"Sunlight!" he exclaimed. "That's the day side of this chunk of rock! Leave the rockets on, 'til we reach it, Barger! Another mile won't make much difference now, and if we can see where we are, we may be able to do something about it!" Barger nodded doubtfully and the _Lodestar_ continued to grind ahead toward the line of sunlight. The four mutineers had lost all their bluster; cringing against the wall, they gazed at Haller as though expecting him to find some way out of this mad place. They had been brave, out in open space, but now, face to face with the unknown, they instinctively sought his leadership. Onward the _Lodestar_ ploughed, held down by the strange magnetism, driven forward by her rockets. At the edge of the dawn-like light, however, there came a staggering shock, as the vessel glanced against a mammoth boulder, and one of the stout glassex ports starred, and then shattered. "God!" Carlson gave a rising, bubbling cry of terror. "Broken! Our air...." But there was no hiss of escaping air, no awful suffocation. Haller, who had torn off his coat to stuff into the gap, paused, eyes narrowed. A strange sharp odor had permeated the control room, and he felt an odd exhilaration. "Air!" Kindt muttered. "Air! Thin, but with a high oxygen content! It's safe out there! Safe!" "Right!" Old Barger cried exultantly. "We can go out, have a look around!" He snapped shut the flaring exhausts, sprang quickly toward an airlock. "Come on! Let's go!" "Wait a minute!" Haller turned to the wall against which the atomite gun had been held. Now that the magnetic center was beneath them, the collection of iron and steel objects had fallen to the floor. With an effort Haller wrenched the gun free, thanking his stars that only the trigger and recoil mechanism were of steel. Even so, the weapon, drawn groundward, seemed to weigh pounds. Gripping it, Haller opened the massive doors of the airlock, swung through. The sight that greeted his gaze defied comparison. The entire surface of the little world was deep with uneven, jagged rocks, roughly spherical in shape. Some of vast size, larger than a spaceship, some no bigger than marbles, they appeared to have fallen like hailstones upon the asteroid's surface, covering it to an unknown depth. Peering between two of the larger stones, Haller could see a crevasse of appalling deepness, and below it, more of the loose rounded rocks. How large the original planetoid was, he could not imagine, but it was evident that for millenniums its magnetic attraction had been collecting about it meteors, most of which have a high ferrous content, drawing them to it and increasing its size. The little world was like a spider ... a spider of space ... catching all ferrous objects in its magnetic field, sucking them to it, fattening on them! Meteors, spaceships, iron-permeated cosmic dust ... all were drawn inexorably to it!