Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [82]
So. That leaves running, and the TravelAll's in as good a shape as I can get it. Bicycles will fit on top, if, as and when. And there's Sunday to go for things I haven't thought of.
Harvey went in, exhausted, but with a feeling of satisfaction. He wasn't exactly ready, but at least he could pretend to be prepared. And a lot better than most. Loretta had waited up for him, and she had the Ben-Gay out. She didn't bug him with a lot of questions; she just rubbed him down good, decided he wasn't interested in anything more intimate and let him get to sleep.
As he dropped off he thought about how much he loved her.
June: Four
The Earth is just too small and fragile a basket for the human race to keep all its eggs in.
Robert A. Heinlein
It was night below on Earth. Every ninety minutes Hammerlab passed through day and night; time aboard was kept by a clock, not by light and dark outside.
Cities glowed across Europe at the world's edge, but the black face of the Atlantic covered half the sky, hiding nucleus and coma of Hamner-Brown. In the other direction stars blazed through thin mist. The comet's tail streamed up from the horizon on all sides, doming the black Earth with luminous blues and oranges and greens streaming upward to the dome's star-pierced dark apex. Far off to the side the half-moon floated in a matrix of shock waves, like diamond patterns in a still photograph of rocket flame. It was a sight that no one could tire of.
They had broken off work for dinner. Rick Delanty ate steadily, his attention on the glory beyond the windows. They had all lost weight—they always did—but Rick was already nine pounds light, and was trying to make up for it. (Considerable ingenuity had gone into devising a gadget to find a human's weight in null-gravity.)
"So long as you've got your health," Rick said, "you've got everything. Wow, it's good not to vomit."
He got puzzled looks from the kosmonauts, who had never watched American TV commercials. Baker ignored him. The Sun exploded over the world's edge. Rick closed his eyes for a few moments, then opened them to watch dawn's blue-and-white arc roll toward them. Yesterday's hurricane pattern still squatted on the Indian Ocean like a sea monster on an ancient map. Typhoon Hilda. Far to the left was Everest and the Himalaya massif. "That's a sight I'm never going to get tired of."
"Yes." Leonilla joined him at the viewport. "But it seems so very fragile. As if I could reach out and … run my thumb across the land, leaving a path of destruction hundreds of kilometers wide. That is an uneasy feeling."
Johnny Baker said, "Hold that thought. The Earth is fragile."
"You are worried about the comet?" Her expression was hard to read. Russian face and body language is not quite the same as American.
"Forget the comet. The more you know, the more fragile we are," said Johnny. "A nearby nova could sterilize everything on Earth except the bacteria. Or the Sun might flare up. Or cool off a lot. Our galaxy could become a Seyfert galaxy, exploding and killing everything."
Leonilla was amused. "We need not worry for thirty-three thousand years. Speed of light, you know."
Johnny shrugged. "So it happened thirty-two thousand, nine hundred years ago. Or we could do it to ourselves. Chemical garbage killing the ocean, or heat pollution—"
Rick said, "Not so fast. Heat pollution could be the only thing saving us from the glaciers. Some people think the next Ice Age started a few centuries back. And we're running out of coal and oil."
"Sheesh! You can't win."
"Atomic wars. Giant meteor impacts. Supersonic aircraft destroying the ozone layers," said Pieter Jakov. "Why are we doing this?"
"Because we aren't safe down there," Baker said.
"The Earth is large, and probably not as delicate as it looks," Leonilla said. "But man's ingenuity … sometimes that is what I fear."
"Only one answer," Baker said. He was very serious now. "We've got to get off. Colonize the planets. Not just here, planets in other systems. Build really big spacecraft, more mobile than planets.