Meteor miners live a hard, lonely life. In their little cargo tugs they lurk about the outer precincts of the atmospheres of the giant planets, Jupiter or Saturn, waiting for the immensely powerful gravity fields of those enormous worlds to draw into their embrace the countless swarms of meteors that wander endlessly in the void.

When this occurs, the miners are glued to their �scopes. Meteors largely composed of ice or frozen methane or stone behave differently than do those with cores of heavy metals, which the miners prize. And when they observe meteors which fall shrieking into the upper atmosphere of one of the giant worlds, fluttering in that characteristic manner, they know they have their prize.

Then comes the long, dangerous, often futile struggle to lock their grappling beams on the metal meteors, as their stubborn, little tugs battle grimly against the measureless power of the giant planet's gravitational field. More than one little tug has lost that struggle, and fallen to a�fiery doom ...

The little two-man tug, Sweet Sue, registered to Big Bill Barlow and his scrawny sidekick, Scotty McGuire, had been five weeks circling the ochre-banded orb of giant Jupiter, and had taken nothing but some tungsten and copper ore, when they spotted the uncharted moon. That the tiny worldlet had hitherto gone unnoticed by astronomers was hardly surprising. The minuscule planetoid was scarcely more than half-a-mile long ... but what Big Bill saw in the 'scope alerted him to the chance of a real find.

"Scotty!" the big, red-faced man boomed. "Looky here! That moonlet�s got an atmosphere, and vegetation of some sort�see!"

The diminutive little Scotsman limped over to the twin 'scope and peered within. There could be no doubt about it�and any kind of an atmosphere on a moonlet so small as this meant a core of heavy, very heavy metal.

And heavy metals were valuable.

"Let�s take 'er down, Bill, and check 'er out," suggested Scotty. His huge partner agreed, and the battered and rusty little space tug settled to the surface of the mystery moon.

The two suited up before leaving their vessels. Atmosphere or no atmosphere, they had not survived as long as they had in their hard and dangerous profession by taking foolish risks. Outside, their space boots squealed and crunched in the queer pink moss and lavender lichens that clung to the moist soil.

All was deathly still. The weird scene was flooded by the amber radiance of Jupiter, whose ochre-banded shield filled almost all the visible sky. They had come down in a small clearing. To all sides loomed strange fungoid growths like enormous mushrooms, whose umbrella-like heads nodded to the impulse of unheard and unfelt winds. The spongy boles of these fungus-trees were pale or creamy or tan, striped or splotched with amazing scarlet, canary, indigo, purple. Neither of the two miners had ever seen or heard of the like.

Bill and Scotty unlimbered and set up the drill on its sturdy tripod. The little Scotsman peered around at the uncanny scene; his superstitious Celtic blood liked not at all this nameless moon, and he yearned to be gone.

Big Bill also felt the strange allure of the mystery moon. Straightening, he glanced about.

"Lissen, Scotty, you take some core samples, okay? I'm gonna have a look around and see what's to be seen. You never know what a funny place like this could hold ..."

"Okay, Bill, but you be careful, now," warned the Scotsman. The big man strode off and was soon lost to view among the tall stalks of the fungus forest. The sandy-haired Scotsman busied himself with the drill.

Suddenly a muffled exclamation sounded over the intercom that linked the suits of the two miners.

"Well, for th' luvva�hey, Scotty! Drop what you're doin' and c'mere�if this don't beat all!" boomed the big man's voice, almost deafening his partner.

"On my way, Bill!" snapped Scotty, sprinting for the fungus forest and clawing one of his heavy proton needles clear of its worn leather holster as he ran.

In the back-alleys behind the big spaceport on Ganymede, moon of Jupiter, stands a two-storey edifice whose illusion-sign proclaims it to be "The Spaceman's Rest."

Although it did not noticeably differ in any particular way from any of the other dozen or so saloons that lined the narrow dirt alley, it was the favorite rendezvous of Big Bill Barlow and Scotty McCuire, whenever they happened to be in port between voyages. The reason for their giving the Spaceman�s Rest their exclusive custom may perhaps lie in the fact that, somehow or other, the owner and bartender always managed to have on hand (although at hefty prices) genuine Scotch whiskey imported all the way from earth. And this beverage was favored by both Big Bill and Scotty.

