Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [36]
His brother (mother's son, not just blood) waited for him in a car that wasn't hot. They drove off just at the speed limit, fast enough not to attract attention, slow enough not to get busted.
"Had to waste two," Alim said.
Harold winced, but his voice was cool. "Too bad. Who were they?"
"Nobody. Nobody important."
March: Two
Most astronomers envisage comets as forming a vast cloud surrounding the solar system and stretching perhaps halfway to the nearest star; the Dutch astronomer I. H. Oort, after whom the cloud is usually named, has estimated that the cloud contains perhaps 100 billion comets.
Brian Marsden, Smithsonian Institution
They loaded them up well in the Green Room. Two ushers and an astonishingly pretty hostess poured their glasses full as soon as they were half empty, so that Tim Hamner had drunk more than he liked. At that, he thought, I'm well off compared to Arnold. Arnold was a best-selling writer, and Arnold never talked about anything that wasn't in his books. When Tim told him Hamner-Brown was now visible to the naked eye, Arnold didn't know what Tim was talking about; when Tim told him, Arnold wanted to meet Brown.
One of the ushers signaled and Tim got unsteadily to his feet. The stairs hadn't seemed so steep when he came down them. He arrived onstage to hear the last of Johnny's smoothly professional monologue and to bask in the audience applause.
Johnny was in full form, joking with the other guests. Tim remembered from the monitor downstairs that Sharps of JPL had been giving a lecture on comets, and that Johnny seemed to know a great deal about astronomy. The other guest, a dowager whose breast equipment had, twenty years ago, given a new word to the English language, kept interrupting with off-color jokes. The dowager was quite drunk. Tim remembered that her name was Mary Jane, and that no one ever called her by her stage name anymore. At her age and weight it would have been ridiculous.
The opening chatter got Tim through a terrible moment of stage fright. Then Johnny turned to him and asked, "How do you discover a comet? I wish I'd done that." He seemed quite serious.
"You wouldn't have time," Tim said. "It takes years. Decades sometimes, and no guarantees, ever. You pick a telescope and you memorize the sky through it, and then you spend every night looking at nothing and freezing your can off. It gets cold in that mountain observatory."
Mary Jane said something. Johnny was alarmed but didn't show it. The sound man with his earphones gave Johnny a high sign. "Do you like owning a comet?" Johnny asked.
"Half a comet," Tim said automatically. "I love it."
"He won't own it long," Dr. Sharps said.
"Eh? How's that?" Tim demanded.
"It'll be the Russians who own it," Sharps said. "They're sending up a Soyuz to have a close look from space. When they get through, it will be their comet."
That was appalling. Tim asked, "But can't we do something?"
"Sure. We can put up an Apollo or something bigger. We've got the equipment sitting around getting rusty. We even did the preliminary work. But the money has run out."
"But you could put something up," Johnny asked, "if you had the money?"
"We could be up there watching Earth go through the tail. It's a shame the American people don't care more about technology. Nobody cares a hang as long as their electric carving knives work. You ever stop to think just how dependent we are on things that none of us understand?" Sharps gestured dramatically around the TV studio.
Johnny started to say something—about the housewife who ran a home computer as a hobby—and changed his mind. The studio audience was listening. There was a careful silence that Johnny had long since learned to respect. They wanted to