The Hammer of God Read online

  The rough riders of the IRT’s graffiti-festooned cattle trucks would appreciate that wisecrack.

  The Tunguska event of 1908 was featured in the TV series Arthur C. Clarke’s Mysterious World, and a detailed discussion, with photographs and maps, will be found in Chapter 9 (“The Great Siberian Explosion”) of the book by Simon Welfare and John Fairley.

  My coauthor Gregory Benford (Beyond the Fall of Night) has just reminded me of the novel he and William Rotsler wrote on the theme of asteroid deflection—Shiva Descending (1980). I must confess that I’ve never read it, but I was certainly aware of the title, and it may well have subconsciously influenced the choice of Kali (Shiva’s consort) as the name for my asteroid. It popped into my head instantly when I started writing.

  Another novel on the same theme is Lucifer’s Hammer by Larry Niven and Jerry Pournelle (1980) which I have read—and which has just triggered a faint memory of dear old Astounding Stories. Rushing to Mike Ashby’s invaluable Complete Index to Astounding/Analog, I’ve found the cause: “The Hammer of Thor,” a short story by Charles Willard Diffin (March 1932).

  I’m astonished—er, astounded—that I’ve recalled this obscure tale of space invaders, but it has obviously been lurking in my subconscious for the last sixty years. And to complete the record, I’m happy to admit that I quite deliberately stole my own very similar title from G. K. Chesterton. His priest-detective, Father Brown, solved a mysterious murder involving “The Hammer of God.”

  I should also mention the novel A Torrent of Faces by James Blish and Norman L. Knight (1967) which concerns the impact of an asteroid on an Earth with a population of a trillion, and the attempt to divert it. I cannot help feeling that such a world could do with an asteroid impact from time to time.

  The Martian place-names mentioned in Chapter 14, improbable though they sound, are all taken from the NASA Atlas of Mars (1979). To spare readers the pangs of unrequited curiosity, here are their origins:

  Dank: town in Oman; Dia-Cau: town in Vietnam; Eil: town in Somalia; Gagra: town in USSR (Georgia); Kagul: town in USSR (Moldavia); Surt: town in Libya; Tiwi: town in Oman; Waspam: town in Nicaragua; Yat: town in Nigeria.

  I am currently trying to persuade the nomenclature committee of the International Astronomical Union to put Isaac Asimov, Robert Heinlein, and Gene Roddenberry on Mars. Unfortunately all the major formations have already been appropriated, so we may have to settle for Mercury—which, as my IAU contact wryly remarks, “may not be colonized for some time.”

  The theoretical basis of the Reborn doctrine (Chapter 20) will be found in “Efficiently coded messages can transmit the information content of a human across interstellar space” by William A. Reupke, Acta Astronautica, Vol. 26, No. 3/4, pp. 273–76, March/April 1992.

  NOTE ON MURPHY’S LAW (CHAPTER 44)

  The almost unbelievable story of the United States Navy’s torpedo failures, which took almost two years to rectify, will be found in United States Submarine Operations in World War II by Theodore Roscoe (U.S. Naval Institute, 1949) and more accessibly in Coral Sea, Midway and Submarine Actions by Samuel Eliot Morison (Little, Brown, 1959). To quote from the latter: “The firing pin, supposed to function under physical impact, proved too fragile to stand up under a good, square 90-degree hit…. Thus the best shooting was rewarded by duds.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Apologies to Bob Singh, paragon of pill pushers, for borrowing his name in a fit of absentmindedness.

  My thanks to Ray Bradbury for permission to use the quotation from The Martian Chronicles (“Night Meeting”) in Chapter 24.

  Special thanks to Prince Sultan al-Saud, Shuttle astronaut, for his hospitality at the Association of Space Explorers Meeting in Riyadh, November 1989, which gave me my first direct contact with Islamic culture.

  And to Gentry Lee, for widening my technical and psychological horizons.

  Special thanks to the Summa Corporation for a manganese nodule dredged up in 1972 from 16,500 feet, during the overture to the CIA’s Operation Jennifer. (See The Ghost from the Grand Banks.) It looks so much like Kali that merely holding it in my hands often gave inspiration at arid moments.

  Programs I found of great value during the writing of this book were VISTAPRO and DISTANT SUNS (Virtual Reality Laboratory, 2341 Ganador Court, San Luis Obispo, California 93401) for the AMIGA, and The Sky (Software Bisque, 912 Twelfth Street, Suite A, Golden, Colorado 80401) and Dance of the Planets (ARC Science Simulations, P.O. Box 1955S, Loveland, Colorado 80539) for MS/DOS. I am also grateful to Simon Tulloch for orbital calculations, though I may have occasionally repealed the law of inverse squares for dramatic purposes.

  STOP PRESS….

  The manuscript of this novel was couriered to my US and UK agents on December 2, 1992. On December 8, the recently discovered asteroid Toutatis made its closest approach to Earth, a mere three million kilometers. Astronomers from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory took the opportunity to scan it with a new radar system at NASA’s Mojave Desert station. They found that Toutatis consists of two heavily cratered bodies, between three and four kilometers in diameter, revolving about each other, almost in contact. The radar image shows an object exactly like Kali after it had split.

  This is the first discovery of a double asteroid. Radar had shown Apollo 4769 (Castalia), referred to in Chapter 45, to be dumbbell shaped: quite probably, as I assumed, it is also a “contact binary.”

  The latest (January 1, 1993) news on Swift-Tuttle, relayed to me by Dr. Duncan Steel, is that a better determination of its orbit makes a 2126 impact unlikely: it may miss Earth by fifteen days. But the last line of the novel still stands: and Dr. Steel adds ominously that fragments calving off the comet, as has been observed in several cases, may yet present a hazard: “How do you fancy a hundred Tunguskas in a day?”