He found the astronomer in the Torture Chamber—the tiny gym, squeezed between the technical stores and the bulkhead of the main propellant tank. Each member of the crew had to exercise here for an hour a day, lest his muscles waste away in this gravityless environment. Martens was wrestling with a set of powerful springs, an expression of grim determination on his face. It became much grimmer when Pickett gave his report.

A few tests on the main input board quickly told them the worst. “The computer’s insane,” said Martens. “It can’t even add or subtract.”

“But surely we can fix it!”

Martens shook his head. He had lost all his usual cocky self-confidence; he looked, Pickett told himself, like an inflated rubber doll that had started to leak.

“Not even the builders could do that. It’s a solid mass of microcircuits, packed as tightly as the human brain. The memory units are still operating, but the computing section’s utterly useless. It just scrambles the figures you feed into it.”

“And where does that leave us?” Pickett asked.

“It means that we’re all dead,” Martens answered flatly. “Without the computer, we’re done for. It’s impossible to calculate an orbit back to Earth. It would take an army of mathematicians weeks to work it out on paper.”

“That’s ridiculous! The ship’s in perfect condition, we’ve plenty of food and fuel—and you tell me we’re all going to die just because we can’t do a few sums.”

“A few sums!” retorted Martens, with a trace of his old spirit. “A major navigational change, like the one needed to break away from the comet and put us on an orbit to Earth involves about a hundred thousand separate calculations. Even the computer needs several minutes for the job.”

Pickett was no mathematician, but he knew enough of astronautics to understand the situation. A ship coasting through space was under the influence of many bodies.