A "ghost-vessel" attacking the liners? A modern version of the ancient _Flying Dutchman_ legend? Radio newscasters talked of things like that. A vengeful ghost-ship roaming the starways, with dead pirates aboard, bent on attacking the living navigators whom they hated just because they were alive. It made nice gruesome broadcasting to give the television audience the shivers. Supernatural legends easily get support. Particularly from hysterical, imaginative women, or cranks who crave publicity. Reports had come from amateur astronomers who owned fairly decent telescopes that they had seen the wraith of a pallid ghost-ship hovering up in Earth's stratosphere; passengers on liners had hysterically thought they saw the same thing. A supernatural menace. But no reputable observer had ever seen anything. Our Interplanetary Patrol was completely baffled. And what the public didn't know was that those wrecked vessels--one of them, at least--had shown evidence that it had been hit by an electronic space-gun with a range of several hundred miles, which had broken the pressure-dome and let the air out. And in every case the wrecked ship was looted; the passengers' money and jewelry gone; the Purser's safe rifled. "Anyway, it's a good thing for us," Arthur Jerome was saying, "the little _Seven Stars_ ought not to be much of a prize for the phantom raider." He grinned, with his hand ruffling his sandy hair. "Let's hope we escape." The _Seven Stars_ not much of a prize? It was certainly reasonable enough to think that. We had a few Martians in the second-class section, and a few Earthmen passengers; and just an average commercial cargo. That's what anyone would think; and only the captain and I knew differently. Our cargo was anything but average. The boxes, as they had come aboard and been stored in the hold, were labeled as American preserved food-stuffs; technical commercial instruments, German-made prisms, lenses and the like. But in reality those boxes were crammed only with modern electronic weapons of war. It was a shipment purchased by the Martian government which was faced by the insurrection of its wealthy colony on Deimos. They were unusual weapons of exclusive Earth-manufacture. Small, for short-range, hand-use only; weapons to disable, but not injure. The recently publicized so-called "paralysis gun" was one of them. The Martian government, humane at least in battle with its own people, desperately needed this type of weapon in its forthcoming invasion of Deimos to subdue the rebels. * * * * *