Phantom of the Seven Stars By RAY CUMMINGS Lovely Brenda Carson, scholarly Jerome, pompous Livingston ... everyone aboard the _Seven Stars_ scoffed at the idea of a Phantom Pirate. But I.P. agent Jim Fanning didn't laugh. He knew the luxury-liner's innocent looking cargo was already marked for plunder. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories Winter 1940. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] Part of my assignment on this space-flight of the _Seven Stars_ was to watch the girl. That much, at least, wasn't hard. She was certainly easy to look at--a little beauty, slim with a pert, oval little face framed by unruly pale-gold hair. With mingled starlight and earthlight gleaming in that hair, it was like spun platinum. Her name was Brenda Carson. Certainly, she was an inspiring figure to any young man, in her white blouse and corded black and white trousers and her long black traveling cape with its hood dangling at the back of her neck and the cape folds flowing from her slim shoulders almost to the ground. We were several days out from New York, with Mars, our destination, hanging like a great dull-red ball among the blazing stars in the black firmament ahead of us, when I first noticed that there was anything queer about Brenda. We were sitting under the glassite pressure-dome on the forepeak of the _Seven Stars_, bathed in the pallid starlight. By ship-routine it was mid-evening. I gestured toward one of the side bull's-eyes of the bow-peak. "Gloomy-looking world, that Asteroid-9," I said. The little asteroid, one of the many out here in the belt between the orbits of Earth and Mars, was a small leaden crescent of sunlight with the unlighted portion faintly putty-colored. It was, I knew, a world some five-hundred miles in diameter, amazingly dense so that its gravity was not a great deal less than Earth. A bleak, barren little globe. It had an atmosphere breathable for humans; there was water--occasional rainfall; but chemicals in the cloud-vapors poisoned the water for human consumption. The rocks were heavily laden with metals. But they were all base metals, of no particular value. So far as I knew, nobody had ever bothered to settle on Asteroid-9. It was completely uninhabited. "Asteroid-9?" Brenda murmured. "Is that what it's called?" Something in my chance remark had frightened her. Her blue eyes as she flung me a quick, startled glance were suddenly clouded with what might have been terror. Her brother Philip was with us. He quickly said, "Asteroid-9? Somebody said we pass pretty close to it this voyage." He laughed. "Rotten sort of place, by what I've heard. You can have it and welcome."