Inside the Comet by Arthur C. Clarke episode #239

Arthur C. Clarke | July 14, 2024

Inside the Comet by Arthur C. Clarke episode #239
Arthur C. Clarke

INSIDE THE COMET

Episode #239 · Written by Arthur C. Clarke · Narrated by Scott Miller

A comet that dazzled Earth becomes a frozen prison for the research ship Challenger when a tiny electronic failure turns their triumphant mission into a slow-motion disaster. With the stars growing colder and food running out, one reporter-turned-officer must resurrect an ancient counting device to give humanity’s explorers a fighting chance to come home.

Randall’s Comet is the greatest sky show in human history—a colossal banner of ice and glowing gas stretching across the dawn, brighter and more spectacular than anything seen since the age of mammoths. Riding its tail is the research ship Challenger, packed with scientists, instruments, and one very lucky reporter, George Takeo Pickett. His assignment is simple: document the mission, interview the crew, and send back the story of a lifetime as humanity flies straight into the heart of a comet.

But inside the nucleus, among drifting, porous icebergs of ammonia and methane, their miracle of modern engineering betrays them. The ship’s computer—brain and heart of every calculation—goes mad. Without it, Challenger can’t compute a return trajectory through the subtle, overlapping gravitational pulls of the Sun and planets. The hull is sound, the tanks are full, the radio still flickers through the comet’s interference… and yet the crew is effectively marooned in deep space, doomed to spend two million years frozen in orbit until the comet swings back past Earth.

As despair creeps in and the specter of a deliberate, early death hangs over them, Pickett reaches for a memory from his childhood: the clatter of beads on his Japanese grandmother’s abacus, and stories of contests where human operators outpaced early electronic calculators. In a world that has forgotten how to do math without machines, he suggests the unthinkable—turning the crew into a human “computer,” trained to use abacuses fast enough to handle the brutal navigation work. What follows is a race against dwindling supplies as the men of Challenger drill, compete, and push their fingers to exhaustion, building a living calculation engine capable of reshaping their orbit and bringing them back into radio range of Earth’s giant computers.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Arthur C. Clarke stands as one of the defining voices of twentieth-century science fiction. A writer, scientist, and futurist, he combined rigorous technical thinking with a keen sense of wonder, giving readers stories where physics and astronomy matter just as much as character and emotion. Clarke helped imagine geostationary communication satellites, wrote influential essays on space travel, and always insisted that the universe is both knowable and astonishing.

From landmark novels like Childhood’s End and Rendezvous with Rama to his many short stories, Clarke specialized in tales where big ideas collide with very human dilemmas. He loved to explore the fragile dependence of modern civilization on its machines—and what happens when those machines break. Inside the Comet (also known as Into the Comet) is Clarke at his playful, clever best: a hard science adventure that celebrates an older kind of knowledge, where survival depends not on sleek computers but on the speed of the human mind, the rhythm of sliding beads, and the refusal to surrender when the cosmos turns hostile.

LISTEN TO THE STORY

Listen to Inside the Comet by Arthur C. Clarke — a vintage science fiction adventure where a stranded crew must become a human computer to find their way home.