Satisfied at last that the armor was spaceworthy, Stevens picked up the coils of drag-line, built of a non-metallic fiber which could retain its flexibility and strength in the bitter cold of outer space, and led the girl into the air-lock.
"Heavens, Steve! It's perfectly stupendous, and grinding around worse than the wreckage of the Arcturus was when I wouldn't let you climb up it—why, I thought comets were little, and hardly massive at all!" exclaimed the girl.
"This is little, compared to any regular planet or satellite or even to the asteroids. There's only a few cubic kilometers of matter there, and, as I said before, it's a decidedly unusual comet. You know the game?"
"I've got it—and believe me, I'll yank you back here a lot faster than you can jump over there if any one of those lumps starts to fall on you! Is this drag line long enough?"
"Yes, I've got a hundred meters here, and it's only fifty meters over there to where I'm going. So long," and with a light thrust of his feet, he dove head foremost across the intervening space, a heavy pike held out ahead of him. Straight as a bullet he floated toward his objective, a jagged chunk many yards in diameter, taking the shock of his landing by sliding along the pike-handle as its head struck the mass.
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."