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.
2
THE HAMMER
And I beheld when he had opened the sixth seal, and lo, there was a great earthquake; and the sun became black as a sackcloth of hair, and the moon became as blood; and the stars of heaven fell unto the earth.
Hammerfall Morning
There is a place with four suns in the sky — red, white, blue, and yellow; two of them are so close together that they touch, and star-stuff flows between them.
I know of a world with a million moons.
I know of a sun the size of the Earth — and made of diamond.
Rick Delanty woke on a wonderful morning, with a rectangle of hot sunlight crawling across his arm. The wonderful mornings came every hour and a half aboard Hammerlab, and he hadn’t tired of them yet. He used the tube and crawled out of the Apollo.
The larger windows in Hammerlab were filled with telescopes and cameras and other instruments. You had to crane around them, holding on to handholds on the bulkheads, swimming across open spaces.
Baker and Leonilla Malik were feeding data into the onboard computer. She looked up and said quickly, “Hello, Rick,” but turned back to work too quickly to see his quick grin.
It was time for work, but Rick Delanty was still partly tourist, and his eagerness was for the dawning of the comet. He found an observation scope unused at the moment, it had a big sun shield built into the optics, so that he could look at the comet without going blind.
The view was something like a stylized sunburst done in Day-Glo, and something like falling down a deep well while high on LSD. The gay streamers of the tail flowed outward as sluggishly as a lunar eclipse. There at the heart of the beast was a hint of graininess.
“Roger, Houston. We do have sideways motion relative to us. It should be coming onto your telemetry right now,” Baker was saying. “And there’s still activity, although that’s been dying out ever since the Hammer rounded the Sun. We got only one explosive event last watch, nothing big, not like the monster we observed yesterday.”
“Hammerlab, there appears to be something wrong with the Doppler data. JPL requests you get optical tracking on the largest piece you can find. Can do?”
“Can try, Houston.”
“I’ll get it, Johnny,” Rick said. He cranked up the resolution on the telescope and peered into the murk. “Leonilla, can you lend a hand? Slave the output onto the telemetry—”
“Right,” she said.
“Mark, mark, I’m off, mark, mark…”
Baker continued his report. “Houston, that nucleus is pretty well spread out, and the coma is huge. I fed the angular diameter into the computer and I get a hundred and forty thousand kilometers. As big as Jupiter. It could envelope the Earth without noticing.”
“Don’t be silly,” a familiar voice crackled. “Gravity… rip it to pieces…” Charlie Sharps’s voice began to fade.
“Houston, we’re losing you,” Baker said.
“That’s not Houston, that’s Sharps at JPL,” Rick said without looking up from the scope. “Mark, mark…”
“It comes through Houston. Damn. The comet stuff is playing pure hell with the ionosphere. We’re going to have communications problems until that thing’s past. Better record every observation we can get, just in case they’re not going through.”
“Rojj,” Delanty said. He continued to stare into the telescope. Hamner-Brown’s nucleus was spread out before him. He was having trouble keeping the cross hairs exactly centered on the mass he’d picked. There wasn’t enough contrast to use an automatic tracking system; it had to be done by eye. Delanty smiled. Another blow for man-in-space. “Mark, mark… ~’
He saw thick, glowing dust in sluggish motion, and a handful of flying mountains, and many more smaller particles, all jumbled, without order, parts moving in random patterns as they responded to light pressure and continuing chemical activity. It was the primal stuff of chaos. His mouth watered with the need to take a spacecraft into that, land on one of the mountains and walk out for a look around. The fifty-mile per-second velocity of those mountains was not evident. But it would be decades before NASA could build manned ships that good. If anyone built them at all. And when it was done, Rick Delanty would be a tired old man.
But this won’t be my last mission. We’ve got the Shuttle coming up, if those goddam congresscritters don’t turn it into pork for their own districts…
Pieter Jakov had been working with a spectroscope. He finished his observations and said, “They have set us a hectic schedule for this morning. I see that extravehicular activity for final check of external instruments is optional. Should we? There are two hours left.”
“Crazy Russian. No, we’re not going to EVA into that. A snowflake at that speed can’t hole the Hammerlab, but it can sure as hell leave a hole in your suit the size of your fist.” Baker frowned at the computer readouts. “Rick, that last optical. What did you pick?”
“A big mountain,” Rick said. “About the center of the nucleus, just as they asked. Why?”
“Nothing.” Baker thumbed the microphone. “Houston, Houston, did you get the optical readings?”
“…squeal… negative, Hammerlab, send again…”
“What the hell is it, Johnny?” Rick demanded.
“Houston and JPL get a miss distance of nine thousand kilometers,” Johnny said thoughtfully. “I don’t. Feeding your data into the onboard I come up with about a quarter of that. They’ve got more computing power down there, but we’ve got better data.”
— “Hell, two thousand kilometers is two thousand kilometers,” Delanty said. He didn’t sound confident.
“I wish we didn’t have a glitch in the main Doppler antenna,” Baker said.
“I will go out and work on it,” Jakov said.
“No.” Baker’s answer was abrupt; the commander speaking. “We haven’t lost anyone in space yet, and why start now?”
“Shouldn’t we ask ground control?” Leonilla asked.
“They put me in charge,” Johnny Baker said. “And I’ve said no.”
Pieter Jakov said nothing. Rick Delanty remembered that the Soviets had lost men in space: the three Soyuz pilots on reentry that the world knew about, and a number of others, known only by rumors and tales told at night over vodka. He wondered (not for the first time) if NASA had been too cautious. With fewer safety precautions the United States could have reached the Moon a little sooner, done a good deal more exploring, learned more — and, yes, created a martyr or two. The Moon had been too expensive in money, but too cheap in lives to gain the popularity it needed. By the time Apollo XI reached it, it was dull. Routine.