbits diagrammed against the concentric circular paths of the planets. Old photos of Halley’s Comet and Brooks’s Comet and Cunningham’s Comet and others, culminating in a blurred pinpoint that was Hamner-Brown. A man with large insectile glasses lectured with fierce intensity:

“Oh, we’ll get hit someday. It probably won’t be an asteroid, either. The orbits are too nearly fixed. There must have been asteroids whose orbits intersected Earth’s, but those have had four billion years to hit us, and most of them eventually did,” said the lecturer. “They hit so long ago that even the craters are gone, weathered away, except for the biggest and the newest. But look at the Moon!

“The comets are different.”

The lecturer’s pointer traced a parabola drawn in chalk. “Some mass way out there beyond Pluto, maybe an undiscovered planet… we even have a name for it. Persephone.

Some mass disturbs the orbits of these great snowballs, and they come down on our heads in a wake of boiling chemicals. None of them have ever had a chance to hit the Earth until they get thrown down into the inner system. One day we’ll be hit. We’d have about a year’s warning. Maybe more, if we can learn enough about Hamner-Brown.”

Then an antiseptic young woman proclaimed that she wasn’t married to her house, and was told that was why Kalva Soap had invented a new disinfectant for her toilet bowl… and Johnny Baker came smiling back into the world. “He really makes his points, doesn’t he?”

“It is well done. Did I tell you I met the man who put it together? I met Tim Hamner, too. At the same party with Harvey Randall. Hamner’s a case. Manic. He’d just discovered his comet, and he couldn’t wait to tell everyone.”

Johnny Baker sipped his drink. Then, after a long pause, he said, “Some funny rumors in the Pentagon.”

“Oh?”

“Gus called. From Downey. Seems Rockwell’s refurbishing an Apollo. And there’s some mutters about diverting one of the Titan boosters from a Big Bird to something else. Know anything?”

She sipped her drink and felt a wave of sadness. Now she knew why Johnny Baker had called yesterday. After six weeks in the Pentagon, six weeks in Washington with no attempt to see her, and then…

And I was going to surprise him. Some surprise.

“Dad’s trying to get Congress to fund a comet-study mission,” Maureen said.

“This for real?” Johnny demanded.

“It’s for real.”

“But…” His hands were shaking. His hands never shook. John Baker had flown fighters over Hanoi, and his maneuvers were always perfect. The MIGs never had a chance. And once he’d taken splinters out of his crew chief when there wasn’t time to get the medics. There was a splinter in the chief’s chest and Baker had removed it and sliced deftly to expose the artery, clamped it together with steady fingers while the chief screamed and the Cong mortars thudded onto the field, and his hands had never shaken.

But they were shaking now. “Congress won’t put up the money.”

“They might. The Russians are planning a mission. Can’t let them outdo us,” Maureen said. “Peace depends on showing them we’re still willing to compete if that’s the way they want it. And if we compete, we win.”

“I don’t care if it’s Martians we’re competing with. I’ve got to go. I’ve got to.” He drained his scotch His hands were suddenly steady.

Maureen watched in fascination. He’s stopped shaking because he’s got a mission. And I know what it is. Me. To get me to get him on that ship. A minute ago he might really have been in love with me. Not now.

“I’m sorry,” he said abruptly. “We don’t have all that much time together, and I’m laying this on you. But… you had me dead to rights. My mind doesn’t turn off.” He drank deeply of his ice-diluted scotch. His attention went back to the screen, and left Maureen wondering if she’d been imagining things. Just how clever was John Baker?

The commercial mercifully ended and the cameras zoomed in on the Jet Propulsion Laboratories.

Harry Newcombe hastily chewed the last of his sandwich while he drove the mail truck with one hand. The regulations gave him time off for lunch, but Harry never took it. He used the time for better purposes.

It was long past noon when he got to Silver Valley Ranch. As usual he stopped at the gate. There was a spot where he could look through a pass in the foothills to the majesty of the High Sierra to the east. Snow gleamed off their tops. To the west were more foothills, the sun not too far above them. Finally he got out to open the gate, drove through, and carefully closed the gate behind him. He ignored the large mailbox on its post beside the gate.

He stopped along the drive to pick a pomegranate from the grove that had started as one tree and was still, untended, propagating itself downhill toward the stream. Harry had seen it grow in the half-year he’d been on the route, and was guessing when the pomegranates would roll all the way downhill into the cocklebur patch. Would they choke out the burrs? He had no idea, really. Harry was a city boy.

Harry was an ex-city boy. Hah! And if he never saw a city again he’d be happy.

He was grinning as he shouldered his load and walked lopsided to the door. Rang. Set the bag down.

The dimly heard hurricane of a vacuum cleaner calmed. Mrs. Cox opened the door and smiled at the bulging bag beside Harry. “That day again? Hello, Harry.”

“Hi. Happy Trash Day, Mrs. Cox!”

“And a Happy Trash Day to you too, Harry. Coffee?”

“Don’t stay me. It’s against guv’mint regulations.”

“Fresh coffee. And new-baked rolls.”

“Well… I can’t resist that.” He reached into the smaller pouch that still hung at his side. “Letter from your sister in Idaho. And something from the Senator.” He handed her the letters, then shouldered the bag and wobbled in. “Anyplace special?”

“The dining table’s big enough.”

Harry spilled the contents of the larger bag across a polished table of lovely grain. It seemed to have been carved out of a slice of a single tree, and must have been fifty years old. They didn’t make tables like that anymore. If there was furniture like that in the caretaker’s home, what must it be like in the big house up the hill?

The wood grain was hidden under a deluge: begging letters from charities, from several political parties, from colleges. Offers to join lotteries by buying records, clothing, books, subscriptions to magazines. “YOU MAY ALREADY HAVE WON $100 A WEEK FOR LIFE!” Religious tracts. Political lessons. Single-tax literature. Free samples of soap, mouthwash, detergent, deodorant.

Alice Cox brought in the coffee. She was only eleven, but she was already beautiful. Long blonde hair. Blue eyes. A trusting girl, as Harry knew from seeing her when he was off duty. But she could be trusting here; nobody was going to bother her. Most of the men in Silver Valley kept rifles slung on racks in their pickups, and they damned well knew what to do with anybody who’d bother an eleven-year-old girl.

It was one of the things Harry liked about the valley. Not the threat of violence, because Harry hated violence; but that it was only a threat. The rifles came off their racks only for deer (in season or out, if the ranchers were hungry or the deer got into the crops).

Mrs. Cox brought in rolls. Half the people on Harry’s route offered him coffee and eats, on days when he ignored regulations and brought the mail up to their houses. Mrs. Cox didn’t make the best coffee on the route, but the cup was definitely the finest in the valley: thin bone china, much too good for a half-hippie mailman. The first time Harry had been to the house he’d drunk water from a tin cup and stood at the door. Now he sat at the fine table and drank coffee from bone china Another reason to stay out of cities.

He sipped hurriedly. There was another blonde girl, this one over eighteen and legal, and it would be Trash Day for her house, too. She’d be home. Donna Adams was always home for Harry. “Lot here for the Senator,” Harry said.

“Yes. He’s back in Washington,” Mrs. Cox answered.

“But he’s coming soon,” Alice piped.

“Wish he’d hurry,” Mrs. Cox said. “It’s nice here when the Senator’s in residence. People coming and going. Important people. The President stayed at the big house one night. Secret Service made a big fuss. Men wandering all over the ranch.” She laughed, and Alice giggled. Harry looked puzzled. “As if anybody in this valley would harm the President of the United States,” Mrs. Cox said.

“I still think your Senator Jellison’s a myth,” Harry said. “I’ve been on this route eight months, and I haven’t seen him yet.”

Mrs. Cox looked him up and down. He seemed a nice enough boy, although Mrs. Adams said her daughter paid him entirely too much attention. Harry’s long, flowing, curly brown hair would have looked good on a girl. His beard was beautiful. The real masterpiece was the mustache. It came to long points which, on formal occasions, Harry could curl and wax into circles like small spectacles.

He can grow hair, Mrs. Cox thought, but he’s little and skinny, not as big as I am. She wondered again what Donna Adams saw in him. Car, maybe. Harry had a sports car, and all the local boys drove pickups like their fathers.

“You’ll likely meet the Senator soon enough,” Mrs. Cox said. It was a sign of ultimate approval, although Harry didn’t know that. Mrs. Cox was very careful about who the Senator met.

Alice had been sifting through the mound of multicolored paper on the table. “Lot of it this time. How much is this?”

“Two weeks,” Harry said.

“Well, we do thank you, Harry,” Mrs. Cox said.

“So do I,” Alice added. “If you didn’t bring it up to the house, I’d have to carry all of it.”

Back in the truck, and down the long drive, with another stop to look at the High Sierra. Then on to the next ranch, a good half-mile away. The Senator kept a big spread, although a lot of it was dry pasture, shot through with ground-squirrel holes. It was good land, but there wasn’t enough water to irrigate it.

At the next gate George Christopher was doing something incomprehensible in the orange groves. Probably setting up to smudge, Harry decided. Christopher came plodding up as Harry opened the gate. He was a bull of a man, Harry’s height and two or three times Harry’s width, with a thick neck. His head was bald and tanned, but Christopher couldn’t be a lot over thirty. He wore a checkered flannel shirt and dark trousers, muddy boots.

Harry set the bag down and got out beside it. Christopher frowned. “Trash Day again, Harry?” He studied the long hair and extravagantly trimmed beard and the frown deepened.

Harry grinned in return. “Yup, Happy Trash Day, every two weeks, like clockwork. I’ll take it up to the house for you.”

“You don’t have to.”

“I like to.” There wasn’t a Mrs. Christopher, but George had a sister about Alice Cox’s age, and she liked to talk to Harry. A very bright little girl, pleasant to talk to and full of news about Harry’s valley.

“All right. Mind the dog.”

“Sure will.” Harry never worried about dogs.

“Ever wonder what the advertising industry would give for your head?” Christopher asked.

“I’ll trade ’em question for question,” Harry said. “Why does the government give them a lower rate so they can waste more of our time? And your taxes?”

Christopher’s frown faded and he almost smiled. “Have at ’em, Harry. Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for. And the taxpayer’s cause is about as lost as they come. I’ll close the gate behind you.”

Day’s end. Clockout time. Harry went into the sorting rooms behind the Post Office. There was a note pinned to his station.

“Hairy the Wolf wants to see you. Gina XXX”

Gina — tall, black, erect of posture and large of bone, the only black in the valley as far as Harry knew — was at the counter. Harry winked at her, then knocked at the supervisor’s door.

When he entered, Mr. Wolfe regarded him coldly. “Harry. Happy Trash Day,” Wolfe said.

Oops! But Harry smiled. “Thank you, and a Happy Trash Day to you, sir.”

“Not funny, Harry. Why do you do it? Why do you separate out the commercial mail and reserve it for one day every two weeks?”

Harry shrugged. He could have explained: Sorting junk mail took so much of his time that he didn’t have a chance to chat with his customers, so he’d started letting it pile up. It had begun that way, but it had become popular with his people. “Everybody’s happy with it,” Harry said defensively. “People can go through the stuff or just drop it in the fireplace.”

“It is illegal to withhold a citizen’s mail,” Wolfe said.

“If someone has complained, I’ll take him off the list,” Harry said. “I like to keep my customers happy.”

“Mrs. Adams,” Wolfe said.

“Oh.” Too bad. Without Trash Day he wouldn’t have an excuse to go up to the Adams house and talk to Donna.

“You will deliver the commercial mail according to regulations,” Wolfe was saying. “As it comes in. Not in batches Trash Day will cease.”

“Yes, sir. Any other way I can be obliging?”

“Shave your beard. Cut your hair.”

Harry shook his head. That part of the regulations he knew.

Wolfe sighed. “Harry, you just don’t have the right attitude to be a mailman.”

Eileen Susan Hancock’s office was small and cramped, but it was an office; she had worked for years to get an office of her own, away from the area behind the counter. It proved that she was more than a secretary.

She was poking at the buttons on her calculator, frowning, when a sudden thought made her burst into rippling laughter. A moment later she realized that Joe Corrigan was standing in her doorway.

Corrigan came into the office. He had unbuttoned the top button of his trousers again, and it showed. His wife wouldn’t let him buy larger sizes. She hadn’t given up hope that he would reduce. He put his thumbs into the waistband and regarded her quizzically.

Eileen’s laughter cut off. She went back to the calculator, and now she wasn’t even smiling.

“Okay,” Corrigan said. “What’s the punch line?”

Eileen looked up with wide eyes. “What? Oh, no. I couldn’t possibly tell you.”

“If you drive me nuts, you think you can gain control of the company, right? Because it won’t work. I’ve covered that.” Corrigan liked to see her like this. Eileen was all-or-nothing: very serious and hard at work, or enjoying herself to the full. “Okay,” Corrigan sighed. “I’ll give away my secret for yours. I’ve had the decorators in. You see, Robin Geston signed up for the Marina deal.”

“Oh? That’s good.”

“Yup. Means we’ll need more help. As of the first, you’re Assistant General Manager, if you want the job.”

“Oh, I want it. Thank you.” She smiled flickeringly (like a flashbulb, on and off almost before you saw it) and turned back to the desk calculator.

“I knew you would. That’s why I had the decorators in. They’re turning that room next to mine into a new office for you. I’ve told them to consult you after they do the preliminaries.” Corrigan lowered his weight onto the corner of her desk. “There. I was keeping it for a surprise. Now what’s your secret?”

“I’ve forgotten,” Eileen said. “And I do have to get these estimates done so you can take them to Bakersfield with you.”

“Okay,” Corrigan said. He went back to his office, defeated.

If he knew, Eileen thought. She had an urge to giggle, but she held it back. She wasn’t really trying to tease Corrigan. She had been thinking: Well, I did it. And Robin was nice. Not the world’s greatest lover, but he didn’t pretend to be either. The way he’d suggested a rematch: “Lovers need practice,” he’d said. “The second time is always better than the first.”

They’d left it vague. Maybe, just maybe, she’d take him up on it sometime; but probably not. He’d also told her definitely that he was married; she’d only suspected it before.

Never had there been any suggestion that business had anything to do with their private lives. But he’d signed up with Corrigan’s Plumbing Supplies for a very large deal — and she felt funny about that, and wondered if she’d have been as careless about finding out Robin’s marital status if the deal hadn’t been pending. But he’d signed up.

So here she was, adding up numbers, pushing papers around, and suddenly she’d asked herself: What does this have to do with plumbing? I don’t make pipe. I don’t lay pipe. I don’t ream it out, or tell people where to put it. What I do is push paper around.

It was an important job. Measure it by the chaos she could create with one random mistake or one malicious error: Thousands of tons of supplies might be sent to the ends of the Earth by a slip of her pen. But what she did had no more to do with creation, with making the things that held a civilization together, than income tax, or being the fireman on a diesel train.

Mr. Corrigan would probably spend the whole day wondering why she’d suddenly burst into sparkling laughter, and there was no way she could tell him. It had just come to her, unexpected and irresistible: What she had done with Robin Geston on the night before last was the closest she had ever come to any activity actually connected with plumbing.

The car wouldn’t be reported stolen for hours. Alim Nassor was pretty sure of that, sure enough that he would sit in it for another ten minutes. Alim Nassor had been a great man. When he had made himself great again, he would have to hide what he was doing now.

Before he was great he had been George Washington Carver Davis. His mother had been proud of that name. She’d said the family was named for Jefferson Davis. That honky had been a tough dude, but it was a loser’s name, no power in it. He’d had a lot of street names since. His mother hadn’t liked those. When she threw him out he took his own.

Alim Nassor meant wise conqueror in both Arabic and Swahili. Not many knew what it meant, and so what? The name had power. Alim Nassor had a hell of a lot more power than George Washington Carver ever did. You could read about Alim Nassor in the newspapers. And he could still walk into City Hall and get in to see people. He’d been able to do that ever since he broke up a riot with his switchblade and the razor blades in his shoes and the chain he carried around his waist. There was all that Federal money around for a tough dude. The honkies shoveled out money. Anything for quiet in the black ghetto. It had been a damn good game, and too bad it was over.

He cursed quietly. Mayor Bentley Allen. Los Angeles had itself another black mayor and this goddam Tom had cut off the pipeline. New people in city council. And that stupid son of a bitch of a black congressman who couldn’t be satisfied with the take, no, that asshole had to put all his relatives on the community payroll and the fucking TV reporters found out. A black man in politics needed a snow-white rep these days…

Well, the game was over, and he’d started another. Eleven jobs, each one worked fine. They’d taken… what? A quarter of a million dollars in loot in four years? Less than a hundred thousand after the fences went through it. Twenty thousand each for four men in four years. That wasn’t even wages! Easy to say, now, that some of it should have been stashed for lawyers’ fees, but at five thousand a year?

This would be the thirteenth. It wouldn’t be long now. The store did a lot of business. Alim waited, always aware of the time. Two customers left, and nobody was coming down the street.

He wasn’t happy about this job. He didn’t like ripping off blood. Honkies were fair game, but you ought to leave brothers alone. He’d hammered that into his followers’ heads, and what were they thinking of him now? But he was boxed in, he had to act fast.

The place was ripe, and he’d been saving it for an emergency, and this was one shitpot motherfucker of an emergency. His honky lawyer would probably beat this for him, but lawyers and bondsmen wanted bread, and now. It was crazy, robbing a store to pay a lawyer to get him off for robbing a store, Someday things would be different. Alim Nassor would make them different.

Almost time. Two minutes ago one of his brothers had got himself stopped for a traffic violation fourteen blocks away and that took one pigmobile off patrol. Twenty minutes ago another brother had a “family argument” and the sister called the station house, and there went the other fuzzwagon. There’d be only the two. Black areas didn’t get patrolled the way honky business districts did. Blacks didn’t have big insurance policies, or know how to kiss ass down at City Hall.

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.”

March: Two

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.”

The studio audience applauded. They hadn’t been cued by the production assistants, but they applauded. Johnny gave Sharps an approving smile and decided how the program would go for the rest of the night. But first there was a frantic signal: time for a Kalva Soap commercial.

There was more after the commercial. When Sharps got going he was really dynamic. His thin, bony hands waved around like windmills. He talked about windmills, too, and about how much power the Sun put out every day. About the solar flare Skylab’s crew had observed. “Johnny, there was enough power in that one little flare to run our whole civilization for hundreds of years! And those idiots talk about doom!”

But they were neglecting Tim Hamner, and Johnny had to bring him into the conversation. Hamner was sitting there nodding, obviously enjoying Sharps. Johnny carefully maneuvered the scientist back onto the comet, then saw his chance. “Charlie, you said the Russians would get a close look at Hamner-Brown. How close?”

“Pretty close. We’ll definitely pass through the tail of the comet. I showed you why we can’t tell how close the head will come — but it’s going to be very close. If we’re lucky, maybe as close as the Moon.”

“I wouldn’t call that luck,” Mary Jane said.

“Tim, it’s your comet,” Johnny said. “Could Hammer-Brown actually hit us?”

“That’s Hamner-Brown,” Tim said.

“Oh.” Johnny laughed. “What did I say? Hammer? It would be a hammer if it hit, wouldn’t it?”

“You know it,” Charlie Sharps said.

“Just what would it do?” Johnny asked.

“Well, we’ve got some pretty big holes left from meteor strikes,” Tim said. “Meteor Crater in Arizona is nearly a mile wide. Vreedevort in South Africa is so big you can’t see it except from the air.”

“And those were the little ones,” Sharps said. They all turned to look at him. Sharps grinned. “Ever notice how circular Hudson’s Bay looks? Or the Sea of Japan?”

“Were those meteors?” Johnny asked. The thought was horrifying.

“A lot of us think so. And something pretty big cracked the Moon wide open — a quarter of its surface is covered by that so-called ocean, which was once a sea of lava welling up from where a big asteroid hit.”

“Of course, we don’t know what Hamner-Brown is made of,” Tim said.

“Maybe it’s time we found these things out,” Mary Jane said. “Before one of them does hit us. Like this one.”

“It’s only a matter of time,” Sharps said. “Give it long enough and the probability of a comet hitting us approaches certainty. But I don’t think we have to worry about HamnerBrown.”

Henry Armitage was a TV preacher. He’d been a radio preacher until one of his converts left him ten million dollars; now he had his own slick-paper magazine, TV shows in a hundred cities, and an elaborate complex of buildings in Pasadena, complete with editorial staff.

For all that, Henry wrote much of the magazine himself, and he always did the editorials. There were too few hours in the day for Henry. He gloried in the troubles of the world. He knew what they meant. They were the signs of a greater joy to come.

For the disciples had asked the Master, “ ‘Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?’

“And Jesus answered and said unto them, ‘Take heed that no man shall deceive you. For many shall come in my name saying “I am Christ”; and shall deceive many.’ ” Henry had seen the entry on the Inyo County, California, police blotter: “Charles Manson, also known as Jesus Christ, God.”

“And you shall hear of wars and rumours of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places.”

Matthew was Henry’s favorite Gospel; and of all the Bible, that was his favorite text. Were these not the times Christ spoke of? The signs were all present in the world.

He sat at his expensive desk. The TV was concealed behind a panel that opened when Henry touched a button. It was a long way from the wood-frame, whitewashed one-room church in Idaho where Henry had started in the Thirties. The ostentatious wealth sometimes disturbed Henry, but his supporters insisted on it, even if Henry and his wife would have been as happy in plainer surroundings.

Henry toyed with his editorial, but he didn’t feel inspired. As a lesson in humility he had the TV turned to an interview show; the lesson was to watch that shallow frivolity without hating those who took part in it; and that was hard, hard…

Something caught his attention. A thin tall man in a herringbone sport jacket, arms waving about. Henry admired his technique. The man would make an impressive preacher. He focused all attention on himself, and his words washed across the listener.

The man was talking about a comet. A comet. A sign in the heavens? Henry knew what comets were, but because comets were natural did not mean that their timing was not miraculous. Henry had seen many healed by prayer and the doctors later “explain” the miracle.

