Most astronomers envisage comets as forming a vast cloud surrounding the solar system and stretching perhaps halfway to the nearest star; the Dutch astronomer J. H. Oort, after whom the cloud is usually named, has estimated that the cloud contains perhaps 100 billion comets.Brian Marsden, Smithsonian Institution
They loaded them up well in the Green Room. Two ushers and an astonishingly pretty hostess poured their glasses full as soon as they were half empty, so that Tim Hamner had drunk more than he liked. At that, he thought, I'm well off compared to Arnold. Arnold was a best-selling writer, and Arnold never talked about anything that wasn't in his books. When Tim told him Hamner-Brown was now visible to the naked eye, Arnold didn't know what Tim was talking about; when Tim told him, Arnold wanted to meet Brown.
One of the ushers signaled and Tim got unsteadily to his feet. The stairs hadn't seemed so steep when he came down them. He arrived onstage to hear the last of Johnny's smoothly professional monologue and to bask in the audience applause.
Johnny was in full form, joking with the other guests. Tim remembered from the monitor downstairs that Sharps of JPL had been giving a lecture on comets, and that Johnny seemed to know a great deal about astronomy. The other guest, a dowager whose breast equipment had, twenty years ago, given a new word to the English language, kept interrupting with off-color jokes. The dowager was quite drunk. Tim remembered that her name was Mary Jane, and that no one ever called her by her stage name anymore. At her age and weight it would have been ridiculous.
The opening chatter got Tim through a terrible moment of stage fright. Then Johnny turned to him and asked, "How do you discover a comet? I wish I'd done that." He seemed quite serious.
"You wouldn't have time," Tim said. "It takes years. Decades sometimes, and no guarantees, ever. You pick a telescope and you memorize the sky through it, and then you spend every night looking at nothing and freezing your can off. It gets cold in that mountain observatory."
Mary Jane said something. Johnny was alarmed but didn't show it. The sound man with his earphones gave Johnny a high sign. "Do you like owning a comet?" Johnny asked.
"Half a comet," Tim said automatically. "I love it."
"He won't own it long," Dr. Sharps said.
"Eh? How's that?" Tim demanded.
"It'll be the Russians who own it," Sharps said. "They're sending up a Soyuz to have a close look from space. When they get through, it will be their comet."
That was appalling. Tim asked, "But can't we do something?"
"Sure. We can put up an Apollo or something bigger. We've got the equipment sitting around getting rusty. We even did the preliminary work. But the money has run out."
"But you could put something up," Johnny asked, "if you had the money?"
"We could be up there watching Earth go through the tail. It's a shame the American people don't care more about technology. Nobody cares a hang as long as their electric carving knives work. You ever stop to think just how dependent we are on things that none of us understand?" Sharps gestured dramatically around the TV studio.
Johnny started to say something—about the housewife who ran a home computer as a hobby—and changed his mind. The studio audience was listening. There was a careful silence that Johnny had long since learned to respect. They wanted to hear Sharps. Maybe this would be one of the good nights, one of the shows that ran over and over, Sundays, anniversaries. . . .
"Not just the TV," Sharps was saying. "Your desk. Formica top. What is Formica? Anyone know how it's made? Or how to make a pencil? Much less penicillin. Our lives depend on these things, and none of us knows much about them. Not even me."
"I always wondered what makes bra straps snappy," Mary Jane said.
Johnny jumped in to give the show back to Sharps. "But tell me, Charlie, what good will it do to study that comet? How will that change our lives?"
Sharps shrugged. "It may not. You're asking what good new research does. And all I can answer is that it always has paid off. Not the way you thought it would, maybe. Who'd have thought we'd get a whole new medical technology out of the space program? But we did. Thousands are alive right now because the human-factors boys had to develop new instruments for the astronauts. Johnny, did you ever hear of the Club of Rome?"
Johnny had, but the audience would need reminding. "They were the people who did computer simulations to find out how long we could get along on our natural resources. Even with zero population growth—"
"They tell us we're finished," Sharps broke in. "And that's stupid. We're only finished because they won't let us really use technology. They say we're running out of metals. There's more metal in one little asteroid than was mined all over the world in the last five years! And there are hundreds of thousands of asteroids. All we have to do is go get 'em."
"Can we?"
"You bet! Even with the technology we already have, we could do it. Johnny, out there in space it's raining soup, and we don't even know about soup bowls."
The studio audience applauded. They hadn't been cued by the production assistants, but they applauded. Johnny gave Sharps an approving smile and decided how the program would go for the rest of the night. But first there was a frantic signal: time for a Kalva Soap commercial.
