Who Goes There?

A group of scientific researchers, isolated in Antarctica by the nearly-ended winter, discover an alien spaceship buried in the ice, where it crashed twenty million years before. They try to thaw the inside of the spacecraft with a thermite charge, but end up accidentally destroying it when the ship's magnesium hull is ignited by the charge.... Who Goes There? was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the stories representing the "most influential, important, and memorable science fiction that has ever been written".