A comet. And it would pass very close to Earth. Could this be the final sign of all? He drew a yellow lined tablet toward him and began writing in sloppy block print, using a dozen pencils. He was through three sheets before he knew his headline, and he turned back to the first page.

In two weeks his magazine would be in half a million homes around the world; and across the cover in blazing red twenty point type would be his headline:

It would make a good text for his TV shows, too. Henry began writing frantically, feeling the way he had felt nearly forty years before, when he’d really begun to understand Matthew 24 and had carried the message to a world that didn’t care.

The Hammer of God was coming to punish the decadent and the willful. Henry wrote eagerly.

April: One

Tim Hamner arrived in a taxi just as Harvey’s TravelAII reached JPL. As Tim handed the driver a twenty and waved him away, Harvey swore; then he put on his best face as Tim came over to join him.

Hamner looked sheepish. “Look, Harvey, I said I wouldn’t interfere — and I won’t. But I met Sharps on that interview show.”

“Yeah, I saw that,” Harvey said. “Sharps was great.”

“He sure was,” Hamner said. “I want to meet him again. I called JPL and they said you were coming here for an interview. Harvey, I want to come along.”

Inwardly Harvey felt anger, but it was a reasonable request from a sponsor. “Sure.”

Charlene, the PR lady, was waiting, and she didn’t make any fuss about Tim Hamner’s unexpected appearance with the crew. Sharps’s office hadn’t changed. There were different books scattered across the expensive desk, and instead of an IBM print-out there was a large diagram. The cast changes, Harvey thought, but the play’s the same.

“What ho,” Sharps said. He lifted a brow at Hamner. “Sponsor coming along to check on you? Harvey, I hope this won’t take long. I’m due in the labs shortly.”

Harvey waved to the crew. Charlie was already setting up, and Mark moved around with the light meter. Mark had become pretty good at this job, and he’d stayed around longer then Harvey could remember him keeping a job before. If he left, Harvey would miss him.

“We’re interested in the probe,” Harvey said. “Does it look as if it will really go?”

Sharps smiled broadly. “Looks good, looks good. Thanks to Senator Arthur Jellison. Remember our conversation about that?”

“Right.”

“Well, he’s the man. I’d appreciate any good publicity you can give him.”

Harvey nodded. He signaled to the crew. “Let’s run it.”

“Speed,” Manuel said. Charlie was behind the camera. Mark stepped out with the board. “Sharps interview, take one.” Clack.

“Dr. Sharps,” Harvey said, “there’s been some criticism of the proposed Apollo mission to study the comet. It’s said it will be too dangerous.”

Sharps made a gesture of dismissal. “Dangerous? We’ve done it all before. A tried-and-true booster and a proven capsule. Not so many months of planning as NASA likes, but ask the men who’ll fly it. Ask the astronauts if they think it’s too dangerous.”

“Has the crew been chosen yet?”

“No — but there are forty volunteers!” Sharps grinned at the camera.

Harvey went on with his questions. They talked about the instruments the Apollo would carry. Many of them were being put together at JPL, and at Cal Tech. “Students and technicians working overtime without pay,” Sharps said. “Just to help out.”

“Without pay?” Harvey asked.

“Right. They get their regular work done, the things we have contracts for, and then put in overtime on comet packages. Without pay.”

That ought to go well, Harvey thought. He made a note to interview some of the technicians. Maybe he could find a janitor who worked overtime to help.

“It sounds like you can’t carry enough gear,” Harvey said.

“Well, we really can’t,” Sharps agreed. “Not all we’d like to carry. But what’s enough? We can take up enough to learn a lot.”

“Right. Dr. Sharps, I understand you’ve done a new plot of Hamner-Brown’s orbit. And you’ve got new photos of it.”

“Hale Observatories has the photos. We did the orbit. We’re safe in saying it will be a big comet. It’s got the largest coma ever recorded for this distance from the Sun. That means there’s a lot of ice left in the snowball. And it’s going to come quite close. First it will pass at a reasonable distance, and we’ll see a spectacular tail. Then it goes inside the orbit of Venus and most of it will vanish, although some of the tail may be visible for a while. Naked-eye visible, I might add. After that it will be too close to the Sun for us to see from here, but of course the Apollo crew will be able to get good observations from space. We won’t see it again until it gets very near Earth on its way back out. By then the sky should be filled with the tail. I’m willing to bet that tail will be visible in daytime.”

Mark Czescu whistled. Manuel didn’t glitch so Harvey knew it hadn’t got onto the tape. Harvey felt like whistling himself.

The office door opened. In came a short, rounded, vague man, about thirty years old. He had a trimmed dark beard and thick glasses. He wore a green Pendleton wool shirt, and both pockets bristled with pens and pencils of every imaginable color and nib. A pocket computer hung at his belt. “Oh — sorry, I thought you were alone.” His voice was apologetic. He began to back out.

“No, no, stay and hear this,” Sharps said. “Let me introduce Dr. Dan Forrester. His job title is computer programmer. His degrees say Ph.D. in astronomy; around here we usually call him our sane genius.”

Mark was muttering behind Harvey. “If they call him a genius in this outfit…”

Harvey nodded. He’d thought of that too.

“Dan’s been doing more recasts of Hamner-Brown’s orbit. He’s also working on the optimum launch date for our Apollo, given the limited amount of equipment we can take, and the limited amount of consumables—”

“Consumables?” Harvey asked.

“Food. Water. Air. They take mass. We can only put up so much mass, and so we trade consumables for instruments. But consumables mean time in orbit. So Dan’s working on the problem: Is it better to launch earlier, with less equipment, so they can stay longer but get less information—”

“Not information,” Forrester said. His voice was apologetic. “Sorry to interrupt—”

“No, tell us what you mean,” Harvey said.

“We’re trying to maximize information,” Forester said. “So the problem is, do we get more information by having more data about a shorter time, or less data about a longer time.”

“Oh.” Harvey nodded. “So what have you got on Hamner-Brown? How far away at its closest point?”

“Zero,” Forrester said. He didn’t crack a smile.

“Uh — you mean it’s coming down our throats?”

“I doubt it.” Now he smiled. “Zero within the limits of prediction. Which is a good half-million miles error.”

Harvey relaxed. So, he noticed, did everyone in the room, including Charlene. They took Forrester seriously here. He turned to Sharps. “Tell us, what would happen if the comet did hit us? Suppose we got unlucky.”

“You mean the head? The nucleus? Because it looks as if we might actually pass through the outer coma. Which is nothing more than gas.”

“No, I mean the head. What happens? The end of the world?”

“Oh, no. Nothing like that. Probably the end of civilization.”

There was silence in the room for a moment. Then for another. “But,” Harvey said, his voice puzzled, “Dr. Sharps, you told me that a comet, even the head, is largely foamy ice with rocks in it. And even the ice is frozen gases. That doesn’t sound dangerous.” In fact, Harvey thought, I asked to get it on the record.

“Several heads,” Dan Forrester said. “At least it looks that way. I think it’s beginning to calve already. And if it does it now, it will do it later. Probably. Maybe.”

“So it’s even less dangerous,” Harvey said.

Sharps wasn’t listening to Harvey. He rolled his eyes toward the ceiling. “Calving already?”

Forrester’s grin widened. “Ook ook.”

Then he noticed Harvey Randall again. “You asked about danger,” he said. “Let’s look at it. We have several masses, largely the same material that boils off to form the coma and the tail: fine dust, foamy frozen gases, with pockets where the really volatile stuff has been long gone, and maybe a few rocks embedded in there. Hey — ” Randall looked up at Forrester.

Forrester was grinning his cherubic smile. “That’s probably why it’s so bright already. Some of the gases are interacting. Think what we’ll see when they really get to boiling near the Sun! Ook ook.”

Sharps was getting that thoughtful, lost look again. Harvey said quickly, “Dr. Sharps—”

“Oh. Yes, certainly. What happens if it hits? Which it won’t.

Well, what makes the nucleus dangerous is that it’s big, and it’s coming fast. Enormous energies.”

“Because of the rocks?” Harvey asked. Rocks he could understand. “How big are those rocks?”

“Not very,” Forrester said. “But that’s theory—”

“Right.” Sharps was aware of the camera again. “That’s why we need the probe. We don’t know. But I’d guess the rocks are small, from the size of a baseball to the size of a small hill.”

Harvey felt relief. That couldn’t be dangerous. A small hill?

“But of course that doesn’t matter,” Sharps said. “They’ll be embedded in the frozen gases and water ice. It would all hit as several solid masses. Not as a lot of little chunks.”

Harvey paused to think that over. This film would take careful editing. “It still doesn’t sound dangerous. Even nickel-iron meteors usually burn out long before they hit the ground. In fact, in all history there’s only been one recorded case of anyone being harmed by a meteor.”

“Sure, that lady in Alabama,” Forrester said. “It got her picture in Life. Wow, that was the biggest bruise I ever saw. Wasn’t there a lawsuit? Her landlady said it was her meteor because it ended up in her basement.”

Harvey said, “Look. Hamner-Brown will hit atmosphere a lot harder than any normal meteorite, and it’s mostly ice. The masses will burn faster, won’t they?”

He saw two shaking heads: a thin face wearing insectile glasses, and a thick bushy beard above thick glasses. And over against the wall Mark was shaking his head too. Sharps said, “They’d bore through quicker. When the mass is above a certain size, it stops being important whether Earth has an atmosphere or not.”

“Except to us,” Forrester said, deadpan.

Sharps paused a second, then laughed. Politely, Harvey thought, but it was done carefully. Sharps took pains to avoid offending Forrester. “What we need is a good analogy. Um…” Sharps’s brow furrowed.

“Hot fudge sundae,” said Forrester.

“Hah?”

Forrester’s grin was wide through his beard. “A cubic mile of hot fudge sundae. Cometary speeds.”

Sharps’s eyes lit up. “I like it! Let’s hit Earth with a cubic mile of hot fudge sundae.”

Lord God, they’ve gone bonkers, Harvey thought. The two men raced each other to the blackboard. Sharps began to draw. “Okay. Hot fudge sundae. Let’s see: We’ll put the vanilla ice cream in the center with a layer of fudge over it…”

He ignored the strangled sound behind him. Tim Hamner hadn’t said a word during the whole interview. Now he was doubled over, holding himself, trying to hold in the laughter. He looked up, choked, got his face straight, said, “I can’t stand it!” and brayed like a jackass. “My comet! A cubic mile of hot… fudge… sun… dae…”

“With the fudge as the outer shell,” Forrester amplified, “so the fudge will heat up when the Hammer rounds the Sun.”

“That’s Hamner-Brown,” Tim said, straight-faced.

“No, my child, that’s a cubic mile of hot fudge sundae. And the ice cream will still be frozen inside the shell,” said Sharps.

Harvey said, “But you forgot the—”

“We put the cherry at one pole and say that pole was in shadow at perihelion.” Sharps sketched to show that when the comet rounded the Sun, the cherry at the oblate spheroid’s axis would be on the side away from Sol. “We don’t want it scorched. And we’ll put crushed nuts all through it, to represent rocks. Say a two-hundred-foot cherry?”

“Carried by the Royal Canadian Air Force,” Mark said.

“Stan Freberg! Right!” Forrester whooped. “Shhhh… plop! Let’s see you do that on television!”

“And now, as the comet rounds the Sun, trailing a luminous froth of fake whipped cream, and aims itself down our throats… Dan, what’s the density of vanilla ice cream?”

Forrester shrugged. “It floats. Say two-thirds.”

“Right. Point six six six it is.” Sharps seized a pocket calculator from the desk and punched frantically. “I love these things. Used to use slide rules. Never could figure out where the decimal point went.

“A cubic mile to play with. Five thousand two hundred and eighty feet, times twelve for inches, times two point five four for centimeters, cube that… We have two point seven seven six times ten to the fifteenth cubic centimeters of vanilla ice cream. It would take a while to eat it all. Times the density, and lo, we have about two times ten to the fifteenth grams. Couple of billion tons. Now for the fudge…” Sharps punched away.

Happy as a clam, Harvey thought. A very voluble clam equipped with Texas Instruments’ latest pocket marvel.

“What do you like for the density of hot fudge?” Sharps asked.

“Call it point nine,” Forrester said.

“Haven’t any of you made fudge?” Charlene demanded. “It doesn’t float. You test it by dripping it into a cup of cold water. Or at least my mother did.”

“Say one point two, then,” Forrester said.

“Another billion and a half tons of hot fudge,” Sharps said. Behind him Hamner made more strangled noises.

“I think we can ignore the rocks,” Sharps said. “Do you see why, now?”

“Lord God, yes,” Harvey said. He looked at the camera with a start. “Uh, yes, Dr. Sharps, it certainly makes sense to ignore the rocks.”

“You’re not going to show this, are you?” Tim Hamner sounded indignant.

“You’re saying no?” Harvey asked.

“No… no…” Hamner doubled over and giggled.

’Now, she’s coming at cometary speeds. Fast. Let’s see, parabolic speed at Earth orbit is what, Dan?”

“Twenty-nine point seven kilometers per second. Times square root of two.”

“Forty-two kilometers a second,” Sharps announced. “And we’ve got Earth’s orbital velocity to add. Depends on the geometry of the strike. Shall we say fifty kilometers a second as a reasonable closing velocity?”

“Sounds good,” Forrester said. “Meteors go from twenty to maybe seventy. It’s reasonable.”

“Right. Call it fifty. Square that, times a half. Times mass in grams. Bit over two times ten to the twenty-eight ergs. That’s for the vanilla ice cream. Now we can figure that most of the hot fudge boiled away, but understand, Harvey, at those speeds we’re just not in the atmosphere very long. If we come in straight it’s two seconds flat! Anyway, whatever mass you burn up, a lot of the energy just gets transferred to the earth’s heat balance. That’s a spectacular explosion all by itself. We’ll figure twenty percent of the hot-fudge energy transfers to Earth, and” — more buttons pressed, and dramatic rise in voice — “our grand total is two point seven times ten to the twenty-eighth ergs. Okay, that’s your strike.”

“Doesn’t mean much to me,” Harvey said. “It sounds like a big number…”

“One followed by twenty-eight zeros,” Mark muttered.

“Six hundred and forty thousand megatons, near enough,” Dan Forrester said gently. “It is a big number.”

“Good God, pasteurized planet,” Mark said.

“Not quite.” Forrester had his own calculator out of the belt case. “About three thousand Krakatoas. Or three hundred Thera explosions, if they’re right about Thera.”

“Thera?” Harvey asked.

“Volcano in the Mediterranean,” Mark said. “Bronze Age. Where the Atlantis legend comes from.”

“Your friend’s right,” Sharps said. “I’m not sure about the energy, though. Look at it this way. All of mankind uses about ten to the twenty-ninth ergs in a year. That’s everything: electric power, coal, nuclear energy, burning buffalo chips, cars — you name it. So our hot fudge sundae pops in with about thirty percent of the world’s annual energy budget.”

“Um. Not so bad, then,” Harvey said.

“Not so bad. Not so bad as what? A year’s energy in one minute,” Sharps said. “It probably hits water. If it hits land, it’s tough for anyone under it, but most of the energy radiates back out to space fairly quickly. But if it hits water, it vaporizes it. Let’s see, ergs to calories… damn. I don’t have that on my gadget.”

“I do,” Forrester said. “The strike would vaporize about sixty million cubic kilometers of water. Or fifty billion acrefeet, if you like that. Enough to cover the entire U.S.A. with two hundred and twelve feet of water.”

“All right,” Sharps said. “So sixty million cubic kilometers of water go into the atmosphere. Harvey, it’s going to rain. A lot of that water is moving across polar areas. It freezes, falls as snow. Glaciers form fast… slide south… yeah. Harvey, the historians believe the Thera explosion changed the world’s climate. We know that Tamboura, about as powerful as Krakatoa, caused what historians of the last century called ‘the year without a summer’. Famine. Crop failure. Our hot fudge sundae will probably trigger an ice age. All those clouds. Clouds reflect heat. Less sunlight gets to Earth. Snow reflects heat too. Still less sunlight. It gets colder. More snow falls. Glaciers move south because they don’t melt as fast. Positive feedback.”

It had all turned dead serious. Harvey asked, “But what stops ice ages?”

Forrester and Sharps shrugged in unison.

“So,” Hamner said, “my comet’s going to bring about an ice age?” Now you could see the long lugubrious face of his grandfather, who could look bereaved at a $60,000 funeral.

Forrester said, “No, that was hot fudge sundae we were talking about. Um — the Hammer is bigger.”

“Hamner-Brown. How much bigger?”

Forrester made an uncertain gesture. “Ten times?”

“Yes,” said Harvey. There were pictures in his mind. Glaciers marched south across fields and forests, across vegetation already killed by snow. Down across North America into California, across Europe to the Alps and Pyrenees. Winter after winter, each colder, each colder than the Great Freeze of ’76–’77. And hell, they hadn’t even mentioned the tidal waves. “But a comet won’t be as dense as a cubic mile of h-h-h—”

It was just one of those things. Harvey leaned back in his chair and belly-laughed, because there was just no way he could say it.

Later he made his own tape, alone, in a studio approximation of an office — fake books on the shelves, worn carpet on the floor. Here he could talk.

“Sorry about that.” (This would run just after one of Harvey’s breakups. He’d done that several times in the Sharps interview.) “The points to remember are these. First, the odds against any solid part of Hamner-Brown hitting us are literally astronomical. Over these distances even the Devil himself couldn’t hit a target as small as Earth. Second, if it did hit, it would probably be as several large masses. Some of those would hit ocean. Others would hit land, where the damage would be local. But if Hamner-Brown did strike the Earth, it would he as if the Devil had struck with an enormous hammer, repeatedly.”

April: Interludes

Leonilla Malik scribbled a prescription and handed it to her patient. He was the last for the morning, and when the man had left her examining room, Leonilla took the bottle of Grand Marnier from her lower desk drawer and poured a small, precious glass. The expensive liqueur was a present from one of her fellow kosmonauts, and drinking it gave her a delicious feeling of decadence. Her friend also brought her silk hose and a slip from Paris.

And I’ve never been outside Russia, she thought. She let the sweet fluid roll over her tongue. No matter how I try, they will never let me go.

She wondered what her status was. Her father had been a physician with a fairly good reputation among the Kremlin elite. Then had come the “Doctors’ Plot,” an insane Stalinist delusion that the Kremlin physicians were trying to poison The Revolutionary Leader of Our Times, Hero of the People, Teacher and Inspired Leader of the World Proletariat, Comrade Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. Her father and forty other doctors had vanished into the Lubianka.

One of her father’s legacies was a 1950 copy of Pravda. He had carefully underlined every mention of Stalin’s name: ninety-one times on the front page alone, ten times as Great Leader, and six as Great Stalin.

He should have poisoned the bastard, Leonilla thought. It wasn’t a pleasant concept; there was a long tradition about that. The Oath of Hippocrates wasn’t taught in Soviet medical schools, but she had read it.

As the daughter of an enemy of the people, Leonilla’s future hadn’t seemed very bright; but then had come a new era, and Dr. Malik was rehabilitated. By way of reparations, Leonilla had been rescued from secretarial work in an obscure Ukrainian town and sent to the university. A liaison with an Air Force colonel had resulted in her learning to fly, and from that, weirdly, to her ambiguous status in the kosmonaut corps. The colonel was now a general and long since married, but he continued to help her.

She had never been in space. She had been trained for it, but she had never been chosen. Instead, she treated flyers and their dependents, and got in flying time when she could, and hoped for a lucky break.

There was a tap at the door. Sergeant Breslov, a young man of no more than nineteen years, proud to be a sergeant in the Red Army; only, of course, it wasn’t the Red Army anymore and hadn’t been since Stalin had been forced to rename it during what he had to call The Great Patriotic War. Breslov would have preferred the Red Army. He often talked of carrying freedom across the world on the point of his bayonet.

“There is a long message for you, Comrade Captain. You have been transferred to Baikunyar.” He frowned at the bottle which Leonilla had forgotten to put away.

“Back to work,” Leonilla said. “That is worth celebration. Will you join me?” She poured a glass for Breslov.

He drank standing at stiff attention. It was one way of showing disapproval of officers who drank before lunch. Of course, many of them did, which to Breslov was another indication of how things had gone downhill since the Red Army days his father boasted of.

In three hours she was flying toward the spaceport. She could hardly believe it: urgency orders, authorizing her to fly a jet trainer, her belongings to be sent after her. What could be so important? She pushed the question from her mind and reveled in the joy of flying. Alone, in the clear skies, no one looking over her shoulder, no other pilots eager for their chance at the stick: ecstasy. Only one thing could be better.

Could that be why they’d sent for her? She knew of no space missions. But perhaps. I’ve been lucky for a long time. Why not more luck? She imagined being in a real Soyuz waiting for the big boosters to roar and fling the spacecraft up into clean space, and for the hell of it she flipped the jet trainer into a series of aerobatics that would have got her grounded if anyone had been watching.

A sudden gust across the San Joaquin Valley shook the trailer slightly, bringing Barry Price to instant wakefulness. He lay still, listening for the reassuring sound of the bulldozers, his crews were still at work on the nuclear power plant. There was light outside. He sat up carefully to avoid waking Dolores, but she stirred and opened one eye. “What time is it?” she asked, her voice heavy with sleep.

“About six.”

“Oh, my God. Come back to bed.” She reached for him. The covers fell away, revealing her tanned breasts.

He moved away, avoiding her, then caught her hands in one of his and held them while he bent to kiss her. “Woman, you’re insatiable.”

“I haven’t had any complaints yet. Are you really getting up?”

“Yes. I’ve got engineering work to do, and we’ve got visitors later, and I’ve got to read that memo McCleve sent over yesterday. Should have got to it last night.”

She grinned muzzily. “Bet what we did was more fun. Sure you won’t come back to bed?”

“No.” He went to the sink and ran water until it was hot.

“You wake up faster than any man I’ve ever known,” Dolores said. “I’m not getting up at the crack of dawn.” She pulled the pillow over her head, but she continued to move slightly under the covers, letting him know she was awake.

