Time - Man of the Year/Time_Man_of_the_Year_Compact_Publishing_3YX-Disc-1_Compact_Publishing_1993.iso/moy/101592/10159929.000

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                                                                                SPECIAL ISSUE: MILLENNIUM -- BEYOND THE YEAR 2000 

THE NEXT 1,000 YEARS, Page 83

The Hammer Of God


A New Story by ARTHUR C. CLARKE


    It came in vertically, punching a hole 10 km wide through
the atmosphere, generating temperatures so high that the air
itself started to burn. When it hit the ground near the Gulf of
Mexico, rock turned to liquid and spread outward in mountainous
waves, not freezing until it had formed a crater 200 km across.

    That was only the beginning of disaster: now the real
tragedy began. Nitric oxides rained from the air, turning the
sea to acid. Clouds of soot from incinerated forests darkened
the sky, hiding the sun for months. Worldwide, the temperature
dropped precipitously, killing off most of the plants and
animals that had survived the initial cataclysm. Though some
species would linger on for millenniums, the reign of the great
reptiles was finally over.

    The clock of evolution had been reset; the countdown to Man
had begun. The date was, very approximately, 65 million B.C.


    Captain Robert Singh never tired of walking in the forest
with his little son Toby. It was, of course, a tamed and gentle
forest, guaranteed to be free of dangerous animals, but it made
an exciting contrast to the rolling sand dunes of their last
environment in the Saudi desert -- and the one before that, on
Australia's Great Barrier Reef. But when the Skylift Service
had moved the house this time, something had gone wrong with
the food-recycling system. Though the electronic menus had
fail-safe backups, there had been a curious metallic taste to
some of the items coming out of the synthesizer recently.

    "What's that, Daddy?" asked the four-year-old, pointing to a
small hairy face peering at them through a screen of leaves.

    "Er, some kind of monkey. We'll ask the Brain when we get
home."

    "Can I play with it?"

    "I don't think that's a good idea. It could bite. And it
probably has fleas. Your robotoys are much nicer."

    "But . . ."

    Captain Singh knew what would happen next: he had run this
sequence a dozen times. Toby would begin to cry, the monkey
would disappear, he would comfort the child as he carried him
back to the house . . .

    But that had been 20 years ago and a quarter-billion
kilometers away. The playback came to an end; sound, vision,
the scent of unknown flowers and the gentle touch of the wind
slowly faded. Suddenly, he was back in this cabin aboard the
orbital tug Goliath, commanding the 100-person team of Operation
ATLAS the most critical mission in the history of space
exploration. Toby, and the stepmothers and stepfathers of his
extended family, remained behind on a distant world which Singh
could never revisit. Decades in space -- and neglect of the
mandatory zero-G exercises -- had so weakened him that he could
now walk only on the Moon and Mars. Gravity had exiled him from
the planet of his birth.

    "One hour to rendezvous, captain," said the quiet but
insistent voice of David, as Goliath's central computer had
been inevitably named. "Active mode, as requested. Time to come
back to the real world."

    Goliath's human commander felt a wave of sadness sweep over
him as the final image from his lost past dissolved into a
featureless, simmering mist of white noise. Too swift a
transition from one reality to another was a good recipe for
schizophrenia, and Captain Singh always eased the shock with
the most soothing sound he knew: waves falling gently on a
beach, with sea gulls crying in the distance. It was yet another
memory of a life he had lost, and of a peaceful past that had
now been replaced by a fearful present.

    For a few more moments, he delayed facing his awesome
responsibility. Then he sighed and removed the neural-input cap
that fitted snugly over his skull and had enabled him to call up
his distant past. Like all spacers, Captain Singh belonged to
the "Bald Is Beautiful" school, if only because wigs were a
nuisance in zero gravity. The social historians were still
staggered by the fact that one invention, the portable
"Brainman," could make bare heads the norm within a single
decade. Not even quick-change skin coloring, or the
lens-corrective laser shaping which had abolished eyeglasses,
had made such an impact upon style and fashion.