There was more after the commercial. When Sharps got going he was really dynamic. His thin, bony hands waved around like windmills. He talked about windmills, too, and about how much power the Sun put out every day. About the solar flare Skylab's crew had observed. "Johnny, there was enough power in that one little flare to run our whole civilization for hundreds of years! And those idiots talk about doom!"
But they were neglecting Tim Hamner, and Johnny had to bring him into the conversation. Hamner was sitting there nodding, obviously enjoying Sharps. Johnny carefully maneuvered the scientist back onto the comet, then saw his chance. "Charlie, you said the Russians would get a close look at Hamner-Brown. How close?"
"Pretty close. We'll definitely pass through the tail of the comet. I showed you why we can't tell how close the head will come—but it's going to be very close. If we're lucky, maybe as close as the Moon."
"I wouldn't call that luck," Mary Jane said.
"Tim, it's your comet," Johnny said. "Could Hammer-Brown actually hit us?"
"That's Hamner-Brown," Tim said.
"Oh." Johnny laughed. "What did I say? Hammer? It would be a hammer if it hit, wouldn't it?"
"You know it," Charlie Sharps said.
"Just what would it do?" Johnny asked.
"Well, we've got some pretty big holes left from meteor strikes," Tim said. "Meteor Crater in Arizona is nearly a mile wide. Vreedevort in South Africa is so big you can't see it except from the air."
"And those were the little ones," Sharps said. They all turned to look at him. Sharps grinned. "Ever notice how circular Hudson's Bay looks? Or the Sea of Japan?"
"Were those meteors?" Johnny asked. The thought was horrifying.
"A lot of us think so. And something pretty big cracked the Moon wide open—a quarter of its surface is covered by that so-called ocean, which was once a sea of lava welling up from where a big asteroid hit."
"Of course, we don't know what Hamner-Brown is made of," Tim said.
"Maybe it's time we found these things out," Mary Jane said. "Before one of them does hit us. Like this one."
"It's only a matter of time," Sharps said. "Give it long enough and the probability of a comet hitting us approaches certainty. But I don't think we have to worry about Hamner-Brown."
* * *
Henry Armitage was a TV preacher. He'd been a radio preacher until one of his converts left him ten million dollars; now he had his own slick-paper magazine, TV shows in a hundred cities, and an elaborate complex of buildings in Pasadena, complete with editorial staff.
For all that, Henry wrote much of the magazine himself, and he always did the editorials. There were too few hours in the day for Henry. He gloried in the troubles of the world. He knew what they meant. They were the signs of a greater joy to come.
For the disciples had asked the Master, " 'Tell us, when shall these things be? And what shall be the sign of thy coming, and of the end of the world?'
"And Jesus answered and said unto them, 'Take heed that no man shall deceive you. For many shall come in my name saying "I am Christ"; and shall deceive many.' " Henry had seen the entry on the Inyo County, California, police blotter: "Charles Manson, also known as Jesus Christ, God."
"And you shall hear of wars and rumors of wars: see that ye be not troubled: for all these things must come to pass, but the end is not yet. For nation shall rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; and there shall be famines, and pestilences, and earthquakes, in divers places."
Matthew was Henry's favorite Gospel; and of all the Bible, that was his favorite text. Were these not the times Christ spoke of? The signs were all present in the world.
He sat at his expensive desk. The TV was concealed behind a panel that opened when Henry touched a button. It was a long way from the wood-frame, whitewashed one-room church in Idaho where Henry had started in the Thirties. The ostentatious wealth sometimes disturbed Henry, but his supporters insisted on it, even if Henry and his wife would have been as happy in plainer surroundings.
Henry toyed with his editorial, but he didn't feel inspired. As a lesson in humility he had the TV turned to an interview show; the lesson was to watch that shallow frivolity without hating those who took part in it; and that was hard, hard . . .
Something caught his attention. A thin tall man in a herringbone sport jacket, arms waving about. Henry admired his technique. The man would make an impressive preacher. He focused all attention on himself, and his words washed across the listener.
The man was talking about a comet. A comet. A sign in the heavens? Henry knew what comets were, but because comets were natural did not mean that their timing was not miraculous. Henry had seen many healed by prayer and the doctors later "explain" the miracle.
A comet. And it would pass very close to Earth. Could this be the final sign of all? He drew a yellow lined tablet toward him and began writing in sloppy block print, using a dozen pencils. He was through three sheets before he knew his headline, and he turned back to the first page.
In two weeks his magazine would be in half a million homes around the world; and across the cover in blazing red twenty point type would be his headline:
THE HAMMER OF GOD
It would make a good text for his TV shows, too. Henry began writing frantically, feeling the way he had felt nearly forty years before, when he'd really begun to understand Matthew 24 and had carried the message to a world that didn't care.
The Hammer of God was coming to punish the decadent and the willful. Henry wrote eagerly.