Then the program was on again. There wasn’t much more about Tim Hamner. Once discovered, Hamner-Brown Comet was the world’s. Now the star was Charles Sharps, who talked about comets and the importance of knowing the Sun and planets and stars. Tim wasn’t disappointed, but he thought the others were. Except for Pat, who watched Sharps and kept nodding. Once, Pat looked up and said, “If I’d had a science professor like him in my freshman year, I might have discovered a comet myself. Do you know him very well?”
“Sharps? Never met him. But I’ve got more of him on the video recordings,” Tim said. “There’s more of me, too.”
Greg pointedly glanced at his watch. “Got to be in the office at five A.M.,” he said. “The market’s going crazy. And after that show, it will be worse.”
“Huh?” Tim frowned. “Why?”
“Comets,” Greg said. “Signs in the sky. Portents of evil change. You’d be surprised how many investors take things like that seriously. Not to mention that diagram the professor drew. The one that showed the comet hitting Earth.”
“But it didn’t,” Pat protested.
’Tim! Could it?” his mother demanded.
“Of course not! Didn’t you listen? Sharps said it was billions to one,” Tim said.
“I saw it,” Greg said. “And he said comets did hit the Earth, sometimes. And this one will be close.”
“But he didn’t mean it that way,” Tim protested.
Greg shrugged. “I know the market. I’m going to be in the office when the big board opens—”
The phone rang. Tim looked puzzled. Before he could get up, Jill answered it. She listened for a moment, then looked puzzled as well. “It’s your answering service. They want to know whether they should put through a call from New York.”
“Eh?” Tim got up to take the phone. He listened. On me TV a NASA official was explaining how they might, just might, be able to get up a probe to study the comet. Tim put the phone down.
“You look dazed,” Penelope Joyce said.
“I am dazed. That was one of the producers. They want me to be a guest on the ‘Tonight Show.’ With Dr. Sharps, Pat, so I’ll meet him after all.”
“I watch Johnny every night,” Tim’s mother said. She said it admiringly. People who got on the “Tonight Show” were important.
Randall’s documentary ended in a blaze of glory, with photographs of the Sun and stars taken by Skylab, and a strong plea for a manned probe to explore Hamner-Brown Comet. Then came the last commercial, and Tim’s audience was leaving. Tim realized, not for the first time, just how far apart they’d grown. He really didn’t have much to say to the head of a stockbroker firm, or to a man who built town houses, even if they were his brother-in-law and his brother. He found himself mixing drinks for himself and Penelope (Joyce!) alone.
“It felt like opening night in a bad play,” Tim said.
“In Boston with an allegory and the Shriners are in town,” Joyce teased.
He laughed. “Hah. Haven’t seen Light Up the Sky since… by golly, since you were in that summer drama thing. And you’re right. That’s what it was like.”
`’Poo.”
“Poo?”
“Poo. You always did think like that, and there never was any reason to, and there isn’t one now. You can be proud Tim. What’s next? Another comet?”
“No, I don’t think so.” He squeezed lime into her gin and tonic and handed it to her. “I don’t know. I’m not strong enough on theory to do what I really want.”
“So learn the theory.”
“Maybe.” He came around and sat next to her. “But anyway, I made the history books. Skoal.”
She lifted her drink in salute. She wasn’t mocking him. “Skoal.”
He sipped at his drink. “I’ll follow it as far as it goes, whatever else I do. Randall wants another documentary, and we’ll do it, if the ratings aren’t too bad.”
“Ratings? You worry about ratings?”
“You’re teasing me again.”
“Not this time.”
“Hmm. All right. I’ll back another documentary. Because I want it. We’ll go heavy on the space probe. With enough publicity we might get the probe up, and somebody like Sharps really will understand comets. Thanks.”
She put a hand on his arm. “You’re welcome. Run with it, Tim. Nobody else here tonight has done half of what they want to do. You’ve already got three-quarters, and a shot at the rest.”
He looked at her and thought, If I married her, Mom would heave a great sigh of relief. She was in that limited class of women. They all seemed to know his sister Jill; they’d gone east to college, and to New York during vacations; they’d broken the same rules; they were not afraid of their mothers; they were beautiful and frightening. The sex urge in a teen-age boy was too powerful, too easily twisted and repressed. It made the beauty of a young woman into a flame, and when that flame was coupled to total self-confidence… a girl like any of Jill’s friends could be a fearsome thing, to a boy who had never believed in himself.
Joyce wasn’t fearsome. She wasn’t pretty enough.
She frowned. “What are you thinking?”
God, no! He couldn’t answer that one! “I was remembering a lot.” Had he been deliberately left alone with Joyce? Certainly she had stayed after the others had left. If he made a pass now…
But he didn’t have the courage. Or, he told himself, the kindness. She was elegant, yes, but you don’t go to bed with a Steuben crystal vase. He got up and went to the video recorder. “Want to watch some of the other clips?”
For a moment she hesitated. She looked at him carefully, then just as carefully drained her glass and set it on the coffee table. “Thanks, Tim, but I’d better get some sleep. There’s a buyer coming in tomorrow.”
She was still smiling when she left. Tim thought it a bit forced. Or, he wondered, am I just flattering myself?
The maelstrom was intolerably crowded. Masses of all sizes whirled past each other, warping space into a complex topology that changed endlessly. The inner moons and planets were all scar tissue, worn craters beneath the atmospheres of Earth and Venus, naked ring walls and frozen lakes of magma spread across the faces of Mars, Mercury, Earth’s Moon.
Here was even the chance of escape. The gravity fields around Saturn and Jupiter could fling a comet hack out into the cold and the dark. But Saturn and Jupiter were wrongly placed, and the comet continued to fall, accelerating, boiling.
Boiling! Pockets of volatile chemicals burst and spurted away in puffs of dust and ice crystals. Now the comet moved in a cloud of glowing fog that might have shielded it from the heat, but didn’t. Instead the fog caught the sunlight across thousands of cubic miles and reflected it back to the comet head from every direction.
Heat at the surface of the nucleus seeped inward. More pockets of gas ruptured and fired like attitude jets on a spacecraft, tossing the comet head this way and that. Masses tugged at it as it passed. Lost and blind and falling. The dying comet dropped past Mars, invisible within a cloud of dust and ice crystals the size of Mars itself.
A telescope on Earth found it as a blurred point near Neptune.
March: Interludes
None of the astronauts ever walked on solid lunar rock, because everywhere they have gone there was “soil” underfoot. This powdery layer is present because the Moon has been bombarded by meteorites throughout geologic time. The unceasing barrage has so pulverized the surface that it has created a residual layer of rocky debris several meters thick.