Queer as was this great top-layer of meteoric stone, it received only a passing glance from the crew of the _Lodestar_. Their gaze was fixed on the gleaming, cylindrical shapes that lay scattered over the rocky, gray plain. In the weird half-light dozens of them could be seen, large and small. Spaceships! Spaceships of every size, sort, and description! The surface of the tiny world was littered with them, some half-buried beneath meteoric stone, some hopelessly wrecked, some, like the _Lodestar_ intact. Haller and his companions stared in awed wonder at the scene. Space-craft of every type, every era. Great liners, all burnished chrome and glass; sleek cruisers, heavily armored, their big ray-guns peeping through open ports; rusty, battered freighters; old vessels of the design of a century, two centuries before, with their archaic wind-vanes and detachable rockets. The names inlaid upon their sides were keys to countless mysteries of the void. Here was the long-lost _Tycho_, vanished off Jupiter with a billion dollars' worth of polonium in her holds; here, the ancient _Explorer_ which had headed for the outer planets two hundred years before, and never returned; here, the battle-cruiser _Valiant_, long since given up for lost, and upon which the last remains of Commander Lane, hero of the Venusian wars, must lie. Ship after ship, venturing too near the Spot, caught in its magnetic field, drawn to the tremendously magnetized surface of this grasping, spider-like little world. "The Isle of Lost Spaceships!" Barger gasped. "Great Cosmos! Must be hundreds of 'em, scattered over the surface, caught by the chunk of lodestone that's at the center of these ferrous meteors!" Haller nodded. "Steel ships and magnetic field," he said somberly. "The asteroid proper, within this layer of steel and iron it's attracted, must have tremendous power. Still, even back in the 20th century they had alloys which, when permanently magnetized, could do fancy tricks. A piece the size of your thumbnail would support two hundred pounds. Plenty powerful. And this planetoid must be of similar stuff." He grinned crookedly. "Seems as if the secret of the Magnetic Spot's solved. Not that we'll ever get back to tell it. We're caught like the others." Haller glanced at the battered, dust-covered ships strewing the rubbled plain, and then suddenly the set, robot-like look faded from his face. Pale, tense, he stared at a big liner that bulked against the horizon. Wheeling, Haller sprang into the ship, returned with a pair of powerful field-glasses. For a long moment he focused them upon the vessel when he spoke, his voice shook. "It's the ... the _Cosmic_! And Fay...." Abruptly he spun about, barking orders. "I'm going to find out if anyone's left alive aboard her. Barger, you and Kindt'll come with me! You others stay here and keep watch over the ship! No telling what dangers we're liable to run into in this screwy world! All set? Let's go!"