Neutron Tide

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Neutron Tide is a short story written by Arthur C. Clarke. It is among his shortest pieces of writing, consisting solely of a 2-page, detailed description of a futuristic scenario in order to use a pun as a punch-line.

Clarke describes a space battleship flying too close to the gravitational field of a neutron star, and subsequently being torn to bits by the high tidal forces. A military commander revealing this in a meeting says the only identifiable piece of debris was from an engineer's toolkit, resulting in the pun, "star-mangled spanner": a play on the title of the United States' national anthem.