Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [53]
"Well, I beat you to it. Tim, you really know how to get a girl's attention. The flowers are beautiful, but the vase—I mean, we'd only just met!"
He laughed. "I take it you're a Steuben crystal fan, then. I've got a nice collection myself."
"Oh?"
"I go ape over the animals." Tim shifted to a sitting position. "I've got … Let's see, a blue whale, a unicorn, a giraffe I got from my grandmother, it's in an older style. And the Frog Prince. Have you seen the Frog Prince?"
"I've seen pictures of His Majesty. Hey, Tim, let me take you to dinner. There's an unusual place called Dar Magrib."
A man would usually pause when Eileen asked him to dinner. With Tim the pause was barely noticeable. "Mr. Hamner accepts, with thanks. Dar Magrib's unusual, all right. Have you been there?"
"Yes. It's very good."
"And you were going to let me go without warning? Without telling me I'd be eating with my fingers?"
Eileen laughed. "Test your flexibility."
"Uh-huh. Why don't you come over here for cocktails first? I'll introduce you to His Majesty and the other crystal." Tim told her how to get there.
Fred Lauren came home with a stack of magazines. He dropped them beside the easy chair, sank into the sagging springs and began reading the National Enquirer.
The article confirmed his worst fears. The comet was certain to hit, and nobody had any idea where. But it was going to hit in summer, and therefore (the sketch made clear) it would hit in the Northern Hemisphere. Nobody knew how massive the comet head would be, but the Enquirer said it might mean the end of the world.
And he had heard that radio preacher, that fool who was on all the stations. The end of the world was coming. His jaw tightened, and he picked up the copy of Astronomy. According to Astronomy it was a hundred thousand to one against any part of the head striking the Earth, but Fred barely noticed that. What drew him were the artist's conceptions, infinitely vivid, of an asteroid strike sending up jets of molten magma; of an "average" asteroid poised above Los Angeles for comparison; of a comet head striking ocean, the sea bed laid bare.
The pages had grown too dark to see, but Fred didn't think of turning on the light. Many men never believe they are going to die, but Fred believed, now. He sat in the dark until it occurred to him that Colleen must have come home, and then he went to the telescope.
The girl wasn't in view, but the lights were on. An empty room. Fred's eye suddenly painted it with flame. The stucco wall around the window flashed blinding light, which died slowly to reveal curtains flaming, bedclothes, couch, tablecloth and table, everything afire. Windows shattered, splinters flying. Bathroom door—opened.
The girl came out struggling into a robe. She was naked. To Fred she glowed like a saint, with a beauty almost impossible to see directly. An eternity passed before she closed the robe … and in that eternity Fred saw her bathed in the light of Hammerfall. Colleen glowed like a star, eyelids clenched futilely shut, face speckled with glass splinters, robe charring, long blonde hair crisping, blackening, flaming … and she was gone before they had met. Fred turned away from the telescope.
We can't meet, the voice of reason told him. I know what I'd do. I can't face prison again.
Prison? When the comet was coming to end the world? Trials took time. He'd never reach prison. He'd be dead first. Fred Lauren smiled very strangely; the muscles at the corners of his jaw were knotted tight. He'd be dead first!
May
By the 1790's, philosophers and scientists were aware of many allegations that stones had fallen from the sky, but the most eminent scientists were skeptical. The first great advance came in 1794, when a German lawyer, E.F.F. Chladni, published a study of some alleged meteorites, one of which had been found after a fireball had been sighted. Chladni accepted the evidence that these meteorites had fallen from the sky and correctly inferred that they were extraterrestrial objects that were heated from falling through