    "Captain," said David. "I know you're there. Or do you want
me to take over?"

    It was an old joke, inspired by all the insane computers in
the fiction and movies of the early electronic age. David had
a surprisingly good sense of humor: he was, after all, a Legal
Person (Nonhuman) under the famous Hundredth Amendment, and
shared -- or surpassed -- almost all the attributes of his
creators. But there were whole sensory and emotional areas
which he could not enter. It had been felt unnecessary to equip
him with smell or taste, though it would have been easy to do
so. And all his attempts at telling dirty stories were such
disastrous failures that he had abandoned the genre.

    "All right, David," replied the captain. "I'm still in
charge." He removed the mask from his eyes, and turned
reluctantly toward the viewport. There, hanging in space before
him, was Kali.

    It looked harmless enough: just another small asteroid,
shaped so exactly like a peanut that the resemblance was almost
comical. A few large impact craters, and hundreds of tiny ones,
were scattered at random over its charcoal-gray surface. There
were no visual clues to give any sense of scale, but Singh knew
its dimensions by heart: 1,295 m maximum length, 456 m minimum
width. Kali would fit easily into many city parks.

    No wonder that, even now, most of humankind could still not
believe that this modest asteroid was the instrument of doom.
Or, as the Chrislamic Fundamentalists were calling it, "the
Hammer of God."

    The sudden rise of Chrislam had been traumatic equally to
Rome and Mecca. Christianity was already reeling from John Paul
XXV's eloquent but belated plea for contraception and the
irrefutable proof in the New Dead Sea Scrolls that the Jesus of
the Gospels was a composite of at least three persons.
Meanwhile the Muslim world had lost much of its economic power
when the Cold Fusion breakthrough, after the fiasco of its
premature announcement, had brought the Oil Age to a sudden end.
The time had been ripe for a new religion embodying, as even its
severest critics admitted, the best elements of two ancient
ones.

    The Prophet Fatima Magdalene (nee Ruby Goldenburg) had
attracted almost 100 million adherents before her spectacular --
and, some maintained, self-contrived -- martyrdom. Thanks to the
brilliant use of neural programming to give previews of Paradise
during its ceremonies, Chrislam had grown explosively, though
it was still far outnumbered by its parent religions.

    Inevitably, after the Prophet's death the movement split
into rival factions, each upholding the True Faith. The most
fanatical was a fundamentalist group calling itself "the
Reborn," which claimed to be in direct contact with God (or at
least Her Archangels) via the listening post they had
established in the silent zone on the far side of the Moon,
shielded from the radio racket of Earth by 3,000 km of solid
rock.

    Now Kali filled the main viewscreen. No magnification was
needed, for Goliath was hovering only 200 m above its ancient,
battered surface. Two crew members had already landed, with the
traditional "One small step for a man" -- even though walking
was impossible on this almost zero-gravity worldlet.

    "Deploying radio beacon. We've got it anchored securely.
Now Kali won't be able to hide from us."

    It was a feeble joke, not meriting the laughter it aroused
from the dozen officers on the bridge. Ever since rendezvous,
there had been a subtle change in the crew's morale, with
unpredictable swings between gloom and juvenile humor. The
ship's physician had already prescribed tranquilizers for one
mild case of manic-depressive symptoms. It would grow worse in
the long weeks ahead, when there would be little to do but wait.

    The first waiting period had already begun. Back on Earth,
giant radio telescopes were tuned to receive the pulses from
the beacon. Although Kali's orbit had already been calculated
with the greatest possible accuracy, there was still a slim
chance that the asteroid might pass harmlessly by. The radio
measuring rod would settle the matter, for better or worse.

    It was a long two hours before the verdict came, and David
relayed it to the crew.

    "Spaceguard reports that the probability of impact on Earth
is 99.9%. Operation ATLAS will begin immediately."

