Asteroid Threat : Defending Our Planet from Deadly Near-earth Objects (9781616149147) (10 page)

Clarke brought his own hammer to science fiction, though he chose to protect Earth from terrible destruction by pushing the approaching devastator off course rather than forcing the planet to endure it and survive, as Niven and Pournelle had (he had read
Lucifer's Hammer
). That, of course, is precisely what NASA, the US Air Force, the world's other space agencies, and the international space community, very much including the B612 Foundation, want to do.

And he did it in
The Hammer of God
, which was published in 1993, nine years before the B612 Foundation came to be, and was only the second work of fiction to be published in
Time
magazine. Like Niven and Pournelle, he used the hammer analogy in that book and in
Rendezvous with Rama
, the latter of which is about a huge alien spacecraft heading toward Earth that is at first mistaken for very big rock. Clarke opened with what is effectively a brief prologue about what happened at Tunguska and then turned it into fiction. “Moving at fifty kilometers a second, a thousand tons of rock and metal impacted on the plains of northern Italy, destroying in a few flaming moments the labor of centuries. The cities of Padua and Verona were wiped from the face of the Earth; and the last glories of Venice sank forever beneath the sea as the waters of the Adriatic came thundering landward after the hammer blow from space.”
⁷
Hammers are for pounding things, after all, from nails to planets.

The seed that sprouted into
The Hammer of God
seems to have been planted by Zanoguera and Penfield's discovery of the crater at Chicxulub, followed by the Alvarezes' work there. Clarke knew father and son and wrote this “puff” (as he put it) for the jacket of Luis Alvarez's autobiography:

And now he's engaged on his most spectacular piece of scientific detection, as he unravels the biggest whodunit of all time—the extinction of the dinosaurs. He and his son Walter are sure they've found the murder weapon in the Crime of the Eons….

Since Luis's death, the evidence for at least one major meteor (or small asteroid) impact has accumulated, and several possible sites have been identified—the current favorite being a buried crater, 180 kilometers across, at Chicxulub, on the Yucatan Peninsula.

Some geologists are still fighting stubbornly for a purely terrestrial explanation of the dinosaur extinction (e.g., volcanoes), and it may well turn out that there is truth in both hypotheses. But the Meteor Mafia appears to be winning, if only because its scenario is much the most dramatic.
⁸

With Clarke's words in mind, it's not hard to see the connections between the Alvarezes' work and
The Hammer of God
. The novel takes place in 2110, when a spaceship called
Goliath
is sent out to meet an asteroid named Kali that is discovered by an amateur astronomer on Mars to be heading in the direction of Earth. The astronomer, Dr. Angus Millar, is bored because there are no exotic diseases on Mars as there are on Earth. (In fiction, amateur astronomers apparently discover more threatening objects in space than professionals do—“When Worlds Collide” being a notable exception—perhaps because that adds an element to the story with which average readers, who may be intimidated by professional astronomers, can readily identify.) Recalling how excited he had been as a boy in 2061, when he saw Halley's Comet return, he builds an instrumented telescope and notices the approaching big rock, a potential Earth-annihilator:

It was an asteroid, just beyond the orbit of Jupiter. Dr. Millar set the computer to calculate its approximate orbit, and was surprised to find that Myrna—as he decided to call it—came quite close to Earth. That made it slightly more interesting.

He was never able to get the name recognized. Before the IAU could approve it, additional observations had given a much more accurate orbit.

And then only one name was possible: Kali, the goddess of destruction.

Kali is the name of the Hindu goddess of empowerment, which is to say, of life and death. And The IAU is the International Astronomical Union, a real organization headquartered in Paris, France.

Clarke was certain to add to his credibility by adroitly basing his fiction on certifiable fact, which would impress both those who knew the science and those who did not but appreciated it, however abstractly. This simple but powerful message made the point up front:

All the events set in the past happened at the times and places stated: all those set in the future are possible. And one is certain. Sooner or later, we will meet Kali.

