They detected no light, however. They only saw below them a terrain that might have been lifted from an ink-sketch of grotesquerie by Goya or Sidney Sime. This was a cold and unutterable outer hell running rampant. This was a new canto for Dante. The rock was like a broken-off black tip of a mountain surging suddenly toward them, with jagged pinnacles reaching out to grasp and deep black gullies agape. Garth allowed the cruiser to drift just beyond gravity, away from the sunward side. Peering at the scene below, he shook his head. "I wouldn't want to attempt a landing there. Safer to use the magnibullet--there's usually enough metallic content at the core of these rocks to make it feasible, and we're only a few hundred yards away." They donned space-suits and moved into the air-lock. There the magnibullet, a heavy magnetized projectile, rested in a powerful compressed air tube. From it led a thin cable, wound upon a pivoted spool. Garth opened the outer door and swung the compression tube around. He released the power and the magnibullet shot "down," or "out," straight for the asteroid. The cable unreeled behind it until it struck. The cruiser was now a tiny satellite, revolving slowly as the rock revolved, but connected to it by the taut strand of wire. The two men moved along the wire hand over hand until the gravity of the rock gripped them, to pull them slowly downward. They alighted on a precipitous plateau bordering on the sunward side. All was an amorphous mass of guttered rock, of serrate pinnacles and precipices and sudden chasms. Bizzare and ever-changing shadows played slowly over the naked, revolving surface. As they stood there staring around, Prokle clicked on the radiophone in his helmet and said: "Hype, I thought of something. How could there be a signal flare here anyway? No oxygen." "How do you know?" Garth replied. "Surprising thing, but there often is air, a thin sort, on asteroids this large--deep down in the crevices. I've even seen various kinds of moss, lichen, and other sparse growth on some of these rocks. Come to think of it, that might conceivably serve as food. You know--to men who cling tenaciously to life?" Prokle shuddered at the thought. He said, "Well, shall I take the light side and you the dark? That way we could circle this rock in a couple of hours."