Still available, Barry thought. Yo ho! Then why am I putting on my pants?

When he was dressed he pretended to think she was asleep and quickly left the trailer. Outside he stretched in the morning sunshine, breathing deeply. His trailer was at the edge of the camp that housed much of the San Joaquin Nuclear Project work force. Dolores had one far away, but she didn’t use it often these days. Barry walked toward the plant with a grin that faded as he thought about Dolores.

She was wonderful. And what they did in their copious free time hadn’t affected their work at all. She was more administrative assistant than secretary, and he knew damned well he couldn’t get along without her; she was at least as important to his work as the operations manager, and that terrified Barry Price. He kept waiting for the possessiveness, the not unreasonable demands for his time and attention that had made life with Grace so unpleasant. He couldn’t believe that Dolores would remain satisfied simply to be his… what? he wondered. Mistress wasn’t right. He didn’t support her. The idea was funny: Dolores wasn’t about to let any man have that kind of control over her fife. Make it lover, he thought. And enjoy it and be glad.

He stopped to get coffee from the big urn at the construction supervisor’s shack. They always had excellent coffee. He carried a cup up to his office and took out McCleve’s memo.

A minute later he was screaming in anger.

He hadn’t calmed down when Dolores arrived about eight-thirty. She came in with more coffee to find him pacing the office. “What’s the matter?” she asked.

Another thing I love about her, Barry thought. She never demands anything personal at the office. “This.” He lifted the memo. “Do you know what those idiots want?”

“Obviously not.”

“They want me to hide the plant! They want us to bulldoze up a fifty-foot earth embankment around the whole complex!”

“Would that make the plant safer?” Dolores asked.

“No! Cosmetics, that’s all. Not even cosmetics. Dammit, San Joaquin is pretty. It’s a beautiful plant. We should be proud of it, not try to hide it behind a lot of dirt.”

She put the coffee down and smiled uncertainly. “You have to do it?”

“I hope not, but McCleve says the Commissioners like the idea. So does the Mayor. I’ll probably have to, and dammit, it messes hell out of the schedule! We’ll have to pull men off the excavations for Number Four, and—”

“And meanwhile, your PTA ladies are due in fifteen minutes.”

“Lord God. Thanks, Dee. I’ll compose myself.”

“Yes, you’d better do that. You sound like a bear. Be nice, these ladies are on our side.”

“I’m glad somebody is.” Barry went back to his desk and his coffee and looked at the piles of work he still had to do, and hoped the ladies wouldn’t take long. Maybe he’d get a chance to call the Mayor, and just maybe the Mayor would be reasonable, and then he could get to work again…

The plant yard buzzed with activity. Bulldozers, forklifts, concrete trucks moved in an intricate, seemingly random pattern. Workmen carried materials for concrete forms. Barry Price led the group through this maelstrom almost without noticing it.

The ladies had seen the PR films, and they’d dressed sensibly in slacks and low shoes. They hadn’t made any fuss about wearing the hard hats Dolores got for them. So far they hadn’t had many questions, either.

Barry took them to the site of Number Three. It was a maze of steel girders and plywood forms, the dome-shaped containment only partially finished; it would be a good place to show them the safety features. Barry hoped they’d listen. Dolores said they’d seemed very reasonable to her, and he was hopeful, but past experience kept him on his guard. They reached a quieter area where there weren’t any construction workers at the moment; there was still noise from the bulldozers and the carpenters putting up forms, boilermakers welding pipes…

“I know we’re taking a lot of your time,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “But we do think it’s important. A lot of parents ask about the plant. The school’s only a few miles away…”

Barry smiled agreement and tried to show her that it was all right, that he knew their visit was important. His heart wasn’t in it. He was still thinking about McCleve’s memo.

“Do all those people really work for you?” one of the other ladies asked.

“Well, they’re employed by Bechtel,” Barry said. “Bechtel Engineering builds the plants. The Department of Water and Power can’t keep all those construction crews on permanent payroll.”

Mrs. Gunderson wasn’t interested in administrative details. She reminded Barry of himself: She wanted to get to the point, and quickly. An ample woman, well dressed. Her husband owned a big farm somewhere nearby. “You were going to show us the safety equipment,” she said.

“Right.” Barry pointed to the rising dome. “First there’s the containment itself. Several feet of concrete. So that if anything does happen inside, the problem stays inside. But this is what I wanted you to see.” He indicated a large pipe that ran into the uncompleted dome “That’s our primary cooling line,” he said. “Stainless steel. Two feet in diameter. The wall thickness of this pipe is one inch. There’s a cut piece over there and I’ll bet you can’t pick it up.”

Mrs. Gunderson went over to try. She hefted at the four foot piece of pipe but was unable to move it.

“Now, for us to lose coolant, that would have to break completely,” Barry said. “I’m not sure how that could happen, but suppose it did. Inside the containment the men are putting in the emergency cooling tanks now. Yes, those big things. If the water pressure from the primary cooling lines ever falls, those dump water at high pressure directly into the reactor core.”

He led them through the structure, making them look at everything. He showed them the pumps which would keep the reactor vessel filled with water, and the 30,000-gallon tank that would contain makeup water for the turbines. “All of that is available for emergency cooling,” Barry said.

“How much does it take?” Mrs. Gunderson asked.

“One hundred gallons a minute. About what six garden hoses can put out.”

“That doesn’t seem like very much. And it’s all you need?”

“All we need. Believe me, Mrs. Gunderson, there’s nobody more concerned about your children’s safety than we are. Most of these so-called accidents we prepare for have never happened. We have people whose job it is to think up strange accidents, silly things that we’re sure will never happen, just so that we can prepare for them.” He let them wander through, knowing they’d be impressed by the massive size of everything. So was he. He loved these power plants; he’d spent most of his life preparing for this job.

Finally they had seen everything, and he led them back to the visitors’ center, where the PR people could take over. Hope I did it right, he thought. They can help us a lot, if they want to. They can hurt us, too…

“One thing still concerns me,” Mrs. Gunderson said. “Sabotage. I know you’ve done all you can to prevent accidents, but suppose somebody deliberately tried to… to make it blow up. After all, you won’t have that many guards here, and there are a lot of crazy people in this world.”

“Yeah. Well, we’ve thought of ways people can try,” Barry said. He smiled. “You’ll excuse me if I don’t tell you about them.”

They smiled back, uncertainly. Finally Mrs. Gunderson said, “Then you’re satisfied that some bunch of nuts can’t harm the plant?”

Barry shook his head. “No, ma’am. We’re satisfied that they can’t harm you by anything they can do to us. But nobody can protect the plant itself. Look at the turbines. They turn thirty-six hundred revolutions a minute. Those blades are spinning so fast that if drops of water got in the steam lines, the turbines would break apart. The switchyard is vulnerable to any idiot with dynamite. No, we can’t stop them from wrecking the plant, but then we can’t stop them from setting fire to the oil tanks at a fossil plant. What we can do is see that nobody outside the power plant site gets hurt.”

“And your own people?”

Barry shrugged. “You know, nobody thinks it’s remarkable that police and firemen are dedicated to their work,” he said. “They don’t hear so much about power workers. They’d think different if they ever saw one of our apprentices standing up to his waist in oil to turn a valve, or a lineman up on a pole in the middle of an electrical storm. We’ll be on the job, Mrs. Gunderson. If they’ll just let us.”

The wind was warm and the skies clear in the Houston suburb of El Lago. The rainy season had ended, and a hundred families had come out into their backyards. The local Safeway was almost sold out of Coors beer.

Busy, hungry, and happy to be home for a whole weekend, Rick Delanty scooped hamburgers off the grill and slid them between buns. His fenced backyard was warm and smoky and noisy with a dozen friends and their wives. From the distance they could hear the children shouting as they played some new game. Children get used to glory, even if they don’t see it very often, Rick thought. Having Daddy home wasn’t such a big deal to them.

“…nothing new about the idea,” his wife was saying. “Science fiction writers have been talking about big space colonies for decades.” She was tall and very black, and she wore her hair in the tiny braids called corn rolls. Delanty could remember when she straightened her hair.

“For that matter, Heinlein wrote about them,” Gloria Delanty said. She looked to Rick for confirmation, but he was busy at the grill, and remembering his wife when they were both students in Chicago.

“It is new,” said a member of a very exclusive club. Evan had been to the Moon — almost. He’d been the man who stayed in the Apollo capsule. “O’Neill has worked out the economics of building these giant space colonies. He’s proved we can do it, not just tell stories.”

“I like it,” Gloria said. “A family astronaut project. How do we sign up?”

“You already did,” Jane Ritchie said. “When you married the test pilot there.”

“Oh, are we married?” Gloria asked. “I wonder. Evan, can’t you people in the training office ever manage to keep a schedule?”

John Baker came out of the house. “Hey, Rickie! I thought I had the wrong house. There wasn’t any sign of action from out front.”

There was a chorus of greetings, warm from the men who hadn’t seen Colonel John Baker since he went off to Washington, not so warm from the women. Baker had done it: got divorced after his mission. It happened to a lot of the astronauts, and having him back in Houston set the others to wondering.

Baker gave them all a wave, then sniffed. “Do I get one of those?”

“I’ll take your order, sir, but unless there’s a cancellation… ,,

“Why is it you never serve fried chicken?”

“I’m afraid of being stereotyped. Because I’m—

“Black,” Johnny Baker said helpfully.

“Eh?” Rick looked at his hands in apparent dismay. “No, that’s just hamburger grease.”

“So who are they picking for the big comet-watching flight?” Evan demanded.

“Damned if I know,” Baker said. “Nobody in Washington’s talking.”

“Hell, they’re sending me,” Rick Delanty said. “I have it on good authority.”

Baker froze with his beer half opened. Three other men nearby stopped talking, and the wives held their breath.

“I went to a fortune-teller in Texarkana, and she—”

“Jesus, give me her name and address, quick!” said Johnny. The others smiled as if hurt and went back to talking. Johnny whispered, “That was a terrible thing to do,” and giggled.

“Yeah,” Rick said without shame. He began turning the hamburgers with a long-handled spatula. “Why won’t they tell us earlier? They’ve had a dozen of us training for weeks, and still no word. And this’ll be the last flight for anyone until they finish the Shuttle. Six years I’ve been on the list, and never been up. Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it.”

He set the spatula down. “I wonder, and then I remember Deke Slayton.”

Baker nodded. Deke Slayton was one of the original Seven, one of the first astronauts to be chosen, and he never went up until the Apollo-Soyuz handshake in space. Thirteen years before a space mission. He was as good an astronaut as anyone, but he was better in ground jobs. Training, mission control; too good on the ground. “I wonder how he stood it,” Johnny Baker said.

Rick nodded. “Me too. But I am the world’s only black astronaut. I keep thinking that’s got to be worth something.”

Gloria came over to the grill. “Hi, Johnny. What are you two talking about?”

“What,” Jane shouted from near the beer cooler, “do astronauts always talk about when there’s a mission planned?”

“Maybe they’re waiting for the right moment,” Johnny Baker said. “Race riots. Then they can send up a black man to prove we’re all equal.”

“Not funny,” Gloria said.

“But as good a theory as any,” Rick told her. “If I knew how NASA picks one man over another, I’d be on every mission. What the hell brings you back from the five-sided funny farm, anyway?”

“Orders. Start training again. I’m in the pool for Hammerwatch.”

“Hmm.” Rick poked at one of the burgers. Almost done. “And wouldn’t that do it,” he said. “Two in a row. You’d have a first.”

Baker shrugged. “I don’t know how it works either. Never have understood how I got on the Skylab—”

“You’d be a good one,” Rick said. “Experience in space repair work. And this thing’s being cobbled up fast, no time for all the tests. It makes sense.”

Gloria nodded, and so did the others, who weren’t quite listening to them. Then they went back to their conversations. Johnny Baker hid his expression of relief by draining the Coors. If it made sense to them, it probably made sense to the Astronaut Office at Houston. “I do bring some word from Washington, though. Not official, but the straight stuff. The Russians are sending up a woman.”

Odd, how the silence spread in a growing circle.

“Leonilla Malik. An M.D., so we don’t have to take a doc.” Johnny Baker raised his voice for a wider audience. “It’s definite, the Russians are sending her up, and we’ll dock with their Soyuz. My source is confidential, but reliable as hell.”

“Maybe,” said Drew Wellen, and he was the only one talking, “maybe they think they have something to prove.”

“Maybe we do too,” someone said.

Rick felt it like a soft explosion in his belly. Nobody had promised him anything at all, but he knew. He said, “Why is everybody suddenly staring at me?”

“You’re burning the hamburgers,” said Johnny.

Rick looked down at the smoking meat. “Burn, baby. Burn,” he said.

At three in the morning Loretta Randall followed strange sounds into the kitchen.

Yesterday’s newspaper was spread across the middle of the kitchen floor. Her largest rectangular cake pan was in the middle, and was filled with a layer of flour. Flour had sprayed across the newspaper and beyond its edges. Harvey was throwing things into the cake pan. He looked tired, and sad.

Loretta said, “My God, Harvey! What are you doing?”

“Hi. The maid’s coming tomorrow, isn’t she?”

“Yes, of course, it’s Friday, but what will she think?”

“Dr. Sharps says that all craters are circular.” Harvey posed above the cake pan with a lug nut in his fingers; he let it drop. Flour sprayed. “Whatever the velocity or the mass or the angle of flight of a meteor, it leaves a circle. I think he’s right.”

The flour was scattered with shelled peas and bits of gravel. A paperweight had left a dinner-plate-size circle now nearly obliterated by smaller craters. Harvey backed away, crouched, and hurled a bottle cap at a low angle. Flour sprayed across the paper. The new crater was a circle.

Loretta sighed with the knowledge that her husband was mad. “But, Harvey, why this? Do you know what time it is?”

“But if he’s right, then…” Harvey glanced at the globe he had brought from his office. He had outlined circles in Magic Marker the Sea of Japan, the Bay of Bengal, the arc of islands that mark the Indies Sea, a double circle within the Gulf of Mexico. If an asteroid strike had made any one of those, the oceans would have boiled, all life would have been cremated. How often had life begun on Earth, and been scalded from its face, and formed again?

If he could explain succinctly enough, Loretta would lie awake in terror until dawn. “Never mind,” he said. “It’s for the documentary.”

“Come to bed. We’ll clean this up in the morning, before Maria gets here.”

“No, don’t touch it. Don’t let her move it. I want photographs … from a lot of angles…” He leaned groggily against her, their hips bumping as they returned to bed.

April: Two

Tim Hamner was waiting by the TravelAII when Harvey came out of the studio building. Harvey frowned. “Hello, Tim. What are you doing out here?”

“If I go inside, it’s a sponsor calling, and that’s a big deal, right? I don’t want a big deal. I want a favor.”

“Favor?”

“Buy me a drink and I’ll tell you about it.”

Harvey eyed Tim’s expensive suit and tie. Not really appropriate for the Security First. He drove to the Brown Derby. The parking attendant recognized Tim Hamner, and so did the hostess; she led them in immediately.

“Okay, what’s it about?” Harvey asked when they had a booth.

“I liked being out at JPL with you,” Hamner said. “I’ve sort of lost control of my comet. Nothing I can do the experts can’t do better, and the same with the TV series. And it is your series. But…” Tim paused to sip his drink. He wasn’t used to asking for favors, especially from people who worked for him. “Harvey, I’d like to come along on more interviews. Unpaid, of course.”

Oh, shit. What happens if I tell him it can’t be done? Will he talk to his agency? I sure as hell don’t need a test of strength just now. “It’s not always so exciting, you know. Right now we’re doing man-in-the-street interviews.”

“Aren’t those pretty dull?”

“They can be. But sometimes you get pure gold. And it doesn’t hurt to check in with the viewers now and then.” And I work my way, goddammit!

“What are you looking for? Can you use much of it?”

Harvey shrugged. “I won’t throw away good film — but that’s not the point. I want attitudes. I want the unexpected. If I knew what I was after, I could have someone else do it. And…”

“Yeah?” Tim’s eyes narrowed in the dim light. He’d seen a funny expression on Randall’s face.

“Well, there are strange reactions I don’t understand. They started after Johnny called it the Hammer—”

“Damn him!”

“And they’ll probably get stronger after we air the Great Hot Fudge Sundae strike. Tim, it’s almost as if a lot of people wanted the end of the world.”

“But that’s ridiculous.”

“Maybe. But we’re getting it.” Ridiculous to you, Harvey thought. Not so ridiculous to a man trapped in a job he hates, or a woman forced to sleep with a slob of a boss to keep her job… “Look, you’re the sponsor. I can’t stop you, but I insist on making the rules. Also, we start early in the mornings—”

“Yeah.” Tim drained his glass. “I’ll get used to it. They say you can get used to hanging if you hang long enough.”

The TravelAII was crammed full of gear and people. Cameras, tape equipment, a portable field desk for paper work. Mark Czescu had trouble finding a place to sit. Now there were three in back, since Hamner claimed the front seat. Mark was reminded of trips out to the desert with the dedicated bike racers: motorcycles and mechanic’s equipment braced with care, riders shoved in as afterthought. As he waited for the others to come out of the studio building, Mark turned on the radio.

An authoritative voice spoke with the compelling quality of the professional orator. “And this Gospel of the kingdom shall be preached in all the world for a witness unto all nations; and then shall the end come. When ye therefore see the abomination of desolation spoken of by Daniel the prophet stand in the holy place: then let them which be in Judea flee into the mountains.” The voice quality changed, from reader to preacher. “My people, have you not seen what is now done in the churches? Is this not that abomination? ’Whoso readeth, let him understand.’ And the Hammer approaches! It comes to punish the wicked.

“’For then shall be great tribulation, such as was not since the beginning of the world unto this time, no, nor ever shall be. And except those days be shortened, there should be no flesh saved.’”

“Really lays it on,” a voice said behind Mark. Charlie Bascomb got into the TravelAII.

“The Gospel has been brought to you by the Reverend Henry Armitage,” the radio announcer said. “The Voice of God is broadcast in every language throughout the world in obedience to the commandment. Your contributions make these broadcasts possible.”

“Sure hear him a lot nowadays,” Mark said. “He must have a lot of new contributors.”

They drove out into Burbank and parked near the Warner Brothers Studios. It was a good street: lots of shops, from hole-in-the-wall camera stores to expensive restaurants. People flowed along the wide avenue. Starlets and production people from the studios mingled with straight business types from insurance offices. Middle-class housewives parked station wagons and took to the streets. A famous TV personality who lived in nearby Toluca Lake strolled past. Mark recognized the ski-shaped nose.

While the crew set up camera and sound equipment, Harvey took Tim Hamner into a restaurant for coffee. When everything was ready, Mark went inside. As he neared the booth he heard Randall speaking. Harvey’s voice had an edge that Mark recognized.

“…whole purpose is to find out what they think. What I think, I hide in neutral questions and a neutral voice. What you think, you hide in silence. Clear?”

“Absolutely,” Hamner drawled. He looked more awake than he had on the drive out. “So what do I do?”

“You can look useful. You can help Mark with the release forms. And you can stay out of the way.”

“I’ve got a good tape machine,” Hamner said. “I could—”

“We couldn’t use anything you’ve got,” Randall said. “You’re not in the union.” He looked up and saw Mark, got the nod and left.

Mark walked out with Hamner. “He gave me that same routine,” Mark said. “Really ate me out.”

“I believe you. I think if I blew an interview for him he’d abandon me on the spot. And cabs home from here cost a lot.”

“You know,” Mark said, “somehow I got the idea you were the sponsor.”

“Yup. That Harv Randall is one tough mother,” Hamner said. “Have you been in this business very long?”

Mark shook his head. “Just temporary, just working for Harv. Maybe one day I’ll do it permanently, but you know how the TV business is. It’d cut into my freedom.”

There was smog in Burbank. “I see Hertz has reclaimed the mountains,” Hamner said.

Mark looked up in surprise. “How’s that?”

Hamner pointed northward where the San Fernando Valley horizon faded into a brown smear. “Sometimes we keep mountains up there. I even have an observatory on one of them. But I guess Hertz Rent-A-Mountain has taken them back today.” They reached the TravelAII. The cameras were set up, ready to zoom in for close-ups or pan out for a wide view. Harvey Randall had already stopped a muscular man in hard hat and work clothes; he looked out of place among the shoppers and business types.

“…Rich Gollantz. We’re putting up the Avery Building over there.”

Harvey Randall’s voice and manner were intended to get the subjects talking; his questions could be filmed again if they were needed on camera. “Have you heard much about the Hamner-Brown Comet?”

Gollantz laughed. “I don’t spend as much time thinking about comets as you might expect.” Harvey smiled. “But I did see the ‘Tonight Show’ where they said it could hit the Earth.”

“And what did you think about that?” Harvey asked.

“Buncha… crap.” Gollantz eyed the camera. “Same kind of thing peopIe are always saying. Ozone’s gone, we’ll all die. And remember ’sixty-eight, when all the fortune-tellers said California was going to slide off into the sea, and the crazies took to the hills?”

“Yes, but the astronomers say that if the head of the comet hit. it would cause—”

“Ice age,” Gollantz interrupted. “I know about it. I saw that thing in Astronomy magazine.” He grinned and scratched under the yellow metal helmet. “Now that’d really be something. Think about all the new construction projects we’d need. And the Welfare boys could pass out polar bear furs instead of checks. Only, somebody’d have to shoot bears for them. Maybe I could get that job.” Gollantz grinned widely. “Yep, it might be fun. I wouldn’t mind trying life as a mighty hunter.”

Harvey dug for more. The interview wasn’t likely to produce usable film, but that wasn’t its purpose. Harvey was fishing, with the camera as bait. The network didn’t approve of this method of research. Too expensive, too crude, and unreliable, they said. They got that opinion straight from the motivational-research outfits that wanted NBS to hire them.

A few more questions. Science and technology. Gollantz was enjoying being on camera. Had he heard about the Apollo shot to study the comet, and what did he think of that?

“Love it. Be a good show. Lots of good pictures, and it’ll cost me less than I paid for Rose Bowl tickets, I guarantee you that. Hey, I hope they let Johnny Baker go up again.”