Indeed. There is absolute agreement among professional astronomers and virtually everyone in the international space community that, asteroid and comet traffic in the neighborhood being what it is, it is not a matter of if; it is a matter of when.

And, like Niven and Pournelle, Clarke effectively used religion as an evil counterpoint to the attempt to save Earth from the Apocalypse. The believers in God are diabolical fanatics who call themselves “The Reborn” and who try to sabotage the mission because they want Kali to destroy Earth. They want the Apocalypse because they will be able to shed their bodies, their physical existence, so their Lord will grant their spirits eternal life in heaven. They are therefore convinced that trying to head off Kali and save the planet is not good but blatantly sinful. For those who want to be reborn, Kali is God's messenger and their savior, so trying to prevent the collision is considered sacrilegious and reprehensible. As usual, Clarke did his homework. This is from 2 Peter 3:10–13 in the King James Bible: “But the day of the Lord will come as a thief in the night; in which the heavens shall pass away with a great noise, and the elements shall melt with fervent heat, the earth also and the works that are therein shall be burned up.”

As all fiction writers know, the old hackneyed expression still applies: there can be no good without evil and no gripping story without conflict. Imagine US marshal Will Kane turning in his badge and riding that buggy out of town for a honeymoon with his Quaker pacifist bride in
High Noon
, with Frank Miller and his brothers still heading for town to gun Kane down. The beleaguered lawman is in a very tense situation, since he is substantially outnumbered and outgunned and must fight his enemy or risk being killed.

So must Earthlings as
Goliath
's skipper, Captain Robert Singh (not uncoincidentally, another Indian) reflects on the religious zealots. “Now that he was forced to think about the previously unthinkable, it was not so astonishing after all. Almost every decade, right through human history, self-proclaimed prophets had predicted that the world would come to an end on some given date. What
was
astonishing—and made one despair for the sanity of the species—was that they usually collected thousands of adherents, who sold all their no-longer-needed possessions, and waited at some appointed place to be taken up to heaven. Though many of the ‘Millennialists' had been imposters, most had sincerely believed their own predictions. And if they had possessed the power, could it be doubted that, if God had failed to cooperate, they would have arranged a self-fulfilling prophecy?”
⁹

Clarke would have been aware of the fact that there was another book called
The Hammer of God
that, ironically, had been written by one of the religionists he scorned and made villainous in his own book. It was authored by a Swedish Lutheran bishop named Bo Giertz and was published in 1960 as a defense of the Gospel, which is to say unwavering orthodox Christian faith against the inroads of the dreaded liberals and their freethinking, which he considered deplorable. He argued for the absolute power of God's word over spiritual deadness and rationalism, which he thought was a handicap because it is contrary
to the sheer joy and salvation that come with faith. It is actually faith, not rationality, that is liberating. Giertz's
The Hammer of God
took its title from Jeremiah 23:29, “Is not my word like a fire? Says the Lord. And like a hammer that breaks the rock into pieces?”
¹⁰
Giertz would be all but deified by The Reborn.

“Sooner or later, it was bound to happen,” Clarke wrote in the opening of
Rendezvous with Rama
, in a reference to the explosion over Tunguska (which either gave him the idea to write the book or reinforced it). It was another clever use of fact to fortify the fiction, which made the fiction more believable, as is the fictionalization of real competition between good and evil on the Western frontier (i.e., lawmen like Wyatt Earp and Bat Masterson against outlaws like Billy the Kid, the James brothers and the Daltons), wrestling alligators, charming snakes, landing at Normandy, trying to take Mount Suribachi from its hara-kiri-crazed defenders, and other dangerous and competitive endeavors. But the Hammer, of course, was the ultimate, consummate evil (and therefore, ironically, a force that could end evil as well as good).