    The task of the mythological Atlas was to hold up the
heavens and prevent them from crashing down upon Earth. The
ATLAS booster that Goliath carried as an external payload had a
more modest goal: keeping at bay only a small piece of the sky.

    It was the size of a small house, weighed 9,000 tons and
was moving at 50,000 km/h. As it passed over the Grand Teton
National Park, one alert tourist photographed the incandescent
fireball and its long vapor trail. In less than two minutes, it
had sliced through the Earth's atmosphere and returned to space.

    The slightest change of orbit during the billions of years
it had been circling the sun might have sent the asteroid
crashing upon any of the world's great cities with an explosive
force five times that of the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.

    The date was Aug. 10, 1972.

    Spaceguard had been one of the last projects of the
legendary NASA, at the close of the 20th century. Its initial
objective had been modest enough: to make as complete a survey
as possible of the asteroids and comets that crossed the orbit
of Earth -- and to determine if any were a potential threat.

    With a total budget seldom exceeding $10 million a year, a
worldwide network of telescopes, most of them operated by
skilled amateurs, had been established by the year 2000.
Sixty-one years later, the spectacular return of Halley's Comet
encouraged more funding, and the great 2079 fireball, luckily
impacting in mid-Atlantic, gave Spaceguard additional prestige.
By the end of the century, it had located more than 1 million
asteroids, and the survey was believed to be 90% complete.
However, it would have to be continued indefinitely: there was
always a chance that some intruder might come rushing in from
the uncharted outer reaches of the solar system.

    As had Kali, which had been detected in late 2212 as it
fell sunward past the orbit of Jupiter. Fortunately humankind
had not been wholly unprepared, thanks to the fact that Senator
George Ledstone (Independent, West America) had chaired an
influential finance committee almost a generation earlier.

    The Senator had one public eccentricity and, he cheerfully
admitted, one secret vice. He always wore massive horn-rimmed
eyeglasses (nonfunctional, of course) because they had an
intimidating effect on uncooperative witnesses, few of whom had
ever encountered such a novelty. His "secret vice," perfectly
well known to everyone, was rifle shooting on a standard
Olympic range, set up in the tunnels of a long-abandoned missile
silo near Mount Cheyenne. Ever since the demilitarization of
Planet Earth (much accelerated by the famous slogan "Guns Are
the Crutches of the Impotent"), such activities had been
frowned upon, though not actively discouraged.

    There was no doubt that Senator Ledstone was an original;
it seemed to run in the family. His grandmother had been a
colonel in the dreaded Beverly Hills Militia, whose skirmishes
with the L.A. Irregulars had spawned endless psychodramas in
every medium, from old-fashioned ballet to direct brain
stimulation. And his grandfather had been one of the most
notorious bootleggers of the 21st century. Before he was killed
in a shoot-out with the Canadian Medicops during an ingenious
attempt to smuggle a kiloton of tobacco up Niagara Falls, it
was estimated that "Smokey" had been responsible for at least
20 million deaths.

    Ledstone was quite unrepentant about his grandfather, whose
sensational demise had triggered the repeal of the late U.S.'s
third, and most disastrous, attempt at Prohibition. He argued
that responsible adults should be allowed to commit suicide in
any way they pleased -- by alcohol, cocaine or even tobacco --
as long as they did not kill innocent bystanders during the
process.

    When the proposed budget for Spaceguard Phase 2 was first
presented to him, Senator Ledstone had been outraged by the
idea of throwing billions of dollars into space. It was true
that the global economy was in good shape; since the almost
simultaneous collapse of communism and capitalism, the skillful
application of chaos theory by World Bank mathematicians had
broken the old cycle of booms and busts and averted (so far) the
Final Depression predicted by many pessimists. Nonetheless, the
Senator argued that the money could be much better spent on
Earth -- especially on his favorite proj ect, reconstructing
what was left of California after the Superquake.