“Do you know Colonel Baker?”

“No. Wish I did. Love to meet him. But I saw the pictures of him fixing Skylab. Now that was construction work. And when he got back down, he sure gave those NASA bastards hell, didn’t he? Hey, I got to be moving. We got work to do.” He waved and moved off. Mark chased him with a release form.

“Sir? Moment of your time?”

The young man walked with his head down, lost in thought. He was not bad-looking, but his face was curiously wooden. He showed a flash of anger when Randall interrupted his thoughts. “Yes?”

“We’re talking with people about Hamner-Brown Comet. May I have your name?”

“Fred Lauren.”

“Have you any thoughts on the comet?”

“No.” Almost reluctantly he added, “I watched your program.” Muscles knotted at Fred Lauren’s jaws, in a manner that Harvey recognized. Some men go through life perpetually angry. The muscles that clamp their jaws and grind their teeth are very prominent.

Harvey wondered if he had found a mental patient. Still… “Have you heard there’s a chance the head of the comet might hit the Earth?”

“Hit the Earth?” The man seemed stunned. Abruptly he turned and walked away striding rapidly, much faster than he’d approached.

“What was that all about?” Tim Hamner asked.

“Don’t know,” Harvey said. Man on his way to do murder? The violently insane are constantly released back to the public. Not enough hospitals. Was Lauren one of those, or just a man who’d had a nonfight with his boss? “We’ll never know. If you can’t stand not knowing, you’re in the wrong game.”

Fred had not been watching Randall’s previous program. He had been watching Colleen watch a program about a comet… but some of what he had heard began to surface. The Earth was in the comet’s path. If the comet hit, civilization would end in fire.

The end of the world. I’ll be dead. We’ll all be dead. He gave up all thought of going back to work. There was a magazine stand down the street and he walked rapidly toward it.

There were other interviews. Housewives who’d never heard of the comet. A starlet who recognized Tim Hamner from the “Tonight Show” and wanted to be filmed kissing him. Housewives who knew as much about the comet as Harvey Randall did. A Boy Scout taking a merit badge in astronomy.

There were few trends that Harvey could spot. One wasn’t surprising: There was a lot of space industry in Burbank, and people there overwhelmingly approved of the coming Apollo shot. Still, the near unanimity was unusual, even for this area. People, Harvey suspected, wanted another manned shot and more looks at their heroes, the astronauts, and the comet was a good excuse. There were mutters about costs, but, like Rich Gollantz, most thought they paid more for worse entertainment every month.

They were about to pack it in when Harvey spotted a remarkably pretty girl. Never hurts to have a few feet of beauty, Harvey thought. She seemed preoccupied, and scurried along the sidewalk, her face abstracted with weighty matters and lean with efficiency.

Her smile was sudden and very nice. “I don’t watch much television,” she said. “And I’m afraid I never heard of your comet. Things have been hectic at the office—”

“It will be a very big comet,” Harvey said. “Look for it this summer. There’s also a space mission to study it. Would you approve?”

She didn’t answer immediately. “Will we learn a lot from it?” When Harvey nodded, she said, “Then I’m for it. If it doesn’t cost too much. And if the government can pay for it. Which seems doubtful.”

Harvey said something about the comet study costing less than football tickets.

“Sure. But the government doesn’t have the money. And they won’t cut back on anything. So they’ll have to print the money. Bigger deficit. More inflation. Of course we’ll get more inflation no matter what, so we might as well learn about comets for our money.”

Harvey made encouraging noises. The girl had turned very serious. Her smile faded into a pensive look that turned to anger. “What difference does it make what I think, anyway? Nobody in government listens. Nobody cares. Sure, I hope they do send up an Apollo. At least something happens. It’s not just pushing papers from one basket to another.”

Then that smile was back again, a sunburst on her face. “And why am I telling you about the political sorrows of the world? I’ve got to go.” She scurried off before Harvey could ask her name.

There was a conservatively dressed black man standing patiently, obviously waiting to get on camera. Muslim? Harvey wondered. They dressed that way. But he turned out to be a member of the Mayor’s staff who wanted to tell everyone that the Mayor did care, and if the voters would approve the Mayor’s new smog-control bond issue, people would be able to see the stars from the San Fernando Valley.

“You might be on for all of five seconds. A flash of that lovely smile,” Tim Hamner was saying. “And ‘HamnerBrown? What’s that?’ Then cut to someone who’s sure it’s going to blast Culver City to smithereens.”

She laughed. “All right. I’ll sign your form.”

“Good. Name?”

“Eileen Susan Hancock.”

Hamner wrote it carefully. “Address? Phone number?”

She frowned. She looked at the TravelAll, and all the camera gear. She looked at Hamner’s expensive leisure suit, and the thin Pulsar watch. “I don’t see—”

“We like to check with people before we use them on camera ” Tim said. “Blast. I didn’t mean it that way. I’m not really a professional at this. Just unpaid labor. Also the sponsor. And the man who discovered the comet.”

Eileen made a face: mock astonishment. “How… incestuous!” They both laughed. “How did you get to be all that?”

“Picked the right grandfather. Inherited a lot of money and a company called Kalva Soap. Spent some of the money on an observatory. Found a comet. Got the company to sponsor a documentary on the comet so I could brag about it. See, it all makes perfect sense.”

“Of course, it’s all so simple now that you’ve explained it.”

“Listen, if you don’t want to give me your address—”

“Oh, I do.” She lived in a high-rise in West Los Angeles. She gave him her phone number, too. She shook his hand briskly, and said, “I have to run, but I’m really glad I met you. You’ve made my day.” And she was gone, leaving Hamner with a dazed and happy smile.

“Ragnarok,” the man said. “Armageddon.” His voice was strong, persuasive. He had a great beard, a full black beard with two tufts of pure white at the chin, and mild, kindly eyes. “The prophets of all lands saw this day coming. The Day of Judgment. The war of fire and ice is foretold by the ancients. The Hammer is ice, and it will come in fire.”

“And what do you advise?” Harvey Randall asked.

The man hesitated; he may have feared that Randall was mocking him. “Join a church. Join any church you can believe in. ‘In my father’s house are many mansions.’ The truly religious will not be turned away.”

“What would you do if Hamner-Brown happens to miss?”

“It won’t.”

Harvey turned him over to Mark and the release form, and gave Charlie the signal to pack it in. It had not been a bad day; they had a few minutes he could use, and Harvey had learned something about the mood of his viewers.

Mark came up with the form. “Went well, didn’t it. You will notice that I kept my mouth shut.”

“So you did. Nice going.”

Hamner came grinning at some private pleasure. He stowed his recording equipment in the truck and climbed aboard. “Did I miss anything?”

“Ragnarok is coming. Earth will die in fire and ice. He had the best beard I’ve ever seen. Where the hell were you?”

“Getting a release form,” said Tim. He wore that sappy smile all the way back to the lot.

From the NBS lot Tim Hamner drove to Bullocks. He knew what he was after. From there to a florist, and then to a drugstore. At the drugstore he bought sleeping pills. He was going to be keeping strange hours.

He flopped on the bed, fully dressed. He was deeply asleep when the phone rang around six-thirty. He rolled over and felt around for the receiver. “Hello?”

“Hello, I’d like to speak to Mr. Hamner, please.”

“This is me. Eileen? Sorry, I was asleep. I was going to call you.”

“Well, I beat you to it. Tim, you really know how to get a girl’s attention. The flowers are beautiful, but the vase — I mean, we’d only just met!”

He laughed. “I take it you’re a Steuben crystal fan, then. I’ve got a nice collection myself.”

“Oh?”

“I go ape over the animals.” Tim shifted to a sitting position. “I’ve got… Let’s see, a blue whale, a unicorn, a giraffe I got from my grandmother, it’s in an older style. And the Frog Prince. Have you seen the Frog Prince?”

“I’ve seen pictures of His Majesty. Hey, Tim, let me take you to dinner. There’s an unusual place called Dar Magrib.”

A man would usually pause when Eileen asked him to dinner. With Tim the pause was barely noticeable. “Mr. Hamner accepts, with thanks. Dar Magrib’s unusual, all right. Have you been there?”

“Yes. It’s very good.”

“And you were going to let me go without warning? Without telling me I’d be eating with my fingers?”

Eileen laughed. “Test your flexibility.”

“Uh-huh. Why don’t you come over here for cocktails first? I’ll introduce you to His Majesty and the other crystal” Tim told her how to get there.

Fred Lauren came home with a stack of magazines. He dropped them beside the easy chair, sank into the sagging springs and began reading the National Enquirer.

The article confirmed his worst fears. The comet was certain to hit, and nobody had any idea where. But it was going to hit in summer, and therefore (the sketch made clear) it would hit in the Northern Hemisphere. Nobody knew how massive the comet head would be, but the Enquirer said it might mean the end of the world.

And he had heard that radio preacher, that fool who was on all the stations. The end of the world was coming. His jaw tightened, and he picked up the copy of Astronomy. According to Astronomy it was a hundred thousand to one against any part of the head striking the Earth, but Fred barely noticed that. What drew him were the artist’s conceptions, infinitely vivid, of an asteroid strike sending up jets of molten magma; of an “average” asteroid poised above Los Angeles for comparison; of a comet head striking ocean, the sea bed laid bare.

The pages had grown too dark to see, but Fred didn’t think of turning on the light. Many men never believe they are going to die, but Fred believed, now. He sat in the dark until it occurred to him that Colleen must have come home, and then he went to the telescope.

The girl wasn’t in view, but the lights were on. An empty room. Fred’s eye suddenly painted it with flame. The stucco wall around the window flashed blinding light, which died slowly to reveal curtains flaming, bedclothes, couch, tablecloth and table, everything afire. Windows shattered, splinters flying. Bathroom door — opened.

The girl came out struggling into a robe. She was naked. To Fred she glowed like a saint, with a beauty almost impossible to see directly. An eternity passed before she closed the robe… and in that eternity Fred saw her bathed in the light of Hammerfall. Colleen glowed like a star, eyelids clenched futilely shut, face speckled with glass splinters, robe charring, long blonde hair crisping, blackening, flaming… and she was gone before they had met. Fred turned away from the telescope.

We can’t meet, the voice of reason told him. I know what I’d do. I can’t face prison again.

Prison? When the comet was coming to end the world? Trials took time. He’d never reach prison. He’d be dead first. Fred Lauren smiled very strangely; the muscles at the corners of his jaw were knotted tight. He’d be dead first!

May

The young man walked with a decided limp. He almost tripped on the thick rug in the big office, and Carrie, Senator Jellison’s receptionist, took his arm for a moment. He shrugged her angrily away. “Mr. Colin Saunders,” Carrie announced.

“What can I do for you?” Senator Jellison asked.

“I need a new leg.”

Jellison tried not to look surprised, but he wasn’t successful. And I thought I’d heard ’em all, he thought. “Have a seat.” Jellison glanced at his watch. “It’s after six…”

“I know I’m taking up your valuable time.” Saunders’s voice was belligerent.

“Wasn’t thinking about my time,” Arthur Jellison said. “Being it’s after six, we can have a drink. Want something?”

“Well… yes, please, sir.”

“Fine.” Jellison got up from the ornate wooden desk and went to the ancient cabinet on the wall. The building wasn’t that old, but the cabinets looked as if they might have been used by Daniel Webster, who was reputed not to wait until six. Senator Jellison opened the cabinets to reveal a huge stock of liquor. Nearly every bottle had the same label.

“Old Fedcal?” the visitor asked.

“Sure. Don’t let the labels fool you. That’s Jack Daniels bourbon in the black bottle. The rest of ’em are top brands, too. Why pay brand prices when I can get it from home a lot cheaper? What’ll you have?”

“Scotch.”

“Right here. I’m a bourbon man myself.” Jellison poured two drinks. “Now tell me what this is all about.”

“It’s the VA.” Saunders poured out his story. This would be his fourth artificial leg. The first one the Veterans Administration gave him had fit fine, but it had been stolen, and the next three didn’t fit at all, they hurt, and now the VA wasn’t going to do anything about it.

“Sounds like a problem for your representative,” Jellison said gently.

“I tried to see the Honorable Jim Braden.” The young man’s voice was bitter again. “I couldn’t even get an appointment.”

“Yeah,” Jellison said. “Excuse me a second.” He took a small bound book from a desk drawer. “HAVE AL LOOK INTO PRIMARY OPPOSITION FOR THAT SON OF A BITCH,” he wrote. “THE PARTY DON’T NEED CREEPS LIKE THAT, AND THIS AIN’T THE FIRST TIME.” Then he drew a memo pad toward him. “Better give me the names of the doctors you’ve been dealing with,” he said.

“You mean you’ll really help?”

“I’ll have somebody look into it.” Jellison wrote the details on the memo pad. “Where’d you get hit?”

“Khe Sanh.”

“Medals? It helps to know.”

The visitor shrugged. “Silver Star.”

“And Purple Heart, of course,” Jellison said. “Want another drink?”

The visitor smiled and shook his head. He looked around the big room. The walls were decorated with photographs: Senator Jellison at an Indian reservation; Jellison at the controls of an Air Force bomber; Jellison’s children, and staff, and friends. “I don’t want to take any more of your time. You must be busy.” He got up carefully.

Jellison saw the visitor to the door. Carrie had to unlock it. “That’s the last,” she said.

“Fine. I’ll stick around awhile. Send Alvin in, and you can go home — oh, one thing. See if you can get me Dr. Sharps at JPL first, will you? And call Maureen to tell her I’ll be a little late.”

“Sure.” Carrie grinned to herself as the Senator went back into his office. Before she finally left he’d have nine other last-minute items. She was used to it. She looked into the staff rooms on the other side of her office. Everyone was gone except Alvin Hardy. He always waited, just in case. “He wants you,” Carrie said.

“So what else is new?” Al went into the big office. Jellison was sprawled out in his judge’s chair, his jacket and narrow striped tie laid across the desk, his shirt unbuttoned halfway down. A big glass of bourbon sat next to the bottle. “Yes, sir?” Al said.

“Couple of things.” He handed Al the memo. “Check this story out. If it’s true, I want a medium-size fire built under those people. Let ’em save money on their goddamn salaries, not cheating a Silver Star vet out of a leg that fits.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And then you can take a look at Braden’s district. Seems to me the Party ought to have a bright young chap in there. I mind a city councilman—”

“Ben Tyson,” Al said helpfully.

“That’s his name. Tyson. Think he could beat Braden?”

“He might. With your help.”

“Look into it. I’ve about had it with Mr. Braden being so goddam busy saving the world he hasn’t got time to look after his constituents.” Senator Jellison wasn’t smiling at all.

Al nodded. Braden, he thought, you’re dead. When the boss gets in that mood—

The intercom buzzed. “Dr. Sharps,” Carrie said.

“Right. Don’t go, Al. I want you to hear this. Charlie?”

“Yes, Senator?” Dr. Sharps said.

“How’s the launch going?” Jellison asked.

“Everything’s fine. It would be even better if I didn’t have every VIP in Washington calling me to ask about it.”

“Goddammit, Charlie, I went out on a long limb for you. If anybody’s got a right to know, it’s me.”

“Yes. Sorry,” Sharps said. “Actually, things are better than we expected. The Russians are helping a lot. They’ve got a big booster, and they’re taking up a lot of consumables they’ll share with our team. Lets us take up more science packages. For once we’ve got a division of labor that makes sense.”

“Good. You won’t ever know how many favors I used up getting that launch for you. Now tell me again how valuable all this is.”

“Senator, it’s about as valuable as we can get — given what we’re doing. It’s not going to cure cancer, but we’ll sure learn a lot about planets and asteroids and comets. Also, that TV fellow, Harvey Randall, wants you in his next documentary. He seems to think the network ought to thank you for getting this launch.”

Jellison looked up at Al Hardy. Hardy grinned and nodded vigorously. “They’ll love us in L.A.,” Al said.

“Tell him I like it,” Jellison said. “Any time. Have him check with my assistant. Al Hardy. You got that?”

“Right. Is that all, Art?” Sharps asked.

“Nooo.” Jellison drained the whiskey glass. “Charlie, I keep getting people in here who think that comet’s going to hit us. Not crazies. Good people. Some of ’em with as many degrees as you have.”

“I know most of them,” Sharps admitted.

“Well?”

“What can I say, Art?” Sharps was quiet for a moment. “Our best projected orbit puts that comet right on top of us—”

“Jesus,” Senator Jellison said.

“But there’s several thousand miles’ error in those projections. And a miss by a thousand miles is still a miss. It can’t reach out and grab us.”

“But it could hit.”

“Well… this isn’t for publication, Art.”

“Didn’t ask for it for publication.”

“All right. Yes. It could hit us. But the odds are against it.”

“What kind of odds?”

“Thousands to one.”

“I recall you said billions to one—”

“So the odds have narrowed,” Sharps said.

“Enough so we ought to be doing something about it?”

“How could you? I’ve spoken with the President,” Sharps said.

“So have I.”

“And he doesn’t want to panic anybody. I agree. It’s still thousands to one against anything happening at all,” Sharps insisted. “And a complete certainty that a lot of people will get killed if we start making preparations. We’re already getting crazy things. Rape artists. Nut groups. People who see the end of the world as an opportunity—”

“Tell me about it,” Jellison said dryly. “I told you, I saw the President too, and he’s got your opinion. Or you’ve got his. I’m not talking about warning the public, Charlie, I’m talking about me. Where will this thing hit, if it does?”

There was another pause.

“You’ve studied it, haven’t you?” Jellison demanded. “Or that crazy genius you keep around, uh, Forrester, he’s studied it. Right?”

“Yes.” The reluctance was plain in Sharps’s voice. “The Hammer has calved. If it does hit, it’s likely to be in a series of strikes. Unless the central head whams us. If that happens, don’t worry about preparations. There aren’t any.”

“Wow.”

“Yeah,” Sharps said. “That bad.”

“But if only part hits—”

“Atlantic Ocean, for sure,” Sharps said.

“Which means Washington…” Jellison let his voice trail off.

“Washington will be under water. The entire East Coast up to the mountains,” Sharps said. “Tidal waves. But it’s long odds, Art. Very long. Best guess is still that we get a spectacular light show and nothing more.”

“Sure. Sure. Okay, Charlie, I’ll let you get back to work. By the way, where’ll you be on That Day?”

“At JPL.”

“Elevation?”

“About a thousand feet, Senator. About a thousand feet. Goodbye.”

The connection went before Jellison could switch off the phone. Jellison and Hardy looked at the dead instrument for a moment. “Al, I think we want to be at the ranch. Good place to watch comets from,” Jellison said.

“Yes, sir—”

“But we want to be careful. No panic. If this gets a big play the whole country could go up in flames. I expect Congress will find a good reason for a recess that week, we won’t have to do anything about that, but I want my family out at the ranch, too. I’ll take care of Maureen. You see that Jack and Charlotte get there.”

Al Hardy winced. Senator Jellison had no use for his son-in-law. Neither did Al. It wouldn’t be pleasant, persuading Jack Turner to take his wife and children out to the Jellison ranch in California.

“May as well be hung for a sheep,” Jellison said. “You’re coming out with us, of course. We’ll need equipment. End-of-the-world equipment. Couple of four-wheel-drive vehicles—”

“Land Rovers,” Al said.

“Hell no, not Land Rovers,” Jellison said. He poured another two-finger drink. “Buy American, dammit. That comet probably won’t hit, and we sure as hell don’t want to be owning foreign cars after it goes by. Jeeps, maybe, or something from GMC.”

“I’ll look into it,” Al said.

“And the rest of it. Camping gear. Batteries. Razor blades. Pocket computers. Rifles. Sleeping bags. All the crap you can’t buy if—”

“It’s going to be expensive, Senator.”

“So what? I’m not broke. Get it wholesale, but be quiet about it. Anybody asks, you’re… what? You’re going along on a junket to Africa. There must be some National Science Foundation project in Africa—”

“Yes, sir—”

“Good. That’s what all this is for, if anybody asks. You can let Rasmussen in on the plot. Nobody else on the staff. Got a girl you want to take along?”

He really doesn’t know, Al thought. He really doesn’t know how I feel about Maureen. “No, sir.”

“Okay. I’ll leave it to you, then. You realize this is damn foolishness and we’re goin’ to feel awful silly when that thing has passed by.”

“Yes, sir.” I hope we are. Sharps called it the Hammer!

“There is absolutely no danger. The asteroid Apollo came within two million miles, very close as cosmic distances go, back in 1932. No damage. Adonis passed within a million miles in 1936. So what? Remember the panic in 1968? People, especially in California, took to the hills. Everyone forgot about it a day later — that is, everyone who hadn’t gone broke buying survival equipment that wasn’t needed.

“Hamner-Brown Comet is a marvelous opportunity to study a new kind of extraterrestrial body at comparatively — and I emphasize comparatively — close range, and that’s all it is.”

“Thank you, Dr. Treece. You have heard an interview with Dr. Henry Treece of the United States Geological Survey. Now back to our regularly scheduled program.”

The road ran north through groves of oranges and almond trees, skirting the eastern edge of the San Joaquin Valley. Sometimes it climbed over low hills or wound among them, but for most of the way the view to the left was of a vast flatland, dotted with farm buildings and croplands, crossed by canals, and stretching all the way to the horizon. The only large buildings visible were the uncompleted San Joaquin Nuclear Plant.

Harvey Randall turned right at Porterville and wound eastward up into the foothills. Once the road turned sharply and for a moment he had a view of the magnificent High Sierra to the east, the mountaintops still covered with snow. Eventually he found the turnoff onto the side road, and further down that was the unmarked gate. A U.S. Mail truck had already gone through, and the driver was coming back to close the gate. He was long-haired and elegantly bearded.

“Lost?” the mailman asked.

“Don’t think so. This Senator Jellison’s ranch?” Harvey asked.

The mailman shrugged. “They say so. I’ve never seen him. You’ll close the gate?”

“Sure.”

