Free 2061: Odyssey Three by Arthur C. Clarke

approaching the most famous of all comets. The nucleus was growing larger and clearer; it was no longer a black dot, but an irregular ellipse - now a small, pockmarked island lost in the cosmic ocean - then, suddenly, a world in its own right.
    There was still no sense of scale. Although Floyd knew that the whole panorama spread before him was less than ten kilometres across, he could easily have imagined that he was looking at a body as large as the Moon. But the Moon was not hazy around the edges, nor did it have little jets of vapour - and two large ones - spurting from its surface.
    ‘My God!’ cried Mihailovich, ‘what’s that?’
    He pointed to the lower edge of the nucleus, just inside the terminator. Unmistakably - impossibly -a light was flashing there on the nightside of the comet with a perfectly regular rhythm: on, off, on, off, once every two or three seconds.
    Dr Willis gave his patient ‘I can explain it to you in words of one syllable’ cough, but Captain Smith got there first.
    ‘I’m sorry to disappoint you, Mr Mihailovich. That’s only the beacon on Sampler Probe Two - it’s been sitting there for a month, waiting for us to come and pick it up.’
    ‘What a shame; I thought there might be someone - something - there to welcome us.’
    ‘No such luck, I’m afraid; we’re very much on our own out here. That beacon is just where we intend to land - it’s near Halley’s south pole and is in permanent darkness at the moment. That will make it easier on our life-support systems. The temperature’s up to 120 degrees on the Sunlit side - way above boiling point.’
    ‘No wonder the comet’s perking,’ said the unabashed Dimitri. ‘Those jets don’t look very healthy to me. Are you sure it’s safe to go in?’
    ‘That’s another reason we’re touching down on the nightside; there’s no activity there. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I must get back to the bridge. This is the first chance I’ve ever had of landing on a new world - and I doubt if I’ll get another.’
    Captain Smith’s audience dispersed slowly, and in unusual silence. The image on the viewscreen zoomed back to normal, and the nucleus dwindled once more to a barely visible spot. Yet even in those few minutes it seemed to have grown slightly larger, and perhaps that was no illusion. Less than four hours before encounter, the ship was still hurtling towards the comet at fifty thousand kilometres an hour.
    It would make a crater more impressive than any that Halley now boasted, if something happened to the main drive at this stage of the game.

2061: Odissey Three
    16

2061: Odissey Three
    Touchdown
    The landing was just as anticlimactic as Captain Smith had hoped. It was impossible to tell the moment when Universe made contact; a full minute elapsed before the passengers realized that touchdown was complete, and raised a belated cheer.
    The ship lay at one end of a shallow valley, surrounded by hills little more than a hundred metres high. Anyone who had been expecting to see a lunar landscape would have been greatly surprised; these formations bore no resemblance at all to the smooth, gentle slopes of the Moon, sand-blasted by micrometeorite bombardment over billions of years.
    There was nothing here more than a thousand years old; the Pyramids were far more ancient than this landscape. Every time around the Sun, Halley was remoulded - and diminished - by the solar fires. Even since the 1986 perihelion passage, the shape of the nucleus had been subtly changed. Melding metaphors shamelessly, Victor Willis had nevertheless put it rather well when he told his viewers: ‘The “peanut” has become wasp-waisted!’
    Indeed, there were indications that, after a few more revolutions round the Sun, Halley might split into two roughly equal fragments - as had Biela’s comet, to the amazement of the astronomers of 1846.
    The virtually non-existent gravity also contributed to the strangeness of the landscape. All around were spidery