By one outstretched hand a small notebook lay open with the leather back upward. The corners of several pages were turned under carelessly--Nat swung the torch around the room. It was bare. The notebook--quickly he picked it up. The page on which the writing began was dated May 10, 2040. About two months ago. "Helmar Swenson. My daughter, Helena, aged nineteen, and I were lured into the maw of this hellish monster by a robot calling for help in our television screen. This thing, known to man as Asteroid Moira, is, in actuality, one of the gigantic mineral creatures which inhabited a planet before it exploded, forming the asteroids. Somehow it survived the catastrophe, and, forming a hard, crustaceous shell about itself, has continued to live here in space as an asteroid. "It is apparently highly intelligent and has acquired an appetite for human flesh. The singing spheres act as its sensory organs, separated from the body and given locomotion. It uses these to lure victims into its stomach in the first cave. I escaped its lure at first because of the 'squeaker' I carried with me. We set up these two doors as a protection from the beast while we stayed here to examine it. But the monster got me when I fell and the 'squeaker' was broken. My daughter rescued me after the acid of the pool had begun eating away my flesh. "My Helena is locked in the room opposite this one. She has food and water to last until July 8th. Oxygen seeps in there somehow--the beast wants to keep her alive until it can get her out of the room to devour her." Here the writing became more cramped and difficult to read. "I have put the key in my mouth to prevent the spheres from opening the door should they force their way into this room. Some one must come to save my Helena. I can't breathe--" The writing ended in a long scrawl angling off the page. The pencil lay some distance from the body. July 8th! But that had been almost a week ago! * * * * * He unscrewed the man's helmet, tried to pry the jaws open. They would not move; the airless void surrounding the tiny planetoid had frozen the body until now it was as solid as the quartz cave-walls. There was but one thing to do: the other door must be melted down. He leaped halfway across the room toward the door in the opposite wall. Could it be possible that he was in time? Anxiously he flung a bolt of energy from his heat rod toward the lock, holding a flashlight under the other stump of an arm. The molten metal flowed to the floor like a rivulet of lava. The door, hanging off balance, screeched open; air swooshed past him in its sudden escape from the room. He squeezed himself through, peered carefully about to see a slim spacesuit start to crumple floorward in a corner. The girl was alive!