“See you.” The mailman went back to his truck. Harvey drove through the gate, got out and closed it, then followed the truck up the dusty path to the top of the hill. There was a white frame house there. The drive forked, the right-hand branch leading down toward a barn and a chain of connected small lakes. Granite cliffs reared high above the lakes. There were several orange groves, and lots of empty pastureland. Pieces of the cliff, weathered boulders larger than a California suburban house, had tumbled down into the pastures.

An ample woman came out of the house. She waved to the mailman. “Coffee’s hot, Harry!”

“Thanks. Happy Trash Day.”

“Oh, that again? So soon? All right, you know where to put it.” She advanced on the TravelAII. “Can I help you?”

“I’m looking for Senator Jellison. Harvey Randall, NBS.”

Mrs. Cox nodded. “They’re expecting you, up to the big house.” She pointed down the left-hand branch of the drive. “Mind where you park, and look out for the cats.”

“What’s Trash Day?” Harvey asked.

Mrs. Cox’s face already wore a suspicious look. Now it changed to deadpan. “Nothing important,” she said. She went back onto the porch. The mailman had already vanished inside the house.

Harvey shrugged and started the TravelAII. The drive ran between barbed-wire fences, orange groves to the right, more pasture to the left. He rounded a bend and saw the house. It was large, stone walls and slate roof, a rambling, massive place that didn’t look very appropriate for this remote area It was framed against more cliffs, and had a view through a canyon to the High Sierra miles beyond.

He parked near the back door. As he started around to the big front porch, the kitchen door opened. “Hi,” Maureen Jellison called. “Save some walking and come in this way.”

“Right. Thanks.” She was as lovely as Harvey had remembered her. She wore tan slacks, not very highly tailored, and high-top shoes, not real trail shoes but good for walking. “Waffle-stompers,” Mark Czescu would have called them. Her red hair looked recently brushed. It hung down just to her shoulders, in waves with slight curls at the ends. The sun glinted off in pleasing highlights.

“Did you have an easy drive?” she asked.

“Pleasant enough—”

“I always like the drive up here from L.A.,” Maureen said. “But I expect you can use a drink right about now. What’ll you have?”

“Scotch. And thanks.”

“Sure.” She led him through a service porch into a very modern kitchen. There was a cabinet full of liquor, and she took out a bottle of Old Fedcal scotch, then fought with the ice tray. “It’s always all over frost when we first come up,” she said. “This is a working ranch, and the Coxes don’t have time to come up and fuss with the place much. Here, it will be nicer in the other room.”

Again she led the way, going through a hall to the front room of the house. The wide verandah was just beyond it. A pleasant room, Harvey decided. It was paneled in light-colored wood, with ranch-style furniture, not really very appropriate for such a massive house as this. There were photographs of dogs and horses on most of the walls, and a case of ribbons and trophies. mostly for horses, but some for cattle. “Where is everybody?” Harvey asked.

“I’m the only one here just now,” Maureen said.

Harvey pushed the thought firmly down into his unconscious, and tried to laugh at himself.

“The Senator got caught by a vote,” Maureen was saying. “He’ll catch the red-eye out of Washington tonight and get here in the morning. Dad says I’m to show you around. Want another drink?”

“No, thank you. One’s enough.” He put the glass down, then picked it up again when he realized he’d set it on a highly polished wood lamp-table. He wiped the water ring off with his hand. “Good thing the crew didn’t come up with me. Actually they’ve got some work to finish up, and I’d hoped we could get the footage on Senator Jellison tomorrow morning, but if he couldn’t be available tomorrow I’ve got the gear in the car. I used to be a fair cameraman. They’ll be here in the morning, and I thought I would use the evening to get acquainted with the Senator, find out what he’d like to talk about for the camera…” And I’m chattering, Harvey thought. Which is stupid.

“Care for the grand tour?” Maureen asked. She glanced at Harvey’s Roughrider trousers and walking shoes. “You won’t need to change. If you’re up to a tough walk, I’ll show you the best view in the valley.”

“Sure. Let’s go.”

They went out through the kitchen and cut across the orange groves. A stream bubbled off to their left.

“That’s good swimming down there,” Maureen said. “Maybe we’ll have a dip if we get back early enough.”

They went through a fence. She parted the barbed wire and climbed through effortlessly, then turned to watch Harvey. She grinned when he came through just behind her, obviously pleased at his competence.

The other side of the fence was weeds and shrubs, never plowed or grazed. The way was steep here. There were small trails, made by rabbits or goats. They weren’t really suited for humans at all. They climbed several hundred feet until they got to the base of a great granite cliff. It rose sheer at least two hundred feet above them. “We have to go around to the left here,” Maureen said. “It gets tough from here on.”

Much tougher and I won’t make it, Harvey thought. But I will be damned if I’ll have a Washington socialite show me up. I’m supposed to be an outdoorsman.

He hadn’t been hiking with a girl since Maggie Thompkins blew herself up on a land mine in Vietnam. Maggie had been a go-get-’em reporter, always out looking for a story. She had no interest in sitting around in the Caravelle Bar and getting her material third- or fourth-hand. Harvey had gone with her to the front, and once they’d had to walk out from behind Cong lines together. If she hadn’t been killed… Harvey put that thought away, too. It was a long time ago.

They scrambled up through a cleft in the rocks. “Do you come up here often?” Harvey asked. He tried to keep the strain out of his voice.

“Only once before,” Maureen said. “Dad told me not to do it alone.”

Eventually they reached the top. They were not, Harvey saw, on a peak at all. They were at one end of a ridge that stretched southeastward into the High Sierra. A narrow path led up into the rock cliff itself; they’d come all the way behind it, so that when they got to its top they faced the ranch.

“You’re right,” Harvey said. “The view’s worth it.” He stood on a monolith several stories high, feeling the pleasant breeze blowing across the valley. Everywhere he looked there were more of the huge white rocks. A glacier must have passed through here and scattered the land with these monoliths.

The Senator’s ranch was laid out below. The small valley carved by the stream ran for several miles to the west; then there were more hills, still dotted with bungalow-size white stones. Far beyond the hills, and far below the level of the ranch, was the broad expanse of the San Joaquin. It was hazy out there, but Harvey thought he could make out the dark shape of the Temblor Range on the western edge of California’s central valley.

“Silver Valley,” Maureen announced. “That’s our place there, and beyond is George Christopher’s ranch. I almost married him, once — ” She broke off, laughing.

Now why do I feel a twinge of jealousy? Harvey wondered. “Why is it so funny?”

“We were all of fourteen at the time he proposed,” Maureen said. “Almost sixteen years ago. Dad had just been elected, and we were going to Washington, and George and I schemed to find a way so I could stay.”

“But you didn’t.”

“No. Sometimes I wish I had,” she said. “Especially when I’m standing here.” She waved expressively.

Harvey turned, and there were more hills, rising higher and higher until they blended into the Sierra Nevada range. The big mountains looked untouched, never climbed by human. Harvey knew that was an illusion. If you stooped to tie your bootlaces on the John Muir Trail, you were likely to be trampled by backpackers.

The great rock they stood on was cloven toward the edge of the cliff. The cleft was no more than a yard wide, but deep, so deep that Harvey couldn’t see the bottom. The top of the rock slanted toward the cleft, and toward the edge beyond it, so that Harvey wasn’t even tempted to go near it.

Maureen strolled over there, and without a thought stepped across the cleft. She stood on a narrow strip of rock two feet wide, a three-hundred-foot drop in front of her, the unknown depth of the cleft behind. She looked out in satisfaction, then turned.

She saw Harvey Randall standing grimly, trying to move forward and not able to do it. She gave him a puzzled look; then her face showed concern. She stepped back onto the main rock. “I’m sorry. Do heights bother you?”

“Some,” Harvey admitted.

“I should never have done that — what were you thinking of, anyway?”

“How I could get out there if something happened. If I could make myself crawl across that crack—”

“That wasn’t nice of me at all,” she said. “Anyway, let me show you the ranch. You can see most of it from here.”

Afterward, Harvey couldn’t remember what they’d talked about. It was nothing important, but it had been a pleasant hour. He couldn’t remember a nicer one.

“We ought to be getting back down,” Maureen said.

“Yeah. Is there an easier way than the one we came up?”

“Don’t know. We can look,” she said. She led the way off to their left, around the opposite side of the rock face. They picked their way through scrub brush and along narrow goat trails. There were piles of goat and sheep droppings. Deer too, Harvey thought, although he couldn’t be sure. The ground was too hard for tracks.

“It’s like nobody was ever here before,” Harvey said, but he said it under his breath, and Maureen didn’t hear. They were in a narrow gully, nothing more than a gash in the side of the steep hill, and the ranch had vanished.

There was a sound behind them. Harvey turned, startled. A horse was coming down the draw.

Not just a horse. The rider was a little blonde girl, a child not more than twelve. She rode without a saddle, and she looked like a part of the huge animal, fitted so well onto him that it might have been an undergrown centaur. “Hi,” she called.

“Hi yourself,” Maureen said. “Harvey, this is Alice Cox. The Coxes work the ranch. Alice, what are you doing up here?”

“Saw you going up,” she said. Her voice was small and high-pitched, but well modulated, not shrill.

Maureen caught up to Harvey and winked. He nodded, pleased. “And we thought we were the intrepid explorers,” Maureen said.

“Yeah. I had enough trouble getting up by myself, without taking a damn big horse.” He looked ahead. The way was steep, and it was absolutely impossible for a horse to get down there. He turned to say so.

Alice had dismounted and was calmly leading the horse down the draw. It slipped and scrambled, and she pointed out places for it to step. The horse seemed to understand her perfectly. “Senator coming soon?” she asked.

“Yes, tomorrow morning,” Maureen said.

“I sure like talkie’ to him,” Alice said. “All the kids at school want to meet him. He’s on TV a lot.”

“Harvey — Mr. Randall makes television programs,” Maureen said.

Alice looked to Harvey with new respect. She didn’t say anything for a moment. Then, “Do you like ‘Star Trek’?”

“Yes, but I didn’t have anything to do with that one.” Harvey scrambled down another steep place. Surely that horse couldn’t get down that?

“It’s my favorite program,” Alice said. “Whoa, Tommy. Come on, it’s all right, right here — I wrote a story for television. It’s about a flying saucer, and how we ran from it and hid in a cave. It’s pretty good, too.”

“I’ll bet it is,” Harvey said. He glanced at Maureen, and saw she was grinning again. “I’ll bet there’s nothing she can’t do,” Harvey muttered. Maureen nodded. They scrambled up the sides of their dry wash when it ended in a thicket of chaparral. The ranch was visible again, still a long way down, and the hillside was steep enough that if you fell, you’d roll a long way and probably break something. Harvey looked back and watched Alice for a second, then stopped worrying about her and the horse. He concentrated on getting himself down.

“You ride alone up here a lot?” Maureen asked.

“Sure,” Alice said.

“Doesn’t anybody worry about you?” Harvey asked.

“Oh, I know the way pretty good,” Alice told him. “Got lost a couple of times, but Tommy knows how to get home.”

“Pretty good horse,” Maureen said.

“Sure. He’s mine.”

Harvey looked to be sure. A stallion, not a gelding. He waited for Maureen to catch up to him. Masculine pride had kept him trying to lead the way, although it was obvious that they ought to leave that to Alice. “Must be nice to live where the only thing to worry about is getting lost — and the horse takes care of that,” he told Maureen. “She doesn’t even know what I’m talking about. And last week a girl her age, about eleven, was raped in the Hollywood Hills not more than half a mile from my house.”

“One of Dad’s secretaries was raped in the Capitol last year,” Maureen said. “Isn’t civilization wonderful?”

“I wish my boy could grow up out here,” Harvey said. “Only, what would I do? Farm?” He laughed at himself. Then the way was too steep for talking.

There was a dirt road at the bottom of the steep hillside. They were still a long way from the ranch, but it was easier now. Alice somehow got onto the horse; Harvey was watching the whole time, but he didn’t see how she managed it. One second she was standing next to the animal, her head lower than its back, and the next moment she was astride. She clucked and they galloped off. The illusion that she was somehow a part of the beast was even stronger: She moved in perfect rhythm with it, her long blonde hair flowing behind.

“She’s going to be one real beauty when she grows up,” Harvey said. “Is it the air here? This whole valley’s magic.”

“I feel that way sometimes too,” Maureen told him.

The sun was low when they got back to the stone ranch house. “Little late, but want to catch a swim?” Maureen asked.

“Sure. Why not? Only I didn’t bring a suit.”

“Oh, there’s something around.” Maureen vanished into the house and came back with trunks. “You can change in there.” She pointed to a bathroom.

Harvey got into the trunks. When he came out, she was already changed. Her one-piece suit was a shiny white material. She had a robe over one arm. She winked at him and dashed off, leaving Harvey to follow. The path led by a pomegranate grove and down to a sandy beach by a bubbling stream. Maureen grinned at him, then plunged quickly into the water. Harvey followed.

“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

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, interrogative? 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—”

“Bullshit. You had a tumbling target. We’re as stable as a streetcar.” Baker watched a few moments more and shook his head. “Not their fault, of course. Control systems. We’ve got the onboard computers. They don’t. But it’s a bloody damned shame.”

Rick Delanty’s mahogany face wrinkled. “Don’t know I can take much more of this, Johnny.”

It was excruciating for both of them. It made the fingers flex, itching to take over. Back-seat drivers are formed by such tensions.

“And he’s got the lunch,” Baker said. “When’s he going to give up?”

They entered darkness. Communications with Soyuz were limited to official messages. When they came into the light again, the Soviet craft approached once more.

“It’s going to get hungry up here,” Delanty said.

“Shut up.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Fuck you.”

“Not possible in a full pressure suit.”

They watched again. Eventually Jakov called: “We are wasting needed fuel. Request Plan B.”

“Soyuz, roger, stand by to implement Plan B,” Baker said with visible relief. He winked at Delanty. “Now show the commies what a real American can do.”

Plan B was officially an emergency measure, but all the American mission planners had predicted privately that it would be needed. In the U.S. they’d trained as if Plan B would be the normal mode of operation. Across the Atlantic it was hoped it wouldn’t be needed — but they’d planned on it too. Plan B was simple: The Soyuz stabilized itself, and the Apollo-Hammerlab monstrosity maneuvered to it.

Delanty was flying a spacecraft and a big, clumsy, massive tin can. (Now picture an aircraft carrier trying to maneuver under a descending airplane.) But he also had the world’s most sophisticated computer system, attitude controls painstakingly turned out by master machinists with thousands of hours’ experience, instruments developed in a dozen laboratories accustomed to making precision instruments.

“Houston, Houston, Plan B under way,” Baker reported.

And now the whole damned world’s watching me. Or listening, Rick Delanty thought. And if I blow it…

That was unthinkable.

“Relax,” Baker said.

He didn’t offer to do it himself, Delanty thought. Well. Here goes. Just like on the simulator.

It was. One straight thrust; check just before contact, and a tiny pulse of the jets to move the two crafts together. Again the mechanical feel of contact, and simultaneously the flare of green lights on the board.

“Latch it,” Rick said.

“Soyuz, we are docked, latch the docking probe,” Baker called.

“Apollo, affirmative. We are locked on.”

“Last one inside’s a rotten egg,” Baker said.

They shook hands, formally, all around, as they floated inside the big tin can. A historic occasion, the commentators were saying below; but Baker couldn’t think of any historic words to say.

There was just too damned much to do. This wasn’t a spectacular, a handshake in space like Apollo-Soyuz. This was a working mission, with a hairy schedule that they probably couldn’t keep up with, even with luck.

And yet… Baker had the urge to laugh. He might have if it wouldn’t have needed so many explanations. He would have laughed at how good they all looked.

God bless us, there’s none like us. Leonilla Alexandrovna — Malik was darkly beautiful. With her imperious self-confidence she could have played a czarina, but her smooth, hard muscles would better have fitted her for the prima ballerina’s role. A cold and lovely woman.

Heartbreaker, Johnny Baker thought. But secretly vulnerable, like Moira Shearer in The Red Shoes. I wonder if she’s as coldly polite with everyone as she is with Brigadier Jakov?

Brigadier Pieter Ivanovitch Jakov, Hero of the People (which class? Baker wondered), the perfect man to illustrate an enlistment poster. Handsome, well muscled, cold eyes: He looked a lot like Johnny Baker himself, and this wasn’t really more surprising than Rick Delanty’s superficial resemblance to Muhammad Ali.

Pour of us, fully mature specimens in the prime of athletic good health — and photogenic as hell to boot. Pity that Randall fellow from NBS isn’t here to take a group picture. But he’ll get one. Eventually.

They floated at strange angles to each other, and shifted as in vagrant breezes, smiling at nothing. Even for Baker and Jakov it was exhilarating, and they’d been up before. For Rick and Leonilla it was sheer heaven. They tended to drift toward the viewports and stare at the stars and Earth.

“Did you bring the lunch?” Delanty asked.

Leonilla smiled. The smile was cold. “Of course. I think you will enjoy it. But I will not harm Comrade Jakov’s surprise.”

“First we have to find a place to eat it,” Baker said. He looked around the crowded capsule.

It was crammed with gear. Electronics bolted to the bulkheads. Styrofoam packing around amorphous lumps suspended on yellow nylon strapping. Plastic boxes, racks of equipment, canisters of film, microscopes, a disassembled telescope, tool kits and soldering irons. There were multiple copies of diagrams that showed where everything was stowed, and Baker and Delanty had drilled until they could literally lay their hands on any item in total darkness; but it made for crowding and gave no sense of order.

“We can eat in the Soyuz,” Leonilla suggested. “It is packed, but…” She waved helplessly.

“It is not what we have been given to expect,” Jakov said. “I have spoken to Baikunyar, and we are now on our own for a few hours until we can deploy the solar wings. But I suggest we eat first.”

“What’s not what you’ve been given to expect?” Delanty asked.

“This.” Jakov waved expressively.

John Baker laughed. “There wasn’t time to do any real planning. Just pile the stuff aboard. Otherwise, everything here would have been designed especially for comet watching, at half the weight—”

“And nine times the cost,” Delanty said.

“And then there would have been no need of us,” Leonilla Malik said.

Jakov looked at her coldly. He started to say something, but decided not to. It was true enough, and they all knew it.

“Jesus, they sure packed it in,” Delanty said. “Let’s eat.”

“You feel no effect? From the free fall?” Leonilla asked.

“Him? Old Iron Ear?” John Baker laughed. “Hell, he eats lunch on roller coasters. Now me, I feel it a bit, and I’ve been here before. It goes away.”

“We should eat now. We are entering darkness, and we will want to deploy the solar wings in light,” Jakov said. “I, too, suggest the Soyuz, where there is more room. And we have a surprise. Caviar. It should be eaten in bowls, but doubtless we can make do from tubes.”

“Caviar?” Baker said.

“It is high in food value,” Leonilla said. “And soon the new canal will be finished and there will be plenty of water in the Caspian and the Volga for our sturgeon. I hope you like caviar—”

“Sure,” Baker said.

“Shall we get to it?” Jakov led the way into the Soyuz.

No one noticed that Rick Delanty held back, as if reluctant to begin lunch after all.

Delanty and Baker were outside. Thin lines connected them to Hammerlab; around them was the vacuum of space, brightly lit in sunshine, dark as the darkest cave in shadow.

Skylab had wings covered with solar cells. They were supposed to deploy automatically, but they hadn’t.

Hammerlab had a different design. The wings were folded against the body, and were designed to be deployed by human muscle power. Baker and Delanty supplied that.

The solar-cell power was all needed. Without it they couldn’t operate the laboratory — or even keep it cool enough to live in. Space is not cold. It has no temperature at all: There is no air to give it a temperature. Objects in sunlight absorb heat, which must be pumped out. Human beings generate even more heat No man can live long in an insulated environment, whether a pressure suit or a space capsule. A man generates more heat inside each cubic inch of his body than the Sun does in each cubic inch of its surface. Of course, there are a great many cubic inches of Sun…

So they needed the solar cells, and that took work. They moved large masses — in space there is no weight, but the mass remains — against friction. Their pressure suits resisted every motion, but eventually it was done. Nothing was broken, nothing was jammed. The system had been designed for simplicity — and to use the talents of intelligent men in orbit.

“At last,” Johnny Baker said. “And we’ve got a few minutes’ oxygen left. Rick, take a moment to enjoy the view.”

“Good,” Rick huffed into his mike.

Baker didn’t like the way he said it. Delanty was breathing too hard, and too irregularly. But he said nothing.

“I thought that last one would never come loose,” Delanty puffed.

“But it did come loose. And if it hadn’t, we’d have fixed it,” Baker said. “Those goddam bastards with their perfect black boxes. Well, this time they gave me the tools for the job. There’s nothing a man can’t do with the right tools.”

“Sure, it’s all a piece of cake now.”

“Right. No worries. Barring a few international tensions, a possible Cuban hijacker, and several masses of dirty ice moving at fifty miles a second — our way.”

“That’s a relief.” Huff! “Hey, John, I see South Africa. Only — you can’t tell where the international boundaries leave off. No national borders. Johnny, I’m on the verge of a philosophical breakthrough.”

“You can’t see the lines of latitude and longitude, either, but that doesn’t make them unimportant.”

“Um.”

“So you can’t see international borders from space, and everyone tries to make a big point of it. If we keep that up, you know what’ll happen?”

Rick laughed. “Yeah. Everybody’s gonna start painting their borders in neon orange a mile wide. Then all the college kids will scream about damage to the environment—”

“And blame you for starting it. Let’s go in.”

June: Interludes

“Woe to you, my people! For have you not raised the abomination of desolation across the earth? Have you not seen the wickedness of the cities, and smelt the very stench of the air itself? Have you not defiled the earth, which is the very temple of the Lord?

“Hear the words of the Prophet Malachi: ‘For, behold, the day cometh, that shall burn as an oven; and all the proud, yea, and all that do wickedly, shall be stubble; and the day that cometh shall burn them up, saith the Lord of Hosts, that it shall leave them neither root nor branch.

“ ‘But unto you that fear my name shall the Son of righteousness arise with healing in his wings.’

