Hammer of the Lord

The plot of the novel tells about the life of the captain of the Goliath spaceship Robert Singh from his participation in a marathon race on the surface of the Moon and his struggle with changing the trajectory of the Kali asteroid to avoid an impact with planet Earth ^[2] .

Robert Singh is a student at the Aritech Institute of Space Technology, located in Aristarchus Crater on the Moon. In his final year, he takes part in a marathon on an open surface through the Rainbow Bay . He uses a lightweight suit without thermal control and wins. He then works at space guard observation stations in Africa.

Space Guard is one of the projects with a modest budget in the structure of NASA , launched at the end of the XX century . And although after the fall of a large asteroid on Earth in 2079, the Space Guard budget was increased, the Kali asteroid in 2109 was discovered not by her, but by one of the amateur astronomers from Mars.

A few years before these events in 2085, the project for the search for extraterrestrial civilizations sent an open message to other worlds with a powerful explosion of a nuclear bomb in Earth’s orbit. And as soon as the signal reached Sirius , the answer was immediately sent from there. Scientists could not decode the signal, and religious sects created their own versions of the answer. The Chrislam sect promised everyone who believed it salvation, turning his personality into a few terabytes of information and sending them to Sirius, considering the Earth doomed.

At this time, Robert Singh permanently resides on Mars in the port of Lovell. He is the captain of the Goliath, who delivered a scientific expedition from the spaceport at Deimos to the Lagrange point near Jupiter.

Having learned about the threat of a collision with Kali, Goliath interrupts the scientific mission, his team landed on an asteroid to leave a beacon on the surface to clarify the trajectory. Then Goliath returns to Deimos to load Atlant rocket engines , which can change the trajectory of Kali, and also takes fuel reserves for Atlant from Europe .

After starting the engines on Kali, they suddenly explode due to explosives laid down by members of the Chrislama sect. The Goliath has to push the asteroid off the collision path itself. At this time, the Earth government decides to use nuclear weapons to crush the oblong body of the Kali asteroid into 2 parts to reduce possible collision damage. Since the reactive effect of geysers warmed by the sun on the asteroid does not make it possible to accurately calculate a new trajectory, Goliath uses the remaining fuel to remove it from the asteroid and drifts in an elliptical orbit with a dangerous approach to the Sun, awaiting rescue.

Kali passes by the surface of the Earth, but has a significant effect on the atmosphere of the planet. The blow falls on Antarctica and completely melts it.

Steven Spielberg bought the rights to the film adaptation of the work, but the plot of the film “Clash with the Abyss” was very far from the work of Clark, so it was not mentioned in the credits ^[3] .