Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [209]
"No," Hooker said softly, "no, no, no. We can't take it. Enough is enough, don't you understand? It has to stop now," Hooker explained, his eyes on the falling bright point. He couldn't take it, nobody could take it, if the Hammer should fall again.
His prayer was answered, weirdly, as a parachute bloomed behind the meteorite. Hooker stared, not understanding.
"It's a spacecraft," Cowles said. "I'll be damned. Hooker, it's a spacecraft. Must be from Hammerlab. Hooker, are you all right?"
"Shut up." Hooker watched the descending parachute.
Gillings bellowed from behind him. "Hey, Sergeant, what does an astronaut taste like? Like turkey?"
"We'll never know," Hooker called, and it was good that his voice was under control; good that only Cowles had seen his face. Cowles wouldn't talk. "They're coming down in the valley. Right where those farmers shot the shit out of us yesterday."
Falling east, blind. Clouds shone fiercely bright beneath the meteorite Soyuz. Here and there were whirlpool patterns, hurricane patterns. North of their path there had been a towering spike of cloud, a mother of hurricanes spinning off little ones, above the hot water that must still cover the Pacific strike. The small window shook with the Soyuz's vibration, and Johnny Baker's eyes vibrated in a different pattern. The Soyuz dipped low, dipped in and out of the cloud deck, and in, and the view went from gray-white gradually to gray-dark.
"Could be anything down there," he reported.
Falling more steeply now. Out of the clouds, but it was still dark below. Land, sea, swamp? It didn't matter. They were committed. The Soyuz had no fuel, no power, no way to maneuver. They'd stayed up as long as they could, until they were down to their last few pounds of oxygen, the last of their rations; until Hammerlab, with its low electrical power because of the sandblasted solar cells, was almost intolerably hot; until they couldn't stay in orbit any longer, and had to return to a blasted Earth.
It had seemed appropriate to make mankind's last space flight last as long as possible. Maybe they'd done some good. They'd been able to pinpoint the strikes and broadcast their locations. They'd seen the rockets rise and fall and the atomic blasts, and that was all over now. The Sino-Russian war went on and on and might last forever, but it wasn't fought with atomic weapons any longer. They'd seen it all and broadcast what they saw, and somebody heard them. There'd been an acknowledgment from Pretoria, and another from New Zealand, and almost five minutes of conversation with NORAD and Colorado Springs. Not a lot to show for four weeks in orbit past Hammerfall, but they'd have stayed if there'd been nothing. The last of the space travelers.
"Parachute opening," Pieter said from behind him. Innocuous words, but something in the tone made Johnny brace himself. It was just as well.
"Rough ride," Rick said from behind his other ear. "Maybe because we're overloaded."
"No, it's always like this," Leonilla said. "Are your Apollos more comfortable?"
"I never came down in one," Rick answered. "It must be easier on the nerves. We wear pressure suits."
"Here there is no room," Pieter said. "I have told you, we made the design different after that trouble that killed three kosmonauts. We have had no leaks, da?"
"Da."
The view was clearing, and coming up fast. "I think we are too far south," Pieter said. "The winds were not predictable."
"So long as we get down," Johnny Baker said. He looked down at the solid sheet of water below. "Can we all swim?"
Leonilla chuckled. "Can we all wade? The water doesn't look deep. In fact … " She stared down at the scene below while the others waited. She was in the chair beside Johnny; Pieter and Rick were in the cramped space behind them. "In fact, we are moving inland. East. I see three—no, four people running from a house."
"Two hundred meters," Johnny Baker said. "Get set. We're coming in. One hundred … fifty … twenty-five … "
Splot! The overburdened Soyuz landed hard. That felt like land. Johnny