Einstein’s Planetoid is a novelet by C.M. Kornbluth (as by Paul Dennis Lavond), Robert A. W. Lowndes and Frederik Pohl. Originally published in Science Fiction Quarterly, No. 6, Spring 1942.
Story:
Their quest lay outside the usual spacelanes, and it led them to the strangest world men had ever found. And they found, when they landed, that a grim cosmic joke had been played upon them, for their most powerful rockets were helpless to fling them off the little world. Caught in the brilliant arms was a flattish thing that looked more like a centipede than anything else.
