Lucifer's Hammer - Larry Niven [91]
"Roger, Houston. We do have sideways motion relative to us. It should be coming onto your telemetry right now," Baker was saying. "And there's still activity, although that's been dying out ever since the Hammer rounded the Sun. We got only one explosive event last watch, nothing big, not like the monster we observed yesterday."
"Hammerlab, there appears to be something wrong with the Doppler data. JPL requests you get optical tracking on the largest piece you can find. Can do?"
"Can try, Houston."
"I'll get it, Johnny," Rick said. He cranked up the resolution on the telescope and peered into the murk. "Leonilla, can you lend a hand? Slave the output onto the telemetry—"
"Right," she said.
"Mark, mark, I'm off, mark, mark … "
Baker continued his report. "Houston, that nucleus is pretty well spread out, and the coma is huge. I fed the angular diameter into the computer and I get a hundred and forty thousand kilometers. As big as Jupiter. It could envelope the Earth without noticing."
"Don't be silly," a familiar voice crackled. "Gravity … rip it to pieces … " Charlie Sharps's voice began to fade.
"Houston, we're losing you," Baker said.
"That's not Houston, that's Sharps at JPL," Rick said without looking up from the scope. "Mark, mark … "
"It comes through Houston. Damn. The comet stuff is playing pure hell with the ionosphere. We're going to have communications problems until that thing's past. Better record every observation we can get, just in case they're not going through."
"Rojj," Delanty said. He continued to stare into the telescope. Hamner-Brown's nucleus was spread out before him. He was having trouble keeping the cross hairs exactly centered on the mass he'd picked. There wasn't enough contrast to use an automatic tracking system; it had to be done by eye. Delanty smiled. Another blow for man-in-space. "Mark, mark … "
He saw thick, glowing dust in sluggish motion, and a handful of flying mountains, and many more smaller particles, all jumbled, without order, parts moving in random patterns as they responded to light pressure and continuing chemical activity. It was the primal stuff of chaos. His mouth watered with the need to take a spacecraft into that, land on one of the mountains and walk out for a look around. The fifty-mile per-second velocity of those mountains was not evident. But it would be decades before NASA could build manned ships that good. If anyone built them at all. And when it was done, Rick Delanty would be a tired old man.
But this won't be my last mission. We've got the Shuttle coming up, if those goddam congresscritters don't turn it into pork for their own districts …
Pieter Jakov had been working with a spectroscope. He finished his observations and said, "They have set us a hectic schedule for this morning. I see that extravehicular activity for final check of external instruments is optional. Should we? There are two hours left."
"Crazy Russian. No, we're not going to EVA into that. A snowflake at that speed can't hole the Hammerlab, but it can sure as hell leave a hole in your suit the size of your fist." Baker frowned at the computer readouts. "Rick, that last optical. What did you pick?"
"A big mountain," Rick said. "About the center of the nucleus, just as they asked. Why?"
"Nothing." Baker thumbed the microphone. "Houston, Houston, did you get the optical readings?"
" … squeal … negative, Hammerlab, send again … "
"What the hell is it, Johnny?" Rick demanded.
"Houston and JPL get a miss distance of nine thousand kilometers," Johnny said thoughtfully. "I don't. Feeding your data into the onboard I come up with about a quarter of that. They've got more computing power down there, but we've got better data."
"Hell, two thousand kilometers is two thousand kilometers," Delanty said. He didn't sound confident.
"I wish we didn't have