s 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?"

"I'm afraid that I'm not going to, very well," replied Stevens, with a
wry grimace. "What I don't know about metallurgy would fill a library,
and I'm probably the world's worst chemist. However, by a series of
successive liquations, I hope to separate out fractions that I can
use. Platinum melts somewhere around seventeen-fifty, tantalum about
twenty-nine hundred, and tungsten not until 'way up around thirty-three,
or four hundred--and that, by the way, means lots of grief. Of course,
each fraction will probably be an alloy of one kind or another, but
I think maybe I'll be able to make them do."

"But mayn't that whole chunk be a pure metal?"

"It's conceivable, but not probable. There, she's beginning to separate
at just below eighteen hundred! Platinum group coming out now, I
t