“My people, the Hammer of God comes to smite the wicked and the proud; but the humble shall be exalted. Repent, while there is yet time; for no man can escape the mighty Hammer that even now blots out the stars. Repent, before it is too late. There is yet time.”

“Thank you, Reverend Armitage. You have heard the Reverend Henry Armitage and ‘The Coming Hour.’ ”

Mark Czescu had the saki heating in a reagent bottle with a ground-glass stopper. He poured refills into tiny cups, then poured more saki into the bottle and set it back in water simmering on the stove.

“I had two plants sitting on my desk,” he said. “One was a rubber marijuana plant, with ‘cannabis sativa’ stamped under the leaves. The other was an Aralia elegantissima. If you don’t know, it looks a lot like marijuana.” He handed a cup to Joanna, another to Lilith. “One day my boss came in with a bigwig from the central office. They didn’t say anything that day, but the next day my boss was saying, ‘Get rid of it.’ ” He handed Frank Stoner the third cup, and settled in the armchair with his own. “I said, ‘What?’ He said, ‘I’m not completely ignorant, you know. I know what that is.’ Carol Miller went into hysterics. She called the other guys in and we made him repeat it. They all knew what it was.”

Frank Stoner sprawled in sinful comfort on the couch, with Joanna MacPherson under one arm and the other around Lilith Hathaway’s waist. Lilith was his own height, five nine, but tiny Joanna’s shoulders just fit beneath Frank’s thick arm. He asked, “How long ago was that?”

“Couple of years. They had to lay me off two months later.”

Frank grinned. “By one of those interesting statistical flukes?”

“Huh? No, it had nothing to do with the rubber marijuana. They just had to lay off some people. Since then… Well, the steadiest work has been with Harv Randall.” Mark leaned forward, eyes sparkling. “Those man-in-the-street gigs are fun. We met this army colonel who was afraid to open his mouth, afraid something would get out. There was a guy at a wrestling match who couldn’t wait for Hammerfall. That’s when the real he-men will rule the world, right?” He smiled at Lilith, who was a pale blonde with a lovely heart-shaped face and big boobs. He’d met Lilith at the Interchange, the topless bar where she danced.

Frank Stoner was sipping just enough saki to be polite. Mark hadn’t noticed. He emptied his cup in one swallow — you had to drink it fast or it would get cold — and said, “We even interviewed some bikers. The Unholy Rollers were in that night. I don’t think they took it seriously, though.”

Joanna laughed. “End of the world. No cars on the road. No fuzz. Your biker friends would think that was fat city.”

“But they couldn’t say that.”

“It’s maybe true,” said Frank Stoner. He and Mark had met on the dirt tracks, fighting it out for prize money across the country. “We can go places cars can’t. We don’t use as much gas. We stick together. We don’t mind a fight. If we had some gas cached somewhere… Hey. What are the chances?”

Mark waved a hand and almost hit his cup. “Almost zilch, unless you believe the astrology columns. Sharps says we might go through the tail, though. Man, won’t that be a kick!”

Joanna explained, “Sharps is one of the astronomers they interviewed.” She got up to refill saki cups.

“Yeah, and he was stranger than any of them! You’ll see it on TV. Hey, did you know that Hot Fudge Sundae falls on a Tuesdae this month?” He gave it a good dramatic pause — during which Joanna got the giggles — before he went on.

An hour later, and Lilith had had to go to work. The saki was dwindling fast. Mark was feeling good. Joanna was feather-light in his lap, while he and Frank talked around her.

Mark had been living with Joanna for almost two years now. Sometimes it struck him as strange, that he had gotten himself involved with a total monogamist. It had changed his life-style, sure — and he liked it. Granted he didn’t dare sleep with anyone else; but he didn’t get into as many fights either. And he still met interesting people. He’d been afraid that would end…

“You’d have a hell of a time getting back in shape,” said Frank.

“Huh?” Mark tried to remember what they’d been talking about. Oh, yeah: the duels they’d fought on the racing circuit years ago. For Mark the dirt tracks were a spectator sport these days. He still had the muscles, but he had grown a great soft pillow of a beer belly. He glanced down and said, “Right. Well, Joanna’s making me have the baby.”

“Fair’s fair,” Joanna said. “You lost the toss.”

“I’m gettin’ too old for fooling around. I should sign up permanently with Randall.” He picked up Joanna and set her on her feet (yes, the muscles were still there) and went to the kitchen for the last of the saki. He called, “What do we do if the Hammer hits?”

“Don’t be there,” Stoner answered. A few seconds later “Don’t be at the beach either. Don’t be near a coastline Three out of four it’d be an ocean strike. Bring me a beer.”

“Yeah.”

“You got a map of the fault lines in California, don’t you?”

Mark was sure he did. He began hunting for it.

Frank said, “I think I’d want the same bike I took to Mexico. The big single, the Honda four-stroke. Not so much problem getting spare parts.” Frank let his mind track possibilities, taking its time. He and Joanna and Mark, they’d known each other a long time. They didn’t have to talk just to fill in silences, though Mark did have a touch of that. “You’d have to think about riots and rip-offs. The rain and the tidal waves and earthquakes, they’d wipe out all the services, cops included. I guess I’d want gas and bike parts hidden outside the city, some place where nobody could steal them.”

“Guns?”

“I brought a souvenir back from ’Nam. Registered lost.”

“So did I.” Mark gave up on the map. “We’d want a siphon. For awhile you’d find abandoned cars—”

“I always carry a siphon.”

“Hey. Why don’t we get together about the time the head’s supposed to pass?”

Frank didn’t answer immediately. Joanna said, “Even if nothing happens, it’d be a great comet-watching party. Maybe we could get Lilith in.”

Frank Stoner thought it over for a few seconds longer than was tactful. He did not make promises lightly, and the comet was becoming real to him. Mark was a good man in a fight, but he couldn’t always do what he said he could do, and he tended to drop things, and there was that brand-new beer belly. To Frank, that belly was a piece of personal sloppiness. Still… “Yeah. Okay. Not here, though. Say we take some sleeping bags up onto Mulholland the night before.”

Mark raised his saki cup in salute. “Good. It’d take a bitch of a tsunami to reach that high. And we could go off the road if we had to.” He would have been displeased if he could have followed Frank’s reasoning.

Frank was concerned for Joanna. He didn’t think Mark could protect her. And Joanna, with her kung fu training and Women’s Lib self-confidence, probably thought she could protect herself.

It took Eileen almost half a minute to realize that Mr. Corrigan was sitting on the edge of her desk, studying her. Bolt upright at her desk, she sat with her fingers motionless on the keyboard. Her eyes seemed to study a blank wall… and then, somehow, they found Corrigan in the foreground. She said, “Yah!”

“Hi. It’s me,” said Corrigan. “Care to talk about it?”

“I don’t know, Boss.”

“About a month ago I would have sworn you were in love. You’d come in with that sappy look, and sometimes you’d be dead tired and grinning all over. I thought your efficiency would go down, but it didn’t.”

“It was love,” she said, and smiled. “His name’s Tim Hamner. He’s indecently rich. He wants me to marry him. He said so last night.”

“Um,” said Corrigan, not liking that. “The crucial question, of course, is whether the business will collapse without you.”

“Naturally that was the first thing I thought of,” said Eileen, but with a pensive look that Corrigan didn’t quite know how to take.

“Occupational hazard,” he said briskly. “Do you love him?”

“Oh… yes. But… nuts. I’ve already made up my mind,” she said, “but I don’t have to like it.” And she attacked her typewriter with a ferocity that drove Corrigan back to his own desk.

She called Tim three times before she found him home. Her first words were, “Tim? I’m sorry, but the answer’s no.”

Long pause. Then, “Okay. Can you tell me why?”

“I’ll try. It’s… it’d make what I’ve been doing look silly.”

“I don’t see that.”

“Just before we met I made Assistant General Manager at Corrigan Plumbing Supplies.”

“You told me. Listen, if you’re afraid of losing your independence, I’ll settle, say, a hundred thousand dollars on your cringing head and you’ll be as independent as anyone.”

“I don’t know how I knew you’d say that, but… that isn’t it. It’s me. I’d change more than I’d like. I made myself what I am, and I want to stay proud of the result.”

“You want to keep your job?” Tim had trouble getting the word out; he must have thought the idea was silly. But — “Okay.”

Eileen pictured herself arriving at Corrigan’s every morning in a chauffeured limousine — and she laughed. After that, things went all to hell.

Colleen was reading a paperback novel. Her hair was in curlers. She’d switched on the stereo, and sometimes her fingers tapped in rhythm on the table beside her easy chair.

Fred wondered wistfully what she was hearing. He knew what she was reading; he couldn’t see the title, but the cover bore a woman in long, flowing garments in the foreground and a castle in the background, with one lighted window. Gothics were all alike, outside and in.

And he didn’t mind the curlers. She looked cute in them.

Half the joy was in the anticipation. Soon, soon, they would meet.

Sometimes the guilt was overwhelming. Then the mad temptation would come on Fred Lauren: to destroy his telescope, to destroy himself, before he could hurt Colleen. But that really was insane. A month and a week from now he would be dead anyway, and so would she. Any hurt he did her would be a passing thing, and done for love.

For love. Fred yearned for the girl in his telescope. His hands were tender on the little wheels that controlled the image, and the fingers trembled. It was too soon, much too soon.

June: Two

Sergeant Mason Jefferson Lawton was SAC and proud of it. He was proud of the sharply creased coveralls, and the blue scarf at his throat, and the white gloves. He was proud of the .38 on his hip.

It was late afternoon in Omaha. The day had been hot. Mason glanced at his watch again, and just as he did, the KC-135 swept out of the sky and down the runway. It taxied over to the unloading area where Mason waited. The first man out was a colonel permanently stationed at Offutt. Mason recognized him. The next man fit the photograph Security had furnished. They came over to the jeep.

“ID, please?” Mason asked.

The colonel took his out without a word. Senator Jellison frowned. “I just came in on the General’s plane, with your own colonel—”

“Yes, sir,” Mason said. “But I need to see your ID.”

Jellison nodded, amused. He took a leather folder from an inside pocket, then grinned as the sergeant came to an even more rigid position of attention. The card was Jellison’s Air Force Reserve Officer ID, and showed him to be a lieutenant general. And that, Jellison thought, ought to shake the kid up.

If it did, Mason showed no other signs. He waited while another officer brought Jellison’s bag and put it in the jeep. They drove down the runway past the specially equipped Looking Glass ship. There were three of those ships, and one was in the air at all times. They carried a Strategic Air Command general officer and staff.

Back at the end of World War II, SAC Headquarters was put in Omaha, at the center of the U.S. The command center itself was built four stories below ground, and reinforced with concrete and steel. The Hole was supposed to withstand anything — but that was before ICBMs and H-bombs. Now there were no illusions. If the Big One came off, the Hole was doomed. That wouldn’t keep SAC from controlling its forces, because Looking Glass couldn’t be brought down. No one except its pilots ever knew where it was.

Mason ushered the Senator into the big brick building and up the stairs to General Bambridge’s office. The office had an old-fashioned air about it. The wooden furniture, most with leather upholstery, was ancient. So was the huge desk. The walls were lined with shelves, each holding USAF models: WWII fighters, a huge B-36 with its improbable pusher props and jet pods, a B-52, missiles of every description. These were the only modern features except the telephones.

There were three on the desk: black, red and gold. A portable unit containing a red and a gold phone stood on a table near the desk. Those phones went with General Bambridge: in his car, to his home, in his bedroom, in the latrines; he was never more than four rings from the gold phone and never would be during his tour of duty as Commander in Chief, Strategic Air Command. The gold phone reached the President. The red one went downhill, from Bambridge to SAC, and it could launch more firepower than all the armies in history had ever employed.

General Thomas Bambridge waved Senator Jellison to a seat, and joined him in the conversation group near the big window overlooking the runway. Bambridge didn’t sit behind his desk to talk to people unless there was something wrong. It was said that a major once fainted dead away after five minutes standing in front of Bambridge’s desk.

“What the hell brings you out here like this?” Bambridge asked. “What couldn’t we settle on the phones?”

“How secure are your phones?” Jellison asked.

Bambridge shrugged. “As good as we can make them.”

“Maybe yours are all right,” Jellison said. “You’ve got your own people to check them. I’m damned sure mine aren’t safe. Officially, it’s what I told you, I need some help understanding budget requests.”

“Sure. You want a drink?”

“Whiskey, if you’ve got it here.”

“Sure.” Bambridge took a bottle and glasses from the cabinet behind his desk. “Cigar? Here, you’ll like ’em.”

“Havana?” Jellison said.

Bambridge shrugged. “The boys get ’em in Canada. Never have got used to U.S. cigars. Cubans may be bastards, but they sure can roll cigars.” He brought the whiskey to the coffee table and poured. “Okay, just what is this all about?”

“The Hammer,” Arthur Jellison said.

General Bambridge’s face went blank. “What about it?”

“It’s coming pretty close.”

Bambridge nodded. “We’ve got some fair mathematicians and computers ourselves, you know.”

“So what are you doing about it?”

“Nothing. By order of the President.” He pointed to the .gold phone. “Nothing is going to happen, and we mustn’t alarm the Russians.” Bambridge grimaced. “Mustn’t alarm the bastards. They’re killing our friends in Africa, but we shouldn’t upset them because it might mess up our friendship.”

“It’s a hard world,” Jellison said.

“Sure it is. Now what is it you want?”

“Tom, that thing’s coming close. Really close. I don’t think the President understands what that means.”

Bambridge took the cigar out of his mouth and inspected the chewed end. “The President doesn’t take much interest in us,” he said. “That’s good, because he leaves SAC pretty much to run itself. But good or bad, he’s President, which makes him my Commander in Chief, and I’ve got funny notions. Like I ought to obey orders.”

“Your oath’s to the Constitution,” Jellison said. “And weren’t you a Pointer? Duty, Honor, Country. In that order.”

“So?”

“Tom, that comet’s coming really close. Really. They tell me it’ll knock out all your early-warning radars—”

“They tell me that, too,” Bambridge said. “Art, I don’t want to be a smart-ass, but aren’t you trying to teach your grandmother to suck eggs?” He went to the desk and brought back a red-covered report. “We’ll see what looks like an attack that isn’t really there, and we won’t be able to see a real one — if there is one. Sure, the day they think they can win clean, they’ll hit us, but Air Intelligence tells me things are pretty quiet over there right now.” Bambridge thumbed through the document again, and his voice fell. “Of course, if we can’t see them coming, they couldn’t see us—”

“Get that look off your face!”

“Well, I can’t be court-martialed just for thinking.”

“This is serious, Tom. I don’t think the Russians will start anything — so long as it’s only a near miss. But…”

Bambridge cocked his head to one side. “Jesus! My people didn’t tell me it would hit us!”

“Nor did mine,” Jellison said. “But the odds are now hundreds to one against. Used to be billions. Then thousands. Now it’s only hundreds. That’s a little scary.”

“It is that. So what am I supposed to do? The President ordered me not to go on alert—”

“He can’t give you that order. Your charter says you have authority to take any measure needed to protect your forces. Anything short of launching.”

“Christ.” Bambridge looked out the window. The Looking Glass KC-135 was taking off, which meant that the airborne ship would be coming in after its replacement was safely airborne and lost. “You’re asking me to defy a Presidential direct order.”

“I’m telling you that if you do, you’ve got friends in Congress. You might lose your job, but that’ll be the worst.” Jellison’s voice was very low and urgent. “Tom, do you think I like this? I doubt that goddam comet will hit Earth, but if it does and we’re not ready… God knows what will happen.”

“That’s for sure.” Bambridge tried to imagine it. An asteroid strike in some remote part of the Soviet Union — would they believe it wasn’t a U.S. sneak attack? Or why remote? Moscow! “But if we’ve gone to alert status, they’ll know it, and it’ll give ’em that much more reason to think we did it,” Bambridge said.

“Sure. And if we haven’t gone to alert, and they see this as a golden opportunity? If the Hammer hits, Washington may be gone, Tom. Washington, New York, most of the eastern seacoast.”

“Shit. All we’d need would be a war on top of that,” Bambridge said. “If the Hammer really does hit, the world is going to be in a big enough mess without starting the Big One to go with it. But if it hits us and not them, they’ll want to finish the job. It’s what I’d do, if I was them.”

“But you wouldn’t—”

“Not from this office,” Bambridge said. “Not even if I got orders that I’ll never, thank God, get.” The General stared at the missile models on the far wall. “Look, what I can do is see that my best people are on duty. Put my top men in the holes, and I’ll be up in Looking Glass myself. But how do I tell a meteor hit from a missile attack?”

“I think you’ll know,” Jellison said.

Outside was night and glory. In the Apollo capsule Rick Delanty was moored to his couch. His eyes were tightly closed and he lay rigid, fists clenched. “All right, dammit. I’ve been sick ever since we came up. But don’t tell Houston. There’s nothing they could do anyway.”

“You damn fool, you’ll starve,” Baker told him. “Hell, it’s no disgrace. Everybody gets space sickness.”

“Not for a whole week.”

“You know better. MacAlliard was sick the whole mission. Not as bad as you, but he had help. And I’m getting Dr. Malik.”

“No!”

“Yes. We haven’t got time for macho pride.”

“That’s not it and you know it.” Delanty’s voice was pinched. “She’ll report it. And—”

“And nothing,” Baker said. “We’re not going to scrub this mission just because you keep puking up your guts.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yeah. They can’t abort unless I say so. And I won’t. Unless—”

“Unless nothing,” Delanty said. “That’s the whole point. Good God, Johnny, if this flops because of me… Hell, I wish they’d picked somebody else. Then it wouldn’t matter so much. But I’ve got to keep going.”

“Why?” Baker demanded.

“Because I’m—”

“A gentleman of color?”

“Black. Try to remember.” He tried to grin. “All right, get the lady doc. Something’s got to help. Mothersills, maybe?”

“Best thing is to keep your eyes closed.”

“Which I’m doing, and a fat lot of help I am,” Delanty said. His voice was bitter. “Me, old Iron Ear, space-sick. It’s insane.” He realized Baker had left, and nervously began buttoning up his fly.

The official name was “sustained duty clothing.” Everyone else would have called them long johns. Or a union suit. What the well-dressed spaceman will wear. It’s a very practical costume, but Rick Delanty couldn’t quite hide his nervousness: He wasn’t used to having women see him in his underwear. Especially not white women.

“Man, will the old boys in the back towns in Texas go nuts over this,” he muttered. …

“What is this you have not reported?” Her voice was sharp, totally professional, and blew away any residual thoughts Rick Delanty might have had. She came into the capsule and unclipped a lead from Rick’s union suit. She plugged it into a thermometer readout. The other end of the lead went inside the long johns and up inside Rick Delanty. All astronauts became gun-shy about their anuses — not that it did them any good.

Leonilla said, “Have you eaten anything at all?” She read the thermometer and made a note.

“Nothing that stays down.”

“So you are dehydrated. We will try these, first. Chew this capsule. No — do not swallow it whole. Chew it.”

Rick chewed. “Jesus Christ, what is this stuff? That’s the nastiest—”

“Swallow, please. In two minutes we will try a nutrient drink. You need hydration and nourishment. Do you often fail to report illnesses?”

“No. I thought I could make it.”

“In every space mission approximately one-third of the personnel involved have experienced from mild to extreme forms of space sickness. The probability that one of us would have the difficulty was very high. Now drink this. Slowly.”

He drank. It was thick and tasted of oranges. “Not bad.”

“It is based on American Tang,” Leonilla said. “I have added fruit sugars and a vitamin solution. How do you feel? No, do not look at me. It is important that this stay down. Keep your eyes closed.”

“It’s not too bad, this way.”

“Good.”

“But I’m no damned use with my eyes closed! And I’ve got to—”

“You’ve got to rehydrate and stay alive so the rest of us can stay here,” Leonilla said.

Delanty felt something cold on his forearm. “What—”

“A sleeping injection. Relax. There. You will sleep for several hours. During that time I will give you an intravenous. Then when you are awake we can try other drugs. Good-night.”

She went back into the main Hammerlab compartment. There was room in the center of it now; the equipment had been stowed in proper places, and much of the styrofoam packing had been ejected out into space.

“Well?” John Baker demanded. Pieter Jakov asked the same thing, in Russian.

“Bad,” she said. “I think he has not kept water in his system for at least twenty-four hours. Possibly longer. His temperature is thirty-eight point eight. Badly dehydrated.”

“So what do we do?” Baker asked.

“I think the drugs I have given him will keep the drink down. I gave him nearly a liter, and he showed no signs of distress. Why did he not tell us before?”

“Hell, he’s the first black man in space. He doesn’t want to be the last one,” Baker said.

“Does he think he is the only one under pressure to succeed?” Leonilla demanded. “He is the first black man in space, but the physiological differences between races are small compared to those between sexes. I am the second woman in space, and the first failed…”

“It is time for more observations,’; Pieter Jakov said. Leonilla, assist me. Or must you attend to your patient?”

With the gear properly stowed, there was still very little room to spare in Hammerlab. They had found ways to achieve some privacy: Delanty in the Apollo, Leonilla Malik m the Soyuz. Baker and Jakov traded off watchkeeping and slept in Hammerlab when they slept at all. With three to cover the work of four, there wasn’t a lot of time for sleep.

And Hamner-Brown was approaching. Tail-first it came, directly toward them, the tenuous gas that streamed from it already engulfing Earth and Moon and Hammerlab. They took hourly observations, visual, and daily went outside to gather samples of nothing: the thin vacuum of space, bottled to take back to Earth, where sensitive instruments could find a few molecules of a comet’s tail.

At first there was little to see. Only in the direction of the comet was it obvious that the tail was streaming across space to cover hundreds of millions of miles; but later, as it came closer, they could see it in any direction they looked.

When they weren’t watching the comet they could take observations of the Sun. There were another dozen experiments, in crystallography, in thin-film research, to occupy any spare time left from that.

It made for a busy day.

They hadn’t much privacy, but they had some. By mutual agreement and ship design, the personal facilities were in the spacecraft, not the lab capsule. For Baker and Delanty the system was simple enough: a tube to fit over their male members, with a tank to pee in. It flushed.

