Lucifer's Hammer Read online

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

  Be the First in Your Block to Help Blow Out the Electric Power Network of the Northeast

  East Village Other is proud to announce the first annual blackout of the Werewolves which is fixed for 3 P.M. on Wednesday, August 19, 1970. Once more let me put the system to the test. Switch on all the electric equipment you can lay hands on. Help the companies producing and distributing electric power to improve their balance sheets by consuming as much as you can; and even then find some way of using a bit more. In particular, switch on electric heaters, toasters, air conditioning, and any other apparatus with a high consumption. Refrigerators turned up to the maximum, with their doors left open, can cool down a large apartment in an amusing way. After an afternoon’s consumption-spree we will meet in Central Park to bay at the moon.

  TUNE IN! PLUG IN! BLOW OUT!

  Hospitals and other emergency services are hereby warned and invited to take necessary precautions.

  The East Village Other (an underground paper)

  July 1970

  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 power-systems 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 paperwork.

  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 means 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 traffic 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 time-server 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 goddam 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.