"Right!" Old Barger cried exultantly. "We can go out, have a look around!" He snapped shut the flaring exhausts, sprang quickly toward an airlock. "Come on! Let's go!"
"Wait a minute!" Haller turned to the wall against which the atomite gun had been held. Now that the magnetic center was beneath them, the collection of iron and steel objects had fallen to the floor. With an effort Haller wrenched the gun free, thanking his stars that only the trigger and recoil mechanism were of steel. Even so, the weapon, drawn groundward, seemed to weigh pounds. Gripping it, Haller opened the massive doors of the airlock, swung through.
The sight that greeted his gaze defied comparison. The entire surface of the little world was deep with uneven, jagged rocks, roughly spherical in shape. Some of vast size, larger than a spaceship, some no bigger than marbles, they appeared to have fallen like hailstones upon the asteroid's surface, covering it to an unknown depth. Peering between two of the larger stones, Haller could see a crevasse of appalling deepness, and below it, more of the loose rounded rocks. How large the original planetoid was, he could not imagine, but it was evident that for millenniums its magnetic attraction had been collecting about it meteors, most of which have a high ferrous content, drawing them to it and increasing its size. The little world was like a spider ... a spider of space ... catching all ferrous objects in its magnetic field, sucking them to it, fattening on them! Meteors, spaceships, iron-permeated cosmic dust ... all were drawn inexorably to it!
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!"