This time when Baker used the system he felt Delanty’s eyes on him.

“You’re supposed to be asleep. Not watching me piss.”

“You I’m not interested in. Johnny… how does Leonilla manage it? In space”

“Yeah. I managed to forget I don’t know. I’D ask her, huh?”

“Sure. Do that. It’s a cinch I’m not gonna.”

“Me neither.” Johnny opened a valve. Urine jetted from the Apollo into space. Frozen droplets formed a cloud around the craft, like a new constellation of stars, and gradually dissipated. “Why the hell did you get me worrying about that again?”

“I should be the only one with trouble?”

“How’re you getting along?”

“Pretty good.”

Two days later, Delanty was much better — but Baker didn’t have an answer.

He had just returned from taking a vacuum sample, and was alone with Jakov when Baker said, “I can’t stand it.”

“I beg your pardon?” the Russian said.

“Something bothering me. How does Leonilla take a leak in free fall?”

“This concerns you?”

“Sure. It’s not even idle curiosity. One reason we never sent women into space, the design boys couldn’t come up with proper sanitary facilities. Somebody suggested a catheter, but that hurts.” Jakov said nothing. “So how does she do it?” Johnny demanded.

“That is a state secret. I’m sorry,” Pieter Jakov said. Could he be joking? It didn’t show. “It is time for a new series of solar observations. Will you help me with the telescope, please.”

“Sure.” I’ll ask Leonilla, Johnny thought. Before we get down, anyway. He glanced sideways at the Russian. Maybe Jakov didn’t know either.

“How you doing?” Baker asked.

“Fine,” Delanty said. “Does Houston know?”

“Not from me,” Baker said. “Maybe from Baikunyar. I don’t guess Jakov keeps much from his people. But why should they tell Houston?”

“I hate it,” Rick said.

“Sure you do. So what? You’ve proved whatever you needed to. You’re here, and we got the wings opened out. Christ, man, if you can do that kind of work while you’re sick, they ought to call you Ironman. You’ll be working tomorrow.”

“Yeah. You solve that problem that was bothering you?”

Baker shrugged. “No. I asked Pieter. ‘State secret,’ he said. State secret my ass.”

“Well, maybe we can find out. We’ve sure got enough cameras…”

“Sure. That’ll look good in the report. Two U.S. Air Force officers sneaking into the lady’s powder room with cameras. Well, I’ve got the watch. I’ll go wake up Comrade Brigadier. See you.” Johnny Baker floated out of the Apollo capsule and across Hammerlab. It was quiet out there; Leonilla was asleep in Soyuz, Delanty strapped down in Apollo, and Jakov supposedly catching a nap before going on watch.

Baker swam toward the Russian’s bunk. In the maze of telescopes and cameras and growing crystals and x-ray detectors Jakov floated, lightly strapped to a nylon web. He was grinning at the bulkhead. When Johnny reached him, the grin blinked out.

Like he just gave somebody a hotfoot, Johnny Baker thought. And was caught in the act.

State secret my ass.

June: Three

The outer receptionist was new, and she didn’t send Harvey Randall on into the big executive suite on the third floor of Los Angeles City Hall. Harvey didn’t mind. There were others waiting out there, and his crew wouldn’t be up with the cameras for a few minutes anyway. He was early for his appointment.

Harvey took a seat and indulged in his favorite game: people-watching. Most of the visitors were obvious. Vendors, political types, all there to see one of the deputy mayors or an executive assistant. One was different. She was in her twenties, and Harvey couldn’t tell if early or late twenties. She wore jeans and a flowered blouse, but they’d come from an expensive shop, not from The Gap. She stared frankly, and when Harvey looked at her she didn’t let her eyes drop in embarrassment. Harvey shrugged and crossed the room to sit next to her. “What’s so interesting about me?” he asked.

“I recognized you. You do TV documentaries. I’ll remember your name in a minute.”

“Fine,” Harvey said.

That did make her look away; but she turned back to him with half a smile. “All right. What is it?”

“You first.”

“Mabe Bishop.” Her accent was definitely native.

Harvey fished into his memories. “Aha. People’s Lobby.” “Right.” She didn’t change expressions, which was curious; most people would be pleased to have a national documentary reporter recognize their name. Harvey was still finding that surprising when she said, “You still haven’t told me.”

“Harvey Randall.”

“Now it’s my turn to say ‘aha.’ You’re doing the comet shows.”

“Right. How did you like them?”

“Terrible. Dangerous. Stupid.”

“You don’t mince words. Mind telling me why?” Harvey asked.

“Not at all. First, you’ve scared the wits out of fifty million halfwits—”

“I did not—”

“And they should be scared, but not of a damned comet! Comets! Signs in the heavens! Evil portents! Medieval crap, when there’s plenty to worry about right here on Earth” Her tones were full and bitter.

“And what should they be scared of?” Harvey prompted. He didn’t really want to know, and cursed himself the instant he said it. It was a reporter’s automatic question, but the trouble was, she’d sure as hell tell him.

She did. “Spray cans ruining the atmosphere, destroying ozone, causing cancer. A new atomic power plant in the San Joaquin Valley making radioactive wastes that will be around for half a million years! The big Cadillacs and Lincolns are burning m-megatons of gasoline. All these things that we’ve got to do something about, things we should be scared of, and instead everyone’s hiding in the root cellar afraid of a comet!”

“You’ve got a point,” Randall said. “Even if I don’t think all of those are good causes—”

“Oh, don’t you? And which ones aren’t?” she demanded. Her voice was full of hate, and readiness for attack.

My, my, Harvey thought. There were times when he wanted to take his reportorial objectivity, roll it tightly and stuff it in an anatomically uncomfortable place about the person of a pompous professor of journalism.

“I’ll tell you,” he said. “The reason people are still burning gas in those big comfortable cars is that they can’t get enough electricity to run electric cars. They can’t get electricity because the air’s already full of crap from fossil fuel plants and we’re running out of fossil fuels, and damned fools keep delaying the nuclear plants that might get us out of that particular box.” Harvey stood up. “And if I ever hear the words ‘spray can’ and ‘ozone’ again, I’ll track you down wherever you hide and throw up in your lap.”

“Huh?”

Harvey went back to the receptionist. “Tell Johnny Kim that Harvey Randall is out here, please,” he said. His voice was commanding. The new receptionist looked at him in alarm, then turned to her intercom.

Behind him Harvey could hear Mabe Bishop spluttering. It gave Harvey great satisfaction. He went over to the door that led into the executive suite and waited. In a second it buzzed. “Go right in, Mr. Randall,” the receptionist said. “I’m sorry I kept you waiting—”

“’Sall right,” Harvey mumbled. The door let him into a long hall. There were offices on both sides of it. An Oriental of indeterminate age, over thirty and under fifty, came out of one of them.

“Ho, Harv. How long did that quim keep you waiting?”

“Not long. How are you, Johnny?”

“Pretty good. The Mayor’s got a conference running overtime. Community-development thing. Mind waiting a see?”

“Not really — the crew should be up pretty soon.”

“They’re coming up now,” John Kim said. He was Mayor Bentley Allen’s press secretary, speechwriter and sometimes political manager, and Harvey knew that Kim could be in Sacramento or Washington if he wanted to be; probably would be anyway, if he stayed on with Bentley Allen. “I sent down to have them come up the private elevator.”

“Thanks,” Harvey said. “They’ll appreciate that—”

“Hah. The conference is breaking up. Let’s go in and see Hizzoner until the crew gets up.” Kim led Harvey down the hall.

There were two offices. One was large, with expensive furniture and thick rugs. Flags hung on the walls, and there were trophies and plaques and framed certificates everywhere. Past the ornate formal outer office was a much smaller room, with an even larger desk. This desk was piled high with papers, reports, books, IBM print-outs, and memos. Some of the memos held large red stars. A few held two red stars, and one had three. The Mayor was just picking that one up when Kim and Harvey Randall came in.

He looks good, Randall thought as the Mayor read the memo. Los Angeles’ second black mayor. He’d kept to a winning game: He was tall and fit and dressed like a wealthy professional man, which he’d been before getting into politics.

His mixed blood showed, and his education showed because he let it. Bentley Allen was not going to talk down to people. He didn’t need the political jobs; he was technically on leave from a tenure appointment on the faculty of a wealthy private university.

“Documentary, Mr. Randall?” Bentley Allen asked. He initialed the memo and put it in an OUT tray.

“No, sir,” Johnny Kim answered. “Evening news this time.”

“So what’s newsworthy about me tonight?” the Mayor asked.

“Fallout from the documentaries,” Harvey Randall said. “Network news, all networks. What are public officials doing on the day Hamner-Brown doesn’t hit Earth.”

“All networks?” Johnny Kim asked.

“Yes.”

“Wouldn’t have been a bit of pressure on that, would there?” Kim asked. “Like from an off-white house on Pennsylvania Avenue?”

“Might have been,” Harvey admitted.

“And what The Man wants is good vibes,” the mayor said. “Keep calm, cool and collected on Hot Fudge Sundae.”

“Which falls on a Tuesdae next week,” Harvey responded automatically. “Yes, sir—”

“So what if I screamed panic?” Mayor Allen asked. There was a gleam of amusement in his eye. “Or said, ‘Here’s your chance, brothers! Burn whitey out! Get yours, you’ll never get a better time’?”

“Aw, bullshit,” Harvey said. “I thought everybody wanted to be on the evening national news.”

“You ever get impulses like that?” Bentley Allen asked. “You know. Irresistible impulses to do the one thing that would put you in a new line of work? Such as spilling a martini down the dean’s wife’s dress? Which, I may add, I did once. Purely accidental, I assure you, but look where it got me.”

Now Harvey really did look worried, and Mayor Allen let the grin play across his face. “Needn’t worry, Mr. Randall. I like this job. Or another one, in a somewhat larger office back east…” He let his voice trail off. It was no secret that Bentley Allen would like to be the first black President; there were serious political managers who thought he could do it in another dozen years or so.

“I’ll be a good boy,” Mayor Allen said. “I’ll tell the people how we expect full attendance in all city offices, and I’ll be right here — well, literally here, but I’ll tell them there,” he added, pointing to the ornate office. “And I expect all my top people to set the same example. I may or may not say that I’ll have a color TV going, because I’m damned if I’m going to miss a show like that.”

“Business as usual with time off for a light show,” Harvey said.

The Mayor nodded. “Of course.” His face took on a serious look. “Privately, I’m a bit worried. Too many people taking off. Do you know that almost every U-Haul trailer in the city has been rented? By the week. And we’ve even had a big surge of requests for time off from my police and firefighters. Not granted, of course. All leaves canceled on Hot Fudge Sundae.”

“Worried about looting?” Harvey asked.

“Not enough to say so in public. But yes,” Mayor Allen said. “Looting and burglaries with all the homes that have been or will be abandoned. But we’ll handle it. If your crew is set up out there, we’d better get to it. I’ve a meeting with the director of Civil Defense in half an hour.”

They stood and went into the outer office.

The traffic on Beverly Glen was nice. Very light for a Thursday evening. Harvey drove with a wide grin. I’ve got a hell of a story, he thought. Even if I never get another foot in the can, I’ve got a story. Not only do millions think the world’s going to end, but millions more hope so. It shows in their attitudes. They hate what they’re doing, and keep looking nostalgically at the “simple” life. Of course they won’t voluntarily choose to be farmers or live in communes, but if everybody has to…

It didn’t really make sense, but people’s attitudes often didn’t. That didn’t bother Harvey Randall at all.

And there’d be another great story in follow-up. The day after the world didn’t end. That’s a good title for a book Harvey thought. Of course there’ll be a thousand novelists scrambling to beat each other into print. Books with titles like Chicken Little, and The Day the World Didn’t End (not as good as his title) and Rock, Won’t You Hide Me? Come to that, some of the radio stations were playing disaster-religious songs twenty-four hours a day, and end-of-the-world preachers were doing a land-office business.

There were also the Comet Wardens, a Southern California sect who were putting on white robes and praying the comet away. They’d staged a couple of stunts to get publicity, and about half their leaders were out on bail for blocking traffic or getting into the outfield during televised baseball games. That had stopped; a judge had ordered that no more be released on bail until next Wednesday…

Hell, I could write a book, Harvey thought. I ought to. I never wanted to before, but I’m literate, and I’ve done the research. I’m way ahead of the flock. The Day After the World Didn’t End. No. No good. Too long, for one thing. I can call mine Hammer Fever. And of course there’ll be plenty of publicity, we’ll have a show on the air just afterward.

I could even make some money on this. A lot of money. Enough to pay off the bills and take care of the tuition at Harvard School for Boys and…

Hammer Fever. I like it.

Only one problem. It’s real. Like a war scare.

He’d found that everywhere. Coffee, tea, flour, sugar, any staple capable of being hoarded, was in short supply. Freezedried foods were gone. Clothing stores reported runs on rain gear (in southern California, with the next rains due in November!). You couldn’t find outdoorsman’s clothing anywhere, no surplus hiking boots in the stores. And nobody was buying suits, white shirts, or neckties.

They were buying guns, though. There wasn’t a firearm to be bought in Beverly Hills or the San Fernando Valley. There wasn’t any ammunition, either.

Backpacking stores were sold out of everything from hiking boots to trail food to fishing equipment (more hooks than flies; you could still get dry flies, but only the expensive American-made ones, not the cheap ones from India). There weren’t any tents to be had, nor sleeping bags. There was even a run on life jackets! Harvey grinned when he heard that one. He’d never seen a tsunami himself, but he’d read about them. After Krakatoa a great wave had deposited a Dutch gunboat miles inland at an elevation of two hundred feet.

Then there were the mail-order “survival packages” that had been sold for the past few weeks. They’d not be getting any more orders, of course, not this close to Hammerfall. Maybe — just maybe — they weren’t intending to deliver? Have to look into that. There were four companies selling them. For from fifty to sixteen thousand dollars you could get anything from just a food supply to the whole thing in one lump. The foods were nonperishable and constituted a more or-less-balanced diet. (Which religious sect was it that required all its members to keep a year’s supply of food? They’d been doing that since the Sixties, too. Harvey made another mental note. They’d be worth interviewing, after That Day had passed.)

The cheap outfits were food only. There was progressively more, up to the sixteen-grand package, which included a Land Cruiser, clothing from thermal underwear out, machete, sleeping bag, butane stove and tank, inflatable raft, almost anything you could name. One included membership in a survival club: You were guaranteed a place if you could get there, somewhere in the Rockies. The different companies didn’t sell identical items, and none of the four included guns (courtesy of Lee Harvey Oswald; and how many people has the ban on mail-order guns saved or killed, depending on whether or not the Hammer falls?).

But all four companies sold you the same outfit whether you lived on a mountain or a seashore or the High Plains. Harvey grinned. Caveat emptor. The stuff was all overpriced, too. Lord, what fools these mortals be…

The traffic was very light. He’d reached Mulholland already. The San Fernando Valley spread out below him. The wind had been strong today and there was no smog.

The valley stretched on for miles. Row after row of California suburban houses, rich areas and poor areas, stucco subdevelopments and old wooden frame homes, here and there a magnificent Monterey style, ancient, the only remnants of the time when the valley had been orange groves — and every one of them built in a flood basin. The neat squares of the valley were cut through by freeways — and there weren’t many cars out there.

All over the basin, on four successive midmornings, the outbound freeways were more crowded than the inbound. Cars, trucks and rented trailers loaded with a lifetime of clutter, all moving out of the basin toward the hills beyond, or over the passes into the San Joaquin. All over the L.A. basin, stores had closed for the week, or for the month, or forever; and the remaining businesses were suffering badly from absenteeism. Hammer Fever.

There was almost no traffic on Benedict Canyon. Harvey chuckled. Here were the people coming home from work… but the ones with Hammer Fever were elsewhere. Hammer Fever had sent the mountain resort business to an all-time high, all across the country. The Treasury Department was worried: Consumer credit levels had broken all records; people were buying survival gear on credit cards. Employment up, economy up, inflation up, all because of the comet.

It’s going to make one hell of a story.

Unless the damned thing does fall. It hit him, just then: If the Hammer fell, nobody was going to give a damn about the story. There’d be no programs. No TV. Nothing.

Harvey shook his head. His smile faded as he glanced at the package in the passenger seat. His compromise with Hammer Fever: an Olympic target pistol, .22 caliber, with a sculpted wooden grip that wrapped fully around the hand, steadying and bracing the wrist. It would be inhumanly accurate, but it was nothing anyone could point to while bellowing, “Look, Old Harv’s got Hammer Fever!”

Only maybe I wasn’t so damned smart after all, Harvey thought. He began to take inventory in his head.

He had a shotgun. Backpacking gear too, but only for himself. The idea of Loretta carrying a backpack was ludicrous. He had taken her on a hike, just once. Did she still have the shoes? Probably not. She couldn’t exist at distances greater than five miles from a beauty shop.

And I love her, he reminded himself firmly. I can play rugged outdoorsman whenever I want to, and have elegance to come back to. Unwanted there came to him the memory of Maureen Jellison standing high on a split rock, her long red hair blowing in the wind. He pushed the memory very firmly back down into his mind and left it there.

So what can I do to prepare? Harvey wondered. Not a lot of time left. Supplies. Well, I can compromise. Canned goods. Good hedge against inflation anyway. They’ll get us through a disaster, if any, and we can still eat them when the damned thing’s gone past. And bottled water… No. Neither one. There’s been a run on both. I’d be lucky to find much this week, and I’ll pay a premium.

He turned into the driveway and braked sharply. Loretta had stopped the station wagon in the drive and was carrying packages into the house. He got out and started helping her, automatically, and only gradually realized that he was carrying bag after bag of frozen food. He asked, “What is this?”

Puffing slightly, Loretta set her load on the kitchen table. “Don’t be angry, Harv. I couldn’t help it. Everyone says — well, says that comet may hit us. So I got some food, just in case.”

“Frozen food.”

“Yes. They were nearly out of cans. I hope we can get it all in the freezer.” She surveyed the bags doubtfully. “I don’t know. We may have to eat Stouffer stuff for a couple of days.”

“Uh-huh.” Frozen food. Good God. Did she expect power lines to survive Hammerfall? But of course she did. He said nothing. She meant well; and while Loretta had been out getting useless supplies, Harvey Randall had been dithering and doing nothing; it came down to the same thing, except for the money, and she’d probably saved them money if the Hammer didn’t fall. Which it wouldn’t. And if it did — why, money wouldn’t be important anyway. “You done good,” Harvey said. He kissed her and went out for another load.

“Hey, Harvey.”

“Yo, Gordie,” Harvey said. He went over to the fence.

Gordie Vance held out a beer. “Brought you one,” he said. “Saw you drive up.”

“Thanks. You want to talk about something?” He hoped Gordie did. Vance hadn’t been himself the last few weeks. There was something bothering him. Harvey could sense it without knowing what it was, and without Gordie knowing that Harvey knew.

“Where you going to be next Tuesday?” Gordie asked.

Harvey shrugged. “L.A. somewhere, I guess. I’ve got crews for the national stuff.”

“But working,” Gordie said. “Sure you don’t want to come hiking? Good weather in the mountains. I get some time off next week.”

“Good Lord,” Harvey said. “I can’t—”

“Why not? You really want to stick here for the end of the world?”

“It won’t be the end of the world,” Harvey said automatically. He caught the gleam in Vance’s eye. “And anyway, if that Hammer doesn’t fall and I haven’t been busy covering it, it’s the end of my world. No can do, Gordie. God. I’d like to get away, but no.”

“Figures,” Vance said. “Loan me your kid.”

“What?”

“Makes sense, doesn’t it?” Vance said. “Suppose that thing does hit. Andy’d have a much better chance up in the hills with me. And if it doesn’t — well, you wouldn’t want him to miss a good hike just to hang around in the L.A. smog, would you?”

“You make plenty of sense,” Harvey said. “But… where’ll you be? I mean, in case something does happen, how do I find you and Andy.”

Vance’s face took on a serious look. “You know damned well what your chances of living through it are if it does hit and you’re in L.A…”

“Yeah. Slim and none,” Harvey said.

“…and besides, I’ll be just about where you’d want to go. Out of Quaking Aspen. The old Silver Knapsack area. Low enough to get out of in bad weather, high enough to be safe no matter what happens. Unless we’re under it, and that’s a random chance, isn’t it?”

“Sure. You ask Andy about this?”

“Yeah. He said he’d like to go, if it’s okay with you.”

“Who all’s going?”

“Just me and seven boys,” Gordie said. “Marie’s got charity work to do, so she can’t come…”

Harvey envied Gordie Vance just one thing: Marie Vance went on hikes. On the other hand, she wasn’t very easy to live with in town.

“…which means under scout rules the girls can’t come,” Gordie was saying. “And some of the others — well, they’re just not available. Hell, Harvey, you know the area. We’ll be fine.”

Harvey nodded. It was safe trail and a good area. “Right,” he said. He drank most of the beer. “You all right, Gordie?” he asked suddenly.

Vance’s face changed, subtly, and he was trying to hide the change. “Sure. Why wouldn’t I be?”

“You just don’t seem yourself lately.”

“Work,” Vance said. “Too much work lately. This hike will fix everything.”

“Good,” Harvey said.

The shower felt good. He let hot water pound on his neck and he thought: Too late. The sensible, phlegmatic ones would stick it out, with the odds still hundreds, maybe thousands, to one in their favor. The panicky ones had already bought supplies and struck for the hills. There were also the sensible, cautious ones like Gordie Vance, who’d planned his hike months before, and who could say he wasn’t letting a comet spoil his vacation — but who’d be in the hills anyway.

Then there were the ones in between. There must be tens of millions, and Harv Randall was one of them, and look at him now: scared too late, and nothing to do but wait it out. In five days the nucleus of Hamner-Brown would be past, on its way to that strange, cold region beyond the planets…

Or it wouldn’t be.