    When Ledstone had twice vetoed Spaceguard Phase 2, everyone
agreed that no one on Earth would make him change his mind. They
had reckoned without someone from Mars.

    The Red Planet was no longer quite so red, though the
process of greening it had barely begun. Concentrating on the
problems of survival, the colonists (they hated the word and
were already saying proudly "we Martians") had little energy
left over for art or science. But the lightning flash of genius
strikes where it will, and the greatest theoretical physicist of
the century was born under the bubble domes of Port Lowell.

    Like Einstein, to whom he was often compared, Carlos
Mendoza was an excellent musician; he owned the only saxophone
on Mars and was a skilled performer on that antique instrument.
He could have received his Nobel Prize on Mars, as everyone
expected, but he loved surprises and practical jokes. Thus he
appeared in Stockholm looking like a knight in high-tech armor,
wearing one of the powered exoskeletons developed for
paraplegics. With this mechanical assistance, he could function
almost unhandicapped in an environment that would otherwise
have quickly killed him.

    Needless to say, when the ceremony was over, Carlos was
bombarded with invitations to scientific and social functions.
Among the few he was able to accept was an appearance before
the World Budget Committee, where Senator Ledstone closely
questioned him about his opinion of Project Spaceguard.

    "I live on a world which still bears the scars of a
thousand meteor impacts, some of them hundreds of kilometers
across," said Professor Mendoza. "Once they were equally common
on Earth, but wind and rain -- something we don't have yet on
Mars, though we're working on it! -- have worn them away."

    Senator Ledstone: "The Spaceguarders are always pointing to
signs of asteroid impacts on Earth. How seriously should we take
their warnings?"

    Professor Mendoza: "Very seriously, Mr. Chairman. Sooner or
later, there's bound to be another major impact."

    Senator Ledstone was impressed, and indeed charmed, by the
young scientist, but not yet convinced. What changed his mind
was not a matter of logic but of emotion. On his way to London,
Carlos Mendoza was killed in a bizarre accident when the control
system of his exoskeleton malfunctioned. Deeply moved, Ledstone
immediately dropped his opposition to Spaceguard, approving
construction of two powerful orbiting tugs, Goliath and Titan,
to be kept permanently patrolling on opposite sides of the sun.
And when he was a very old man, he said to one of his aides,
"They tell me we'll soon be able to take Mendoza's brain out of
that tank of liquid nitrogen, and talk to it through a computer
interface. I wonder what he's been thinking about, all these
years . . ."

    Assembled on Phobos, the inner satellite of Mars, ATLAS was
little more than a set of rocket engines attached to propellant
tanks holding 100,000 tons of hydrogen. Though its fusion drive
could generate far less thrust than the primitive missile that
had carried Yuri Gagarin into space, it could run continuously
not merely for minutes but for weeks. Even so, the effect on the
asteroid would be trivial, a velocity change of a few
centimeters per second. Yet that might be sufficient to deflect
Kali from its fatal orbit during the months while it was still
falling earthward.

    Now that Atlas's propellant tanks, control systems and
thrusters had been securely mounted on Kali, it looked as if
some lunatic had built an oil refinery on an asteroid. Captain
Singh was exhausted, as were all the crew members, after days of
assembly and checking. Yet he felt a warm glow of achievement:
they had done everything that was expected of them, the
countdown was going smoothly, and the rest was up to ATLAS.

    He would have been far less relaxed had he known of the
ABSOLUTE PRIORITY message racing toward him by tight infrared
beam from ASTROPOL headquarters in Geneva. It would not reach
Goliath for another 30 minutes. And by then it would be much
too late.

    At about t minus 30 minutes, Goliath had drawn away from
Kali to stand well clear of the jet with which ATLAS would try
to nudge it from its present course. "Like a mouse pushing an
elephant," one media person had described the operation. But in
the frictionless vacuum of space, where momentum could never be
lost, even one mousepower would be enough if applied early and
over a sufficient length of time.

