Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [17]
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
It appears that the inner planets have ceaselessly been bombarded since their formation. Mars, Mercury, and Earth's Moon have undergone repeated strikes by objects ranging in size from micrometeorites to whatever cracked the Moon and created the large lava basin called Oceanus Procellarum.
Although it was originally thought that Mars, because it was at the edge of the asteroid belt, experienced a higher rate of meteoric bombardment, examination of Mercury indicates that Mars is not exceptional, and the inner planets have approximately equal probabilities of being struck …
Mariner Preliminary Report
The TravelAll was crammed with equipment: cameras, tape recorders, lights and reflectors,