Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [62]
She laughed. He could see her face now, pale, without detail.
He slid onto the broad arm of her chair and kissed her. She moved aside, and he slid in beside her. The chair held two, barely.
There is no harmless subject.
There was a point at which he might have disengaged. The thought that stopped him was: tomorrow, shazam! I'm Harvey Randall again.
Inside the house it was utterly black. She led him by the hand, by touch and memory, to one of the bedrooms. They undressed each other. Their clothes, falling, might as well have fallen out of the universe. Her skin was warm, almost hot. For a moment he wished he could see her face, but only for a moment.
There was gray light when he woke. His back was cold. They lay tangled together on a made bed. Maureen slept calmly, deeply, wearing a slight smile.
He was freezing. She must be too. Should he wake her up? His slow brain found a better answer. He disentangled himself, gently. She didn't wake. He went to the other of the twin beds, pulled off the bedclothes, took them back and spread them over her. Then—with the full conviction that he was about to climb under the covers with her—he stood without moving for almost a minute.
She wasn't his wife.
"Shazam," Harvey said softly. He scooped up an armload of his clothes, careful to miss nothing. He padded out into the living room. He was starting to shiver. The first door he tried was another bedroom. He dumped the clothes on a chair and went to bed.
Not dead, but transmuted! The comet is glorious in its agony. The streamer of its torn flesh reaches millions of miles, a wake of strange chemicals blowing back toward the cometary halo on a wind of reflected light. Perhaps a few molecules will plate themselves across the icy surfaces of other comets.
Earth's telescopes find the comet blocked by the blazing sun itself. Its exact orbit is still uncertain.
The glory of the tail is reflected sunlight, but more than sunlight glows in the coma. Some chemicals can lie intimately mixed at near absolute zero, but heat them and they burn. The coma seethes in change.
The head grows smaller every day. Here, ammonia boils from the surface of an ice-and-dust mixture; the hydrogen has long since boiled out. The mass contracts, and its density increases. Soon there will be little but rock dust cemented together by water ice. There, a stone monolith the size of a hill blocks the path of a gas pocket that grows hourly warmer, until something gives. Gas blasts away into the coma. The stony mass pulls slowly away, tumbling. The orbit of Hamner-Brown has been changed minutely.
June: One
The lord Himself will descend from heaven with a cry of command, with the archangel's call, and with the sound of the trumpet of God. The dead in Christ will rise first; then we who remain alive shall be caught up together with them in the clouds to meet the Lord in the air; and so we shall always be with the Lord.
Paul of Tarsus, First Thessalonians
There at the top of the great disintegrating totem pole, there in that tiny space at the tip, Rick Delanty lay on his back with his smile blinking on and off. His carefully enunciated voice gave no hint of that. It sounded just like Johnny's; and Johnny Baker wore the slight frown of a man doing delicate work.
"Switch to internal power."
"Internal power check. In the green."
"T minus fifteen minutes, and counting."
Whenever he glanced over at Rick, at that wavering smile, then Johnny's lips twitched at the corners. But Johnny Baker had been up before; he could afford to be supercilious. Fifteen minutes, and no glitches. It would take a man his whole life to write down all the glitches that could stop an Apollo launch.
Delanty kept smiling. They'd picked him! He'd gone through the training, and the simulators, and then off to Florida. Two days ago he's been doing barrel rolls and loops and Immelmanns and dives above Florida and the Bahamas. That final loosening-up flight two days before a launch was just too