“On June 30, 1908, Moscow escaped destruction by three hours and 4,000 kilometers—a margin invisibly small by the standards of the universe,” Clarke wrote. “On February 12, 1947, another Russian city had a still narrower escape, when the second great meteorite of the twentieth century detonated less than four hundred kilometers from Vladivostok, with an explosion rivaling that of the newly invented uranium bomb.” A generation that had seen photographs of the grotesque results of what manmade nuclear impactors did to Hiroshima and Nagasaki got the message. “In those days there was nothing that men could do to protect themselves against the last random shots in the cosmic bombardment that had once scarred the face of the Moon.”
¹¹

Again, Clarke's genius lay in combining fact and fiction, as he did when he mentioned SETI (the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence),
and in basing his fiction on fact and clearly describing both, as he did in a chapter in
The Hammer of God
called “Excalibur,” which accurately describes the nuclear-pumped x-ray laser that was designed for President Ronald W. Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative ballistic-missile defense system, better known as Star Wars. (More about SDI in
chapter 7
.) Although he had a degree in mathematics and physics from King's College in London, which he received after he served as a radar specialist in the Royal Air Force in World War II, Clarke's extensive knowledge of the physical sciences, rocketry, and the whole realm of space was essentially self-taught. “My involvement with the subject of asteroid impacts is now beginning to resemble a DNA molecule: the strands of fact and fiction are becoming inextricably entwined,” he explained with impressive candor.
¹²

Since Clarke knew Luis Alvarez before the discovery at Chicxulub, followed that earth-shaking event closely, and kept up with the asteroid and comet situation, he would have known about the work in that area that was going on at universities and in the foundations and societies. He was also aware of the three-stage planetary-defense strategy against potentially hazardous space objects that NASA, the European Space Agency, Roskosmos, and just about everyone else believed and continues to believe will work. It is based on the B612 Foundation model, which Clarke used in
The Hammer of God
. The first stage is spotting Kali, taking its measurements, and determining that it is headed this way and is big enough to destroy a large part of the planet or perhaps all of it. Then
Goliath
is sent to nudge Kali off course and, if that does not work, to take it out, as the fastidious call it when obliterating something.

So Kali has to be sized up in
The Hammer of God
, as the real strategy requires.

The mass of Kali was known to within one percent, and the velocity it would have when meeting Earth was known to twelve decimal places. Any schoolboy could work out the resulting half em vee
squared of energy—and convert it into megatons of explosive. The result was an unimaginable two million
million
tons—a figure that was still meaningless when expressed as a billion times the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima. And the great unknown in the equation, upon which millions of lives might depend, was the point of impact. The closer Kali approached, the smaller the margin of error, but until a few days before encounter, ground zero could not be pinned down to within better than a thousand kilometers—an estimate that many thought was worse than useless.
¹³

Goliath
's crew plants on Kali the most powerful bomb ever made. It doesn't explode as planned, but it does go off with enough force to cause the porous, moonlike rock to “fission like an amoeba.” Both halves miss Earth.

And by way of showing that there is not just one death-dealing monster out there but many, Clarke introduced another one toward the end of the book.

Kali 2 entered the atmosphere just before sunrise, a hundred kilometers above Hawaii. Instantly, the gigantic fireball brought a false dawn to the Pacific, awakening the wildlife on its myriad islands. But few humans; not many were 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. By great good fortune, the main thermal impact was on the Antarctic—the one continent that could best absorb it. Even Kali could not strip away all the kilometers of polar ice, but the Great Thaw would change coastlines all around the world.

No one who survived hearing it could ever describe the sound of Kali's passage….
¹⁴

And he used a suitably dramatic word for what Kali and other killer asteroids were capable of committing; a name that perfectly suited a world-ending cataclysmic act of violence:
terracide
.

Clarke could not resist beginning the novel by having some
fun with himself, some self-deprecation, which showed impressive self-assurance and respect:

SPACEGUARD had been one of the last projects of the legendary NASA, back at the close of the Twentieth 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. The project's name—taken from an obscure Twentieth Century science fiction novel—was somewhat misleading; critics were fond of pointing out that “Spacewatch” or “Spacewarn” would have been much more appropriate.
¹⁵