Maybe that’s what we ought to do. The picture of Johnny Baker crawling out on the broken Spacelab wing, of a man out in that hostile environment risking the loneliest death ever — that had given the space program almost as big a boost as Neil Armstrong’s giant leap.
There was a ping. Then another, and red warning lights flared on the monitor board.
Rick Delanty didn’t think. He leaped for the nearest redpainted box. A square box, duplicate of others that were put at various places in Hammerlab. He opened it and took out several flat metal plates with goop on one side, then some larger, rubberlike patches. He looked to Baker for instructions.
“Not holed,” Johnny was saying. “Sand. We’re being sandblasted.” He frowned at the status board. “And we’re losing efficiency in the solar cells. Pieter, cap all the optical instruments! We’ll have to save ’em for closest approach.”
“Rojj,” Jakov said. He moved to the instruments.
Delanty stood by with the meteor patches. Just in case.
“It depends on just how large that nucleus is,” Pieter Jakov called from the far end of the space capsule. “And we have yet to get firm estimates of how widely the solid matter extends. I think it highly likely that the Earth — and we — will be hit by high-velocity gravel if nothing worse.”
“Yeah. That’s what I was thinking,” Johnny Baker said. “We’ve been looking for sideways drift. Well, we found it, but is it enough? Maybe we ought to terminate this mission.”
There was a moment of silence.
“Please, no,” Leonilla said.
“I second that,” Rick added. “You don’t want to either. Who does?”
“Not me,” Jakov said.
“Unanimous. But it’s hardly a democracy,” Baker said. “We’ve lost a lot of power. It’s going to get warm in here.”
“You stood it in Spacelab until you got the wing fixed,” Delanty said. “If you could take it before, you can take it now. And so can we.”
“Right,” Baker said. “But you will stand by those meteor patches.”
“Yes, sir.”
Minutes later Hamner-Brown’s nucleus dropped behind the Earth. The Moon rose in its ghostly net of shock waves. Leonilla passed out breakfast.
Dawn found Harvey Randall in an easy chair on the lawn, with a table to hold his cigarettes and coffee and another to hold the portable television. Dawn washed out the once-in-a-lifetime sky show and left him a little depressed, a little drunk, and not really ready to start a working day. Loretta found him in the same state two hours later.
“I’ve gone to work in worse shape,” he told her. “It was worth it.”
“I’m glad. Are you sure you can drive?”
“Of course I can.” That was an old argument.
“Where are you going to be today?”
He didn’t notice the worry in her voice. “I had a hell of a time deciding that. I really want to be everywhere at once. But hell, the regular network science team will be at JPL, and they’ve got a good crew in Houston. I think I’ll start at City Hall. Bentley Allen and staff calmly taking care of the city while half the populace runs for the hills.”
“But that’s all the way downtown.”
Now he heard it. “So?”
“But what if it hits? You’ll be miles away. How can you get back?”
“Loretta, it’s not going to hit us. Listen—”
“You’ve got the swimming pool filled with fresh water and I couldn’t use it yesterday and you covered it up!” Her voice rose. “You made a couple of hundred dollars’ worth of dried beef and you sent our boy into the mountains and you filled the garage with expensive liquor and—”
“Loretta—”
“—and we don’t drink that kind of thing, and nobody could eat that meat unless they were starving to death. So you think we’ll be starving. Don’t you?”
“No. Honey, it’s hundreds to one against—”
“Harvey, please. Stay home today. Just this once. I never make a fuss about you being off somewhere all the time. I didn’t complain when you volunteered for another tour in Vietnam. I didn’t complain when you went to Peru. I didn’t complain when you took three weeks extra in Alaska. I’ve never said anything about having to raise your boy, who’s smarter than I am only he’s seen less of his father than Ralph Harris ever saw of his. I know your job means more to you than I do, but please, Harvey, don’t I mean something to you?”
“Of course you do.” He grabbed her and pulled her to him. “Lord, is that how you feel? The job doesn’t mean more than you do.” It’s just the money, he thought. And I can’t say that. I can’t say that I don’t need the money, you do.
“Then you’ll stay?”
“I can’t. Really can’t. Loretta, these documentaries have been good. Really good. Maybe I’ll get an offer from ABC. They’ll need a new science feature editor pretty soon, and that’s real folding money. And there’s a real chance of a book…”
“You’ve been up all night, Harvey, you’re in no shape to go anywhere. And I’m scared.”
“Hey.” He hugged her tightly and kissed her hard. And it’s all my fault, he told himself. How could she not be scared, after all the stuff I bought? But I can’t miss Hammer Day… “Look. I’ll send somebody else down to City Hall.”
“Good!”
“And I’ll have Charlie and Manuel meet me at UCLA.”
“But why can’t you stay here?”
“Got to do something, Loretta. Manly pride if nothing else. How can T tell people I sat at home in the root cellar after telling everybody else there wasn’t any danger? Look, I’ll get some interviews, and the Governor’s in town for a charity thing at Los Angeles Country Club, I’ll go over there just after the thing has gone by. And I won’t ever be more than ten or fifteen minutes from here. If anything happens, I’ll come home fast.”
“All right. But you still haven’t eaten your breakfast. It’s getting cold. And I filled your Thermos, and put a beer in the TravelAII.”
He ate quickly. She sat and watched him the whole time, not eating anything at all. She laughed when he made jokes, and she told him to be careful when he drove down the hill.
Communications were still bad. Mostly they spoke into recorders. It would be important to get their observations because the instruments weren’t going to be much use. Too much sandblasting. They had preserved the big telescope that could be attached to the color TV, though, and they’d record the video as well as try to send it back to Earth.
“Solar power’s down to about twenty-five percent,” Rick Delanty reported.
“Save the batteries,” Baker said.
“Rojj.”
It was getting warm in the spacecraft, but they needed the power for the recorders and other instruments.
Leonilla Malik spoke rapid-fire Russian into a mike. Jakov played with the transmitter controls, trying to get some response from Baikunyar. No luck. Leonilla continued to record. She had moored herself oddly, twisting to watch the observation port and still see the instrument board. Rick tried to follow what she was saying, but she was using too many unfamiliar words. Waxing lyrical, Rick thought. Letting her poetic streak have its way. Why not? How else could you describe being inside a comet?
They now knew less about Hamner-Brown’s path than Houston did. The last report from Houston was a miss by one thousand kilometers, but Rick wondered. Was that based on his visual observation? Because if it was, it meant only that that particular mountain would be that far off, and the cloud of solid gup was large. Not that large, though. Surely not that large.