Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [43]
Forrester said, "No, that was hot fudge sundae we were talking about. Um—the Hammer is bigger."
"Hamner-Brown. How much bigger?"
Forrester made an uncertain gesture. "Ten times?"
"Yes," said Harvey. There were pictures in his mind. Glaciers marched south across fields and forests, across vegetation already killed by snow. Down across North America into California, across Europe to the Alps and Pyrenees. Winter after winter, each colder, each colder than the Great Freeze of '76-'77. And hell, they hadn't even mentioned the tidal waves. "But a comet won't be as dense as a cubic mile of h-h-h—"
It was just one of those things. Harvey leaned back in his chair and belly-laughed, because there was just no way he could say it.
Later he made his own tape, alone, in a studio approximation of an office—fake books on the shelves, worn carpet on the floor. Here he could talk.
"Sorry about that." (This would run just after one of Harvey's breakups. He'd done that several times in the Sharps interview.) "The points to remember are these. First, the odds against any solid part of Hamner-Brown hitting us are literally astronomical. Over these distances even the Devil himself couldn't hit a target as small as Earth. Second, if it did hit, it would probably be as several large masses. Some of those would hit ocean. Others would hit land, where the damage would be local. But if Hamner-Brown did strike the Earth, it would be as if the Devil had struck with an enormous hammer, repeatedly."
April: Interludes
Fifty thousand years ago in Arizona:
Friction with the air makes the surface incandescent as the oxygen in the atmosphere blowtorches the iron. From this great flying mass, sputtering chunks as large as houses fly off as the meteoroid, travelling at a low angle, nears the ground. A huge cylinder of superheated air is forced along by the meteoroid and, as it strikes, this air is forced across the surrounding countryside in a fiery blast that instantaneously scorches every living thing for a hundred miles in every direction.
Frank W. Lane, The Elements Rage (Chilton, 1965)
Leonilla Malik scribbled a prescription and handed it to her patient. He was the last for the morning, and when the man had left her examining room, Leonilla took the bottle of Grand Marnier from her lower desk drawer and poured a small, precious glass. The expensive liqueur was a present from one of her fellow kosmonauts, and drinking it gave her a delicious feeling of decadence. Her friend also brought her silk hose and a slip from Paris.
And I've never been outside Russia, she thought. She let the sweet fluid roll over her tongue. No matter how I try, they will never let me go.
She wondered what her status was. Her father had been a physician with a fairly good reputation among the Kremlin elite. Then had come the "Doctors' Plot," an insane Stalinist delusion that the Kremlin physicians were trying to poison The Revolutionary Leader of Our Times, Hero of the People, Teacher and Inspired Leader of the World Proletariat, Comrade Josef Vissarionovich Stalin. Her father and forty other doctors had vanished into the Lubianka.
One of her father's legacies was a 1950 copy of Pravda. He had carefully underlined every mention of Stalin's name: ninety-one times on the front page alone, ten times as Great Leader, and six as Great Stalin.
He should have poisoned the bastard, Leonilla thought. It wasn't a pleasant concept; there was a long tradition about that. The Oath of Hippocrates wasn't taught in Soviet medical schools, but she had read it.
As the daughter of an enemy of the people, Leonilla's future hadn't seemed very bright; but then had come a new era, and Dr. Malik was rehabilitated. By way of reparations, Leonilla had been rescued from secretarial work in an obscure Ukrainian town and sent to the university. A liaison with an Air Force colonel had resulted in her learning to fly, and from that, weirdly, to her ambiguous status in the kosmonaut corps. The colonel was now a general and