I followed her gesture. Up in the leaden sky beyond the looming triple
spires of Andros, a tiny speck had appeared. A ship coming down.
Breathlessly we watched. In a few minutes it was a little oblong blob.
"It's coming this way, Brenda."
"Yes."
It seemed circling a little. By the look it would land on a small level
plateau some quarter of a mile from us. We stared, mute, transfixed,
watching.
And then suddenly I sucked in my breath with a new shock of startled
amazement. There was something familiar about that cylindrical alumite
hull with the curving pressure-dome above it, and those quadruplicate
tail-fins.
It wasn't the bandit flyer! "That's the _Seven Stars_!" I gasped.
The _Seven Stars_ unquestionably. We saw her clearly in a moment, as
she circled some five miles away from us and headed slowly for the
small plateau. Captain Wilkes undoubtedly had changed his mind about
trying to make a run for it. With chaos on his ship--his radio-helio
wrecked so that he could not summon another convoy--he had headed down
here to hide his vessel. And he did not know, of course, that the
Phantom raider's base was here! He had brought his little treasure ship
into the very camp of the enemy!
"We must warn him, Brenda."
The blob of the little liner dropped from our sight behind a line of
broken rock-spires as she settled to the plateau. But we could tell
within a few hundred yards of where she had landed. It took us only
a few minutes to run there, with the slighter gravity of Asteroid-9
aiding us in our leaps across the intervening little chasms. And then
we saw the _Seven Stars_, where she rested placidly on the level
surface. One of her lower portes was open, but there were no figures
out on the dim rocks.
There was silence inside as we entered the dark little
pressure-chamber. As always customary in port, both its outer and inner
door-slides were open, admitting the fresh outer air.
There was no one to greet us on the lower level catwalk. Its single
overhead light was burning. We passed Kellogg's little cubby. No
one was in it. Then we mounted the companion ladder; came to the
superstructure corridor.
Queer, this silence. I held Brenda, with my heart chilling, sinking.
It seemed suddenly that we were prowling like ghouls. The ship was so
cold, so silent. With the ventilating fans stilled, the interior air
here was turning fetid. I had an impulse to call out. Captain Wilkes,
Controlman Kellogg, Purser Green, the crew, the passengers--where were
they all? But abruptly I was furtive, with a slow, horrified terror
dawning in me so that in the dim corridor I stood suddenly and turned
to Brenda.
"We'd better get back out of here," I murmured. "Something queer--"
"Jim--look!"
We stood frozen, transfixed. At the deck doorway a blob was lying.
Captain Wilkes. Dead--suffocated. I swept Brenda away that she might
not get a second glimpse of his puffed, mangled flesh where it had
burst outward from its own pressure. There had been a vacuum here! Out
in space the little _Seven Stars_ quite evidently had lost her interior
air!
Ship of the dead! I took only one look at the dimly starlit deck
triangle; the bodies lying strewn there. Little group of humans who
had gathered there in a last frenzied panic, clinging to each other,
falling one upon the other--suffocating, dying.
Nothing but the dead here.
But this tragedy had happened out in space! And we had seen the _Seven
Stars_ calmly coming down, gracefully, skilfully landing!