Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [27]
Joyce wasn't fearsome. She wasn't pretty enough.
She frowned. "What are you thinking?"
God, no! He couldn't answer that one! "I was remembering a lot." Had he been deliberately left alone with Joyce? Certainly she had stayed after the others had left. If he made a pass now …
But he didn't have the courage. Or, he told himself, the kindness. She was elegant, yes, but you don't go to bed with a Steuben crystal vase. He got up and went to the video recorder. "Want to watch some of the other clips?"
For a moment she hesitated. She looked at him carefully, then just as carefully drained her glass and set it on the coffee table. "Thanks, Tim, but I'd better get some sleep. There's a buyer coming in tomorrow."
She was still smiling when she left. Tim thought it a bit forced. Or, he wondered, am I just flattering myself?
The maelstrom was intolerably crowded. Masses of all sizes whirled past each other, warping space into a complex topology that changed endlessly. The inner moons and planets were all scar tissue, worn craters beneath the atmospheres of Earth and Venus, naked ring walls and frozen lakes of magma spread across the faces of Mars, Mercury, Earth's Moon.
Here was even the chance of escape. The gravity fields around Saturn and Jupiter could fling a comet back out into the cold and the dark. But Saturn and Jupiter were wrongly placed, and the comet continued to fall, accelerating, boiling.
Boiling! Pockets of volatile chemicals burst and spurted away in puffs of dust and ice crystals. Now the comet moved in a cloud of glowing fog that might have shielded it from the heat, but didn't. Instead the fog caught the sunlight across thousands of cubic miles and reflected it back to the comet head from every direction.
Heat at the surface of the nucleus seeped inward. More pockets of gas ruptured and fired like attitude jets on a spacecraft, tossing the comet head this way and that. Masses tugged at it as it passed. Lost and blind and falling. The dying comet dropped past Mars, invisible within a cloud of dust and ice crystals the size of Mars itself.
A telescope on Earth found it as a blurred point near Neptune.
March: Interludes
None of the astronauts ever walked on solid lunar rock, because everywhere they have gone there was "soil" underfoot. This powdery layer is present because the Moon has been bombarded by meteorites throughout geologic time. The unceasing barrage has so pulverized the surface that it has created a residual layer of rocky debris several meters thick.
Dr. John A. Wood, Smithsonian Institution
Fred Lauren made delicate adjustments to the telescope. It was a big instrument, a four-inch refractor on a heavy tripod. The apartment cost him too much money, but he had to have it for the location. His only furniture was a cheap couch, a few cushions on the floor, and the big telescope.
Fred watched a darkened window a quarter-mile away. She had to come home soon. She always did. What could she be doing? She'd left alone. No one had come for her. The thought frightened him, then made him sick. Suppose she had met a man somewhere? Had they gone for dinner, and then to his apartment? Even now he might be putting his filthy hands on her breasts. He would have hairy hands, rough, like a mechanic's, and they would be sliding downward, caressingly down across the flat curve of her belly.
No! She wasn't that kind. She wouldn't let anyone do that to her. She wouldn't.
But all women did. Even his mother. Fred Lauren shuddered. Unwanted, the memory came back, when he was just nine, when he'd gone in to ask his mother to say his prayers, and she'd been lying on the bed with the man he called Uncle Jack on top of her. She was moaning and writhing, and Uncle Jack had leaped from the bed.
"You little bastard, I'll cut your goddamn balls off! You want to watch? You'll sure to God watch? Stand there and if you say one word, I'll cut your prick off!"
He'd watched. And his mother had let that man—
The window came alight.