“There must be something.” Harvey said, talking to himself in the privacy of a roaring shower. “Something I can do. What do I want out of this? If that damned dirty snowball ends the blessings of civilization and the advertising industry… okay, back to the basics. Eat, sleep, fight, drink and run. Not necessarily in that order. Right?”

Right.

Harvey Randall took Friday off. He called in sick, and by sheer bad luck Mark Czescu was in and took the call.

Mark got obvious pleasure out of asking it. “Hammer Fever, Harv?”

“Knock it off.”

“Okay. Making a few plans myself. Meeting a couple of friends, getting to a nice safe place. Forgot to tell you. I won’t be around on Hot Fudge Sundae, which falls on a Tuesdae next week. Want we should swing by your place after — if, as and when?”

He got no answer, because Harvey Randall had already hung up.

Randall went to a shopping center. He made his purchases carefully, and all on credit cards, or with checks.

At a supermarket he bought six big round roasts weighing twenty-eight pounds, and half their stock of vitamins, and half their stock of spices and considerable baking soda.

At a health-food store two doors down he bought more vitamins and more bottled spices. He bought a respectable amount of salt and pepper, and three pepper grinders.

Next door, a set of good carving knives. They’d needed new kitchen knives for a year. He also bought a sharpening stone and a hand-operated knife sharpener.

There was a tool kit he’d been wanting for years, and this was the time, he decided. While he was in the hardware store he picked up other odds and ends. Plastic plumbing parts, cheap stuff, that would thread onto iron pipe. There might be a use for it one day, if; and it would be handy around the house if not. There wasn’t a camp stove to be had, but the clerk knew Harvey and obligingly fetched out four hand-pumped flashlights and two Coleman lanterns that had just come in, along with four gallons of Coleman fuel. He also gave Harvey a knowing look that Randall was coming to recognize.

At the liquor store he bought a hundred and ninety-three dollars’ worth of everything in sight: gallons of vodka and bourbon and scotch; fifths of Grand Marnier, Drambuie and other esoteric and expensive liqueurs. He loaded everything into the wagon and then went back for bottles of Perrier water. He paid by credit card — and got another knowing look from the clerk.

“I’m ready to throw one hell of a party,” he told Kipling. The dog thumped his tail on the seat. He liked to go places with Harvey, although he didn’t get the chance as often as he wanted. He watched as his master went from store to store; to drugstores for sleeping pills and more vitamins, iodine, first-aid cream, the last box of bandages; back to the grocery for dog food; back to the drugstore for soap, shampoo, toothpaste, new toothbrushes, skin cream, calamine lotion, suntan lotion…

“Where do we stop?” Harvey asked. The dog licked his face. “We have to stop somewhere. Good Lord, I never thought much about the blessings of civilization before, but there are just a lot of things I wouldn’t want to live without.”

Harvey took his purchases home, then went back down the hill to collect the TravelAII from the mechanic who usually worked on it. If Harvey hadn’t been a very old and valued customer, he’d never have got squeezed in for tuneup, oil change, grease job, and general before-trip checkup; the garage wasn’t taking on new jobs for a week, and there were dozens of cars waiting for rush jobs.

But he got the TravelAII, and filled both tanks with gas. He filled the strap-on tanks for good measure, but he had to go to three service stations to do it; there was unofficial gas rationing in the L.A. basin.

After lunch it was bloody work. Twenty-eight pounds of beef had to be sliced into thin strips — thin! The new knives helped, but his arms were cramped by dinner time, and the job still wasn’t done. “I’ll need the bottom oven for the next three days,” he told Loretta.

“It is going to hit us,” Loretta said firmly. “I knew it.”

“No. Odds are hundreds, thousands, to one against it.”

“Then why that?” she asked. It was a good question. “My kitchen is just covered with little slices of raw meat.”

“Just in case,” Harvey said. “And it keeps. Andy can use it for hikes, if we don’t.” He got back to work.

The easy way to make beef jerky is not the way the Indians used. They employed a slow fire, or a summer sun, and their quality control was poor. Far better to set a modern oven at 100° to 120° and leave the thin strips of beef in for twenty-four hours. The meat isn’t supposed to cook; it’s supposed to dry. A good strip of beef jerky is bone-dry, and hard enough to kill you if you file the end to a point. It will also keep practically forever.

Beef jerky is too limited a diet to keep a human being alive forever. The time can be greatly extended with vitamin supplements, but it’s still dull. So? If the Hammer fell, boredom would not be the major cause of death…

For bulk and carbohydrates, Harvey had grits. Nobody else in Beverly Hills, it seemed, had thought of them, and yet several of the stores carried them. He’d also found a sack of cornmeal, although there’d been no wheat or rye flour.

The fat from the beef he pounded into pemmican, mixing it with the little sugar they had around the house, with salt, with pepper, and some Worcestershire sauce for a bit of flavor. That he’d partly cook, keeping the fat that melted out for more pemmican, and to store bacon in. Bacon covered with fat and kept protected from air will keep a long time before going rancid.

So much for food, he decided. Now for water. He went out to the swimming pool. He’d started emptying it last night. It had almost drained, and he began filling it again. This time it wouldn’t get chlorine. When it was filling well he put the cover over it to keep leaves and dirt out.

Take a long time to drink all that, he thought. And there’s the contents of the hot-water heater at any given time. And… He rooted around in the garage until he found a number of old plastic bottles. Several had held bleach and still smelled of it. Perfect. He filled them without rinsing. The others he washed out carefully. Now, even if the pool went, there’d be some water.

Eat, drink. What’s next? Sleep. That one was easy. Harvey Randall never threw anything away, and he had, in addition to his regular backpacking bag, a U.S. Army Arctic sleeping bag, a summer-weight bag, bag liners, Andy’s discarded bag, and even the one he’d bought that only time Loretta had tried a hike. He took them all out and hung them on the back clothesline. Solar heat. The simplest and most efficient solar power system known to man: Hang your clothes out to dry, rather than use an electric or gas dryer. Of course not many “conservationists” did it; they were too busy preaching conservation. And I’m being unfair, and why?

Because I’ve got Hammer Fever, and my wife knows it. Loretta thinks I’ve gone crazy — and I’m scaring her, too. She’s convinced I think it’s going to hit.

And the more he did to prepare for Hammerfall, the more real it became. I’m even scaring myself, he thought. Have to remember that for the book. Hammer Fever. “Hey, hon…”

“Yes, darling?”

“Don’t look so worried. I’m doing research.”

“On what?” She brought him a beer.

“Hammer Fever. I’m going to write a book on it, once the comet’s gone past. I’ve done all the work. It might even be a best seller.”

“Oh. I’d love it if you had a book. People look up to an author.”

Which, Harv thought, they do. Sometimes. Okay. Now we can eat, drink and sleep. That leaves fight and run.

Fight. Not so good. He had no faith in his skill with guns; either the shotgun or the target pistol. No gun would have given him real confidence. There was no limit to how good a weapon the other guy might have, or how skillful he might be with it, and Harvey Randall had spent the war as a correspondent, not as a soldier.

But there’s also bribe. The liquor and spices might buy my way out of trouble. And if I can hang on to them, in a few years they’ll be literally priceless, providing there’s any surplus food left for luxuries, and there usually is, for someone. For centuries the price of black pepper was fixed, all across Europe, at its own weight in gold, ounce for ounce, and not everybody’s going to have thought of hoarding pepper.

Harvey was proud of that idea.

So. That leaves running, and the TravelAll’s in as good a shape as I can get it. Bicycles will fit on top, if, as and when. And there’s Sunday to go for things I haven’t thought of.

Harvey went in, exhausted, but with a feeling of satisfaction. He wasn’t exactly ready, but at least he could pretend to be prepared. And a lot better than most. Loretta had waited up for him, and she had the Ben-Gay out. She didn’t bug him with a lot of questions; she just rubbed him down good, decided he wasn’t interested in anything more intimate and let him get to sleep.

As he dropped off he thought about how much he loved her.

June: Four

It was night below on Earth. Every ninety minutes Hammerlab passed through day and night; time aboard was kept by a clock, not by light and dark outside.

Cities glowed across Europe at the world’s edge, but the black face of the Atlantic covered half the sky, hiding nucleus and coma of Hamner-Brown. In the other direction stars blazed through thin mist. The comet’s tail streamed up from the horizon on all sides, doming the black Earth with luminous blues and oranges and greens streaming upward to the dome’s star-pierced dark apex. Far off to the side the half-moon floated in a matrix of shock waves, like diamond patterns in a still photograph of rocket flame. It was a sight that no one could tire of.

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 Jakov 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 the 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.

He’d also learned the police view of the world: All humanity is divided into three parts — cops, scumbags and civilians. He hadn’t yet adopted an attitude of contempt toward civilians. They were the people he was supposed to protect, and perhaps because he was not a career policeman (although Burbank didn’t know that) he could take his job seriously. The civilians paid him. One day he would be one of them.

He’d learned to curse the judicial system, while keeping enough literary objectivity to admit that he didn’t know what to replace it with. There were people who could be “rehabilitated.” Not many. Most scumbags were just that, and the best thing to do with them would be to take them out to San Nicholas Island and put them ashore. Let them victimize each other. The trouble was, you couldn’t always tell which ones should be put away forever and which could fit back into the real world. He often got into arguments with his partners over that. His buddies on the force called him “Professor” and kidded his literary ambitions, and the diary he kept; but Eric got along with nearly everyone, and his sergeant had recommended him for promotion to Investigator.

The comet fascinated Eric, and he’d read all he could about it. Now it dominated the skies above. Tomorrow it would be past. Eric drove with his partner through strangely active Burbank streets. People were moving about, piling goods into trailers, doing things inside their houses. There was a lot of traffic.

“Be glad when that thing’s past,” his partner said. Investigator Harris was all cop. The brilliant light show in the skies above was only another problem to him. If it was a pretty show, he’d look at films of it after it was past. Right now it was a pain in the arse.

“Car forty-six. See the woman at eight-nine-seven-six Alamont. Reports screaming in the apartment above her. Handle Code Three.”

“Ten-four,” Eric told the microphone. Harris had already sent the cruiser around a tight curve.

“That’s not a family-fight house,” Harris said. “Singles apartments. Probably some guy can’t take no for an answer.”

The cruiser pulled up in front of the apartment building. It was a large, fancy place, swimming pool and sauna. Rubber trees grew on both sides of the entrance. The girl standing behind the glass lobby doors wore a thin robe over a blue silk nightgown. She seemed scared. “It’s in three-fourteen,” she said. “It was horrible! She was screaming for help…”

Investigator Harris stopped just long enough to look on the mailbox for 314. “Colleen Darcy.” He led the way up the stairs, his nightstick drawn.

The even-numbered apartments on the third floor faced onto an interior hallway. Eric thought he remembered seeing the building from the other side. It had little private balconies, screened from the street. Probably good places for girls to sunbathe. The hall was freshly painted, and the impression was of a nice building, a good place to live for young singles. Of course the best apartments would be on the other side, overlooking the pool.

The hall was quiet. They couldn’t hear anything through the door of 314. “Now what?” Eric asked.

Harris shrugged, then knocked loudly on the door. There was no answer. He knocked again. “Police,” he said. “Miz Darcy?”

There was no answer. The lady who’d called them was coming up the stairs behind them. “You sure she’s in there?” Eric asked.

“Yes! She was screaming.”

“Where’s the manager?”

“Not here. I called him, but there wasn’t anyone there.”

Eric and his partner exchanged glances.

“She was screaming for help!” the lady said indignantly.

“We’ll probably catch hell for this,” Harris muttered. He stood to one side and gestured to Eric. Then he drew his service revolver.

Eric stepped back, raised his foot and smashed it at the locked door. Once. Then again. The door burst open and Eric darted inside, moving quickly to one side the way he’d been taught.

There was only one room. There was something on the bed. Later Eric remembered thinking just that: “Something.” It looked so little like a girl in her twenties…

There was blood on the bed and on the floor beside it. The room smelled of bright copper and expensive perfume.

The girl was nude. Eric saw long blonde hair, arranged carefully on the pillow. The hair was spattered with blood. One of her teats was gone. Blood oozed from punctures below the missing breast. Someone had drawn figures in the blood, tracing an arrow down to point to her dark pubic hair. There was more blood there.

Eric doubled over, struggling with himself, holding his breath. His partner came in.

Harris took one look at the bed, then looked away. He sent his eyes searching the room, saw no one, then looked for doors. There was a door across the room, and Harris moved toward it. As he did, the closet door opened behind him and a man darted out, breaking for the opening to the hallway. He was past Joe Harris, running toward the screaming lady who’d called the police.

Eric breathed deeply, got control of himself and moved to intercept the man. The man had a knife. A bloody knife. He raised it high, point toward Eric. Eric brought up his pistol and leveled it at the man’s chest. His finger tightened on the trigger.

The man threw up his arms. The knife dropped from his hand. Then he fell to his knees. He still said nothing.

Eric’s pistol followed the man. His finger tightened again. A half-ounce more… No! I am a police officer, not a judge and jury.

The man held his hands in supplication, almost as if in prayer. When Eric moved closer, he saw the man’s eyes. They did not hold terror, or even hatred. The man had a curious expression, of troth resignation and satisfaction. It did not change when he looked past Eric Larsen at the dead girl.

Later, after the detectives and the coroner had come, Eric Larsen and Joe Harris took their prisoner to the Burbank City Jail.

“You’ll get him there alive.” The voice was a whine. It belonged to a lawyer who lived in the apartment building. He’d come while they were still questioning the suspect, and shouted that the police had no right to keep after the man. He advised the man to keep silent. The man had laughed.

Eric and Harris took their prisoner to the patrol car and put him inside. He would be turned over to the L.A. County Jail the next day.

During the whole time the man had said nothing. They knew his name from his wallet: Fred Lauren. They’d also heard his record from R I. Three previous sex offenses, two with violence. Probation, probation, then parole after psychiatric treatment.

When they reached the station, Eric hauled Lauren roughly out of the car.

“That hurts,” the man said.

“That hurts. You son of a bitch!” Harris moved close to Lauren. His arm jerked, sending his elbow into the pit of the prisoner’s stomach. He did it again. “Nothing that ever happens to you will hurt the way you…” Harris couldn’t say anything else.

“Joe.” Eric moved between his partner and the prisoner. “He’s not worth it.”

“I’ll report you!” Lauren screamed. Then he giggled. “No. What’s the point? No.”

“Now he’s scared,” Eric said. “Not when he was arrested.” And not now, Eric saw: As soon as Harris moved away and they began walking Lauren into the station, the fear vanished, replaced by the look of resignation. “Okay, tell me,” Eric said. “You think the judge will give you probation again? You’ll be on the street in a week?”

The man giggled. “There won’t be any streets in a week. There won’t be anything!”

“Hammer Fever,” Eric muttered. He’d seen it before: Why not commit a crime? The end of the world was coming. The papers had a lot of stories about that. But none like this, and none in Burbank before.

“I’ll be glad when that goddam thing’s past,” Harris said. He didn’t mention the body on the bed. You lived with that, or you quit; but you worked it out on your own.

“It’s going to be a long night,” Eric said.

“Yeah, and we’ve got morning watch tomorrow.” Harris looked up at the glowing sky. “Be damned glad when that thing’s past.”

They camped at Soda Springs. It was a good campground, surprisingly uncrowded; Gordie Vance had expected a dozen other scout troops to be there. Instead, there was only Gordie and the six scouts he’d brought with him. Hammer Fever, Gordie thought. Nobody wants to be this far from roads and civilization.

They dropped their packs with relief. The boys went dashing off to the spring. There were two springs: One bubbled with clear mountain water, pure and cold; the other was rusty in color, and tasted awful, although the boys pretended they liked it. The water was naturally carbonated, and they made Wyler’s root beer in their canteens. Gordie didn’t bother telling them not to drink too much. Nobody ever did.

They cooked supper over the Svea gasoline backpacker stoves. Gordie let Andy Randall choose the dinner; Andy would have to get used to leading the group. It wouldn’t be long before…

“But my teacher said it might,” one of the younger boys was saying.

“Nuts,” Andy Randall told him. “Dad’s been out to JPL dozens of times, and their computer says it won’t. Besides, Mr. Hamner told me—”

“You know him?” the younger scout asked.

“Sure.”

“But he invented the Hammer.” Involuntarily they looked upward, to the huge glowing smear in the evening sky. “It sure looks close,” the younger scout said.

The long mountain twilight ended, and the stars came out. The Hammer glowed fiercely in the night sky before it sank behind the Sierra. Gordie got the boys into their sleeping bags. They wanted to stay up and watch; there were bright aurora displays across the sky, with the stars showing through jagged lines of green and red.

Gordie climbed into his own sack. As usual he dropped straight off to sleep, programmed to wake in a couple of hours so that he could walk around and see that the boys were all right. I’m a conscientious bastard, he thought, just before he dozed off. It was funny, but Gordie wasn’t laughing.

He woke at midnight — and that was all the sleep he got that night.

The sky was frantic. It streamed overhead like luminescent milk in black water. Stars winked in Hamner-Brown’s tail, then sank into the background as blazes of color flashed across from horizon to horizon. Somewhere in the far distance there were brighter flashes, and after a long time, thunder. Gordie made his rounds in a trance.

Andy Randall was awake. He hadn’t bothered to set up a tube tent, although it often rains in the Sierra in June. Andy lay in the open, his head propped on his pack, his long arms under his neck. “Quite a show,” he whispered.

“That it is,” Gordie said. He was careful to keep his voice cheerful and under control. When they asked later, Andy would have to say that Gordon Vance had shown no signs of depression. “Get some sleep,” Gordie said. “We don’t have far to go tomorrow, but the trail’s tricky in places.”

“I know.”

“Right,” Gordie said. He walked a little way uphill, to be alone, and sank down in the long grass.

Tomorrow it won’t matter, he thought. I don’t need any sleep.

He had the cliff all picked out. A fatal fall… it would have to be fatal. A mistake would leave him injured but alive the kids frantic, while a rescue team moved in to get him to a hospital. He’d be in a hospital bed when the bank examiners found the shortages. Crippled, maybe. Not even able to run.

Not that he would run. He’d had that chance, and it was no good, no good at all. Where would he go? The money was gone, and there was nothing for an American exile without money. Besides, children ought to grow up in their own country. Gordie glanced over to where his own son, age twelve, lay huddled in his sleeping bag. It was going to be rough on Bert, but there wasn’t any help for it.

Funny about that cliff. Gordie could remember it perfectly. The trail wasn’t all that narrow there, but the edge was crumbly, and if you stood too close… he’d seen that two years ago, when they passed by it. He’d had different thoughts then.

I sure wish Bert wasn’t along.

A red velvet curtain rippled across the sky. Magnificent show for my last night, Gordie thought. He tried to watch the sky, but he kept seeing the cliff.

One moment. One carefully careless moment and he’d be at the bottom with a broken neck, and worse. There was a path down, easy enough for the kids. Andy would see that they went down properly. Then Andy Randall would be in charge, and that would be okay. Gordie had been training Andy for two years. Not for this — well, yes, for this, just in case of a genuine accident. Funny how things work out.

The crescent moon rose over the hills, washing out some of the stars and blending its own eerie colors into the light show. Gordie imagined he could see shock waves in the comet tail — but that was probably imagination. The astronauts up there would be seeing it, though, with instruments if not with their eyes. Wonder what it’s like to be up there? Gordie had been a flyer, for a short time, until he’d been low scorer in his class and washed out of flight school to become a navigator for the Air Force. Should have stayed in, he thought. But I had to be a banker…

Too damn bad to ruin the boys’ trip. No choice. None at all, and an accident solves all problems. Half a million in insurance, enough to cover all the bank shortages and leave Marie and Bert in pretty good shape. Call it three hundred thousand left, at seven percent. It’s not magnificent wealth, but it’s sure as hell better than having your father in prison and nothing to live on…

Toward dawn the frantic sky became even more frantic. There was a bright spot in there. If it was the head, it was hard to see, looking down through the luminous tunnel of the tail. Cold light and shifting shadows, faint color splashes of aurora even in daytime. Then the land was afire with dawn, but the light was still funny. Elfin. Gordie shivered.

He went back to his sleeping bag and slid in. No point in catching a nap. It won’t be long…

The Svea was laid out with the fuel bottle, pan of water next to it. Gordie reached out with one arm and primed the tiny stove. His sleeping-bag breakfasts were a standard joke with everyone who’d been camping with him. He didn’t really feel like eating, but it would be dangerous to change the routine. He brought a pan of water to a boil and made hot chocolate. It was surprisingly good, and then he was ready for oatmeal, and a big cup of Sherpa tea, strong tea with brown sugar and a lump of butter…

One by one the boys woke. Gordie chortled to hear Andy Randall tell Bert, “You mean you slept through it? All night?”

No campfire. Not enough wood. Every year there were fewer and fewer places you could build a real fire. Not very many of the kids knew how to cook over a wood fire. Be bad if they really had to be out on their own, but that didn’t happen anymore. Nowadays, if you get lost, you clear an area fifty feet in diameter and light a match in the middle of it. Pretty soon a fire patrol will be out to give you a citation. There aren’t any deep woods anymore, not like when I was a kid…

I should have got some sleep, Gordie thought. My mind’s wandering. It doesn’t matter, though. It’s not very far now. I think I’ll have one more cup of chocolate.

He put the water on. “Let’s get it together,” he called. “Time to be finishing up. Stuff your bags and lace your boots. 1 want us on the trail in five minutes.”

The comet’s nucleus is bathed in light. The tail and coma trap sunlight throughout a tremendous volume and reflect it, some to Earth, some to space, some to the nucleus itself.

The comet has suffered. Explosions in the head have torn it into mountainous chunks. Megatons of volatile chemicals have boiled away. The large masses in the head are crusted with icy mud from which most of the water ice has boiled out.

Yet the crusts retard further evaporation. Other comets have survived many such passages through the maelstrom. Much mass has been lost, poured into the tail; but much of the coma could freeze again, and the rocky chunks could merge; and crystals of strange ices could plate themselves across a growing comet, out there in the dark and the cold, over the millions of years… if only Hamner-Brown could return to the cometary halo.

But there appears to be something in its path.