Then, bracing his feet against one lump, he pushed against its neighbor, and under that steady pressure the enormous masses moved apart and kept on moving, grinding among their fellows. Over and around them Stevens sprang, always watching his line of retreat as well as that of his advance, until his exploring pike struck a lump of apparently solid metal. Hooking the fragment toward him, he thrust savagely with his weapon and was reassured--that object was not only metal, but it was metal so hard that his pike-head of space-tempered alloy steel did not make an impression upon its surface. Turning on his helmet light he swung his heavy hammer repeatedly but could not break off even a small fragment. "Found something, Steve?" Nadia's voice came clearly in his ears. "I'll say I have! A hunk of solid, non-magnetic metal about the size of an office desk. I can't break off any of it, so I guess we'll have to grab the whole chunk." He hitched the end of his cable around the nugget, made sure that the loops would not slip, and then, as Nadia tightened the line, he shoved mightily. "All x, Nadia, she's coming! Pull in my drag line as I said over there, and I'll help you land her." Inside the _Forlorn Hope_ the mass of metal was urged into the shop, where Stevens clamped it immovably to the steel floor, before he took off his space-suit. "Why, it's getting covered with snow, and the whole room is getting positively _cold_!" Nadia exclaimed. "Sure. Anything that comes in from space is cold, even if it's been out only a few minutes, and that hunk of stuff has been out for nobody knows how many million years. It didn't get much heat from the sun except at perihelion, you know, so it's probably somewhere around minus two hundred and sixty degrees now. I'll have to throw a heater on it for half an hour before we can touch it. And since this is more or less new stuff to you, I'll caution you--don't try to touch anything that has just come in. That hammer or pike would freeze your hand instantly, even though they've been out only a little while. Before you touch anything, blow on it, like this, see? If your breath freezes solid on it, like that, don't touch it--it's cold." * * * * * Under the infra-beams of the heater, the mass of the metal was brought to room temperature and Stevens attacked it with his machine tools. Bit by bit the stubborn material was torn from the lump. Through heavy goggles he watched the incandescent mass in a refractory crucible, in the heart of the induction furnace. "What do you think you've got--what you want?" "I don't know. It wasn't iron--it wouldn't hold a magnet. It's royal metal of some kind, I think. Base metals mostly melt at around fifteen hundred, and that crucible is still dry as a bone at better than seventeen." "How are you going to separate out the tantalum and the others you want from the ones that you don't want?"