Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [103]
"Shut up," Joanna said. "Shut up, shut up." But she didn't say it loud enough to hear. She whispered, and her whisper was drowned out by rumbling that rolled toward them, and then the mountains began to dance.
The communications center at JPL was jammed with people: newsmen with special passes; friends of the Director; and even some people, like Charles Sharps and Dan Forrester, who belonged there.
The TV screens were bright with pictures. Reception wasn't as good as they'd have liked; the ionized tail of the comet roiled the upper atmosphere, and live TV pictures were apt to dissolve into wavy lines. No matter, Sharps thought. They'll make onboard recordings in the Apollo, and we'll recover them later. And there'll be all those film pictures, taken through the telescope. We'll learn more about comets in the next hour than we have learned in the last hundred thousand years.
That was a sobering thought, but Sharps was used to it. It was the same for the planets, for the whole solar system. Until men went—or sent probes—into space, they were guessing about their universe. Now they knew. And no other generation could ever discover so much, because the next generation would read it from textbooks, not from the universe itself. They would grow up knowing. Not like when I was growing up and we didn't know anything, Sharps thought. God, what exciting times. I love it.
A digital clock ticked off the seconds. A glass panel with a world map showed the current position of the Apollo capsule.
Apollo-Soyuz, Sharps reminded himself, and he grinned, because if the one hadn't gone, the other wouldn't have either. U.S.-Soviet rivalry was still good for something. Sometimes. To force U.S.-Soviet cooperation, if nothing else.
Pity we're having communications problems. Power losses on Hammerlab. Didn't anticipate that. Should have. But we didn't think it would be this close when we threw Hammerlab together.
"How close?" Sharps said.
Forrester looked up from his computer console. "Hard to say." He played his fingers across the keys like E. Power Biggs at the Milan Cathedral organ. "If that last input hadn't been garbled, I'd know. Best estimate is still around a thousand kilometers. If. If that garbled reading was right. And if the one I threw out because it didn't fit the others is wrong. There are a lot of ifs."
"Yeah."
"Taking shots … number thirty-one filter … handheld … " They could barely recognize Rick Delanty's voice.
"One of your accomplishments," Dan Forrester said.
"Mine? Which one is this?"
"Getting the first black astronaut a mission," Forrester said, but he said it absently, because he was studying squiggles on the oscilloscope above his console. He did something, and one of the TV pictures improved enormously.
Charlie Sharps looked at the approaching cloud. He saw it only as a batch of not very sharply focused grays, but one thing was evident—it wasn't moving sideways at all. The seconds ticked on relentlessly.
"Where the devil is Hamner?" Sharps asked suddenly.
Forrester, if he heard, didn't answer.
" … path of outer edges of nucleus; say again, Earth … Outer … impossible … may strike … " The voice faded.
"Hammerlab, this is Houston, we do not copy, use full power and say again; I say again, we do not copy."
More seconds ticked off. Then, suddenly, the TV pictures on the screens swam, blurred and became clearer, in color, as Apollo used the main telescope and full transmission power.
"Jesus, it's coming closer" Johnny Baker's voice shouted. "Like it's going to hit … "
The TV screens changed rapidly as Rick Delanty kept the main telescope trained on the comet head. The comet grew and grew, shapes appearing in the maelstrom of fog, larger shapes, details, lumps of rock, jets of streaming gas, all happening even as they watched. The picture swung on down, until the Earth itself was in view …
And flaming spots appeared on the Earth. For just one long moment, a moment that seemed to stretch out forever, the pictures stayed there on the TV screen: Earth, with bright