    The group of officers waiting quietly on the bridge did not
expect to see anything spectacular: the plasma jet of the ATLAS
drive would be far too hot to produce much visible radiation.
Only the telemetry would confirm that ignition had started and
that Kali was no longer an implacable juggernaut, wholly beyond
the control of humanity.

    There was a brief round of cheering and a gentle patter of
applause as the string of zeros on the accelerometer display
began to change. The feeling on the bridge was one of relief
rather than exultation. Though Kali was stirring, it would be
days and weeks before victory was assured.

    And then, unbelievably, the numbers dropped back to zero.
Seconds later, three simultaneous audio alarms sounded. All
eyes were suddenly fixed on Kali and the ATLAS booster which
should be nudging it from its present course. The sight was
heartbreaking: the great propellant tanks were opening up like
flowers in a time-lapse movie, spilling out the thousands of
tons of reaction mass that might have saved the Earth. Wisps of
vapor drifted across the face of the asteroid, veiling its
cratered surface with an evanescent atmosphere.

    Then Kali continued along its path, heading inexorably
toward a fiery collision with the Earth.

    Captain Singh was alone in the large, well-appointed cabin
that had been his home for longer than any other place in the
solar system. He was still dazed but was trying to make his
peace with the universe.

    He had lost, finally and forever, all that he loved on
Earth. With the decline of the nuclear family, he had known
many deep attachments, and it had been hard to decide who should
be the mothers of the two children he was permitted. A phrase
from an old American novel (he had forgotten the author) kept
coming into his mind: "Remember them as they were -- and write
them off." The fact that he himself was perfectly safe somehow
made him feel worse; Goliath was in no danger whatsoever, and
still had all the propellant it needed to rejoin the shaken
survivors of humanity on the Moon or Mars.

    Well, he had many friendships -- and one that was much more
than that -- on Mars; this was where his future must lie. He was
only 102, with decades of active life ahead of him. But some of
the crew had loved ones on the Moon; he would have to put
Goliath's destination to the vote.

    Ship's Orders had never covered a situation like this.

    "I still don't understand," said the chief engineer, "why
that explosive cord wasn't detected on the preflight check-out."

    "Because that Reborn fanatic could have hidden it easily --
and no one would have dreamed of looking for such a thing. Pity
ASTROPOL didn't catch him while he was still on Phobos."

    "But why did they do it? I can't believe that even
Chrislamic crazies would want to destroy the Earth."

    "You can't argue with their logic -- if you accept their
premises. God, Allah, is testing us, and we mustn't interfere.
If Kali misses, fine. If it doesn't, well, that's part of Her
bigger plan. Maybe we've messed up Earth so badly that it's
time to start over. Remember that old saying of Tsiolkovski's:
`Earth is the cradle of humankind, but you cannot live in the
cradle forever.' Kali could be a sign that it's time to leave."

    The captain held up his hand for silence.

    "The only important question now is, Moon or Mars? They'll
both need us. I don't want to influence you" (that was hardly
true; everyone knew where he wanted to go), "so I'd like your
views first."

    The first ballot was Mars 6, Moon 6, Don't know 1, captain
abstaining.

    Each side was trying to convert the single "Don't know"
when David spoke.

    "There is an alternative."

    "What do you mean?" Captain Singh demanded, rather
brusquely.

    "It seems obvious. Even though ATLAS is destroyed, we still
have a chance of saving the Earth. According to my calculations,
Goliath has just enough propellant to deflect Kali -- if we
start thrusting against it immediately. But the longer we wait,
the less the probability of success."

    There was a moment of stunned silence on the bridge as
everyone asked the question, "Why didn't I think of that?" and
quickly arrived at the answer.

    David had kept his head, if one could use so inappropriate a
phrase, while all the humans around him were in a state of
shock. There were some compensations in being a Legal Person
(Nonhuman). Though David could not know love, neither could he
know fear. He would continue to think logically, even to the
edge of doom.

