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.