“Will we be able to go into the nucleus?”

“We’ll know when we get there. Maybe we’ll play safe and study it through telescopes from a few thousand miles away. But personally, I’ll be disappointed unless we go right inside. Won’t you?”

Pickett switched off the recorder. Yes, Martens had been right. He would have been disappointed, especially since there had seemed no possible source of danger. Nor was there, as far as the comet was concerned. The danger had come from within.

They had sailed through one after another of the huge but unimaginably tenuous curtains of gas that Randall’s comet was still ejecting as it raced away from the sun. Yet even now, though they were approaching the densest regions of the nucleus, they were for all practical purposes in a perfect vacuum. The luminous fog that stretched around Challenger for so many millions of miles scarcely dimmed the stars; but directly ahead, where lay the comet’s core, was a brilliant patch of hazy light, luring them onwards like a will-o’-the-wisp.

The electrical disturbances now taking place around them with ever-increasing violence had almost completely cut their link with Earth. The ship’s main radio transmitter could just get a signal through, but for the last few days they had been reduced to sending “O.K.” messages in Morse. When they broke away from the comet and headed for home, normal communication would be resumed; but now they were almost as isolated as explorers had been in the days before radio. It was inconvenient, but that was all. Indeed, Pickett rather welcomed this state of affairs; it gave him more time to get on with his clerical duties. Though Challenger was sailing into the heart of a comet, on a course that no captain could have dreamed of before the twentieth century, someone still had to check the provisions and count the stores.