    With any luck, thought Captain Singh, this is my last
broadcast to Earth. I'm tired of being a hero, and a slightly
premature one at that. Many things could still go wrong, as
indeed they already have . . .

    "This is Captain Singh, space tug Goliath. First of all,
let me say how glad we are that the Elders of Chrislam have
identified the saboteurs and handed them over to ASTROPOL.

    "We are now 50 days from Earth, and we have a slight
problem. This one, I hasten to add, will not affect our new
attempt to deflect Kali into a safe orbit. I note that the news
media are calling this deflection Operation Deliverance. We
like the name, and hope to live up to it, but we still cannot
be absolutely certain of success. David, who appreciates all
the goodwill messages he has received, estimates that the
probability of Kali impacting Earth is still 10% . . .

    "We had intended to keep just enough propellant reserve to
leave Kali shortly before encounter and go into a safer orbit,
where our sister ship Titan could rendezvous with us. But that
option is now closed. While Goliath was pushing against Kali at
maximum drive, we broke through a weak point in the crust. The
ship wasn't damaged, but we're stuck! All attempts to break away
have failed.

    "We're not worried, and it may even be a blessing in
disguise. Now we'll use the whole of our remaining propellant to
give one final nudge. Perhaps that will be the last drop that's
needed to do the job.

    "So we'll ride Kali past Earth, and wave to you from a
comfortable distance, in just 50 days."

    It would be the longest 50 days in the history of the
world.

    Now the huge crescent of the Moon spanned the sky, the
jagged mountain peaks along the terminator burning with the
fierce light of the lunar dawn. But the dusty plains still
untouched by the sun were not completely dark; they were
glowing faintly in the light reflected from Earth's clouds and
continents. And scattered here and there across that once dead
landscape were the glowing fireflies that marked the first
permanent settlements humankind had built beyond the home
planet. Captain Singh could easily locate Clavius Base, Port
Armstrong, Plato City. He could even see the necklace of faint
lights along the Translunar Railroad, bringing its precious
cargo of water from the ice mines at the South Pole.

    Earth was now only five hours away.

    Kali entered Earth's atmosphere soon after local midnight,
200 km above Hawaii. Instantly, the gigantic fireball brought a
false dawn to the Pacific, awakening the wildlife on its myriad
islands. But few humans had been asleep this night of nights,
except those who had sought the oblivion of drugs.

    Over New Zealand, the heat of the orbiting furnace ignited
forests and melted the snow on mountaintops, triggering
avalanches into the valleys beneath. But the human race had
been very, very lucky: the main thermal impact as Kali passed
the Earth was on the Antarctic, the continent that could best
absorb it. Even Kali could not strip away all the kilometers of
polar ice, but it set in motion the Great Thaw that would
change coastlines all around the world.

    No one who survived hearing it could ever describe the
sound of Kali's passage; none of the recordings were more than
feeble echoes. The video coverage, of course, was superb, and
would be watched in awe for generations to come. But nothing
could ever compare with the fearsome reality.

    Two minutes after it had sliced into the atmosphere, Kali
re-entered space. Its closest approach to Earth had been 60 km.
In that two minutes, it took 100,000 lives and did $1 trillion
worth of damage.

    Goliath had been protected from the fireball by the massive
shield of Kali itself; the sheets of incandescent plasma
streamed harmlessly overhead. But when the asteroid smashed
into Earth's blanket of air at more than 100 times the speed of
sound, the colossal drag forces mounted swiftly to five, 10, 20
gravities -- and peaked at a level far beyond anything that
machines or flesh could withstand.

    Now indeed Kali's orbit had been drastically changed; never
again would it come near Earth. On its next return to the inner
solar system, the swifter spacecraft of a later age would visit
the crumpled wreckage of Goliath and bear reverently homeward
the bodies of those who had saved the world.

    Until the next encounter.