They had arrived in parking orbit above Ganymede that morning, wasted no time in selling their meagre claim of copper and tungsten ore to the first-comers, and had taken their tiny gig down to the spaceport for a night of celebration. As they entered the Spaceman�s Rest, they found the joint crowded with other meteor miners and crewmen from various freighters�even a handful of tourists out for a night of slumming. The saloon was thronged with ruddyfaced, burly Jovians, slim, paleskinned Venusians, Mercurians, dark as mahogany, with eyes like gold coins, and the usual sprinkling of Earthlings in their usual variety of shapes, sizes and colors.

Room was swiftly made for Big Bill Barlow and his freckle-laced little sidekick at one long table in front of the fire, for the two miners were favorites here. Although noisy and boisterous when in his cups, Bill never got into brawls in the bar and usually stood drinks for everybody in sight, so long as he still had a few credits in his pocket. The bartender and owner of the saloon, a fat, moonfaced, yellow-skinned Uranian named Quarl, brought a pitcher of water and a bottle of good, well-aged Earth Scotch over to their table, and two tumblers.

In no time, Bill was busy regaling some of his friends with the tale of their discovery of the uncharted moonlet of Jupiter, and of the weird treasure that it had held.

�... And there it was, mates," rumbled Big Bill, waving his heavy hands expansively, "buried in them weird mushroom jungles, for the Lord on �y knows how many millions of years!"

He described the view that had greeted him on the other side of the fungus forest, where a structure of black basalt protruded from the loam of the nameless moonlet, half-overgrown with uncanny pink moss There were few who did not know that it was theorized that the Asteroid Belt�and many of the moons of Jupiter�were actually fragments of�a shattered planet, the mysterious "Aster," torn asunder aeons before in a tug of war between the gravitational forces of the giants, Jupiter and Saturn, and the mighty Sun. And that some weird form of intelligent life had inhabited the Lost Planet was also no secret, for more that a few asteroids and moons bore the enigmatic ruins of this forgotten race.

Barlow told his breathless audience how he had pried open the sealed stone vault, discovering naught within but a metal box of unknown and nameless alloy, which, when forced open, revealed seven strange, unearthly stones�

One of these he had brought with him, and now displayed it solemnly on his palm. The miners and spacemen gaped, staring avidly at the mystery jewel, which was unlike anything they had ever seen before.

It was a perfect sphere, larger than a man's thumb, and black as night itself, but with a queer bloom upon it like that upon the skin of a purple grape. Many of those present had heard of black pearls�but never of one as huge or as dark as this ...

"And there are seven in all, mates," breathed Big Bill Barlow, staring down at the dark shape which shimmered in his grasp. "Seven black pearls ..."

"And each one worth a fortune, I�ll wager," muttered the fat bartender, Quarl. "I�ve heard of unknown gems like this, found in the hearts of meteors or the soil of far-off worlds and moons, going for half a million credits each to the big jewellers on Mars ...� say, in Syrtis Port, or Propontis, or Sun Lake ..."

"Half a million ..." breathed someone in the crowd.

"Then my partner and I are rich,� grinned Big Bill, wrapping one huge arm around the skinny shoulders of the Scotchman. "Rich ... we can retire from space, and live at ease like gentlemen on one of them pleasure moons�... �cause with Scotty an� me, it's always been half an' half, an� always will be ..."

In the rear of the saloon, half-hidden in a booth which lay in the shadow of a stone pillar, two men sat hunched over the remnants of their meal and half-empty winecups, listening to the loud voice of the meteor miner.

One was a slender, milk-pale Venusian, with the pink eyes and hairless pate of his kind. The other was a tall, long-legged, rangy, broad-shouldered and lean-hipped Earthling who wore leathern space-boots and a drab one-piece zipper suit of gray synthetic. He was wrapped in a gray wool hooded cloak, whose cowl was drawn up around his face, perhaps to conceal features already a bit too well known in these parts.

He had a merry, space-tanned, clean-shaven face, with an impish grin, and his eyes were sparkling green with mischief under an unruly mop of red curls.

They called him Star Pirate.

Big Bill Barlow bought round after round of drinks for his fellow spacemen and miners in the saloon, including the two strangers in the back booth. The more he drank, the happier and noisier he got, boasting of the high and glorious days to come when he and Scotty would he living it up in Luna City or Paris or anywhere else in the System they cared to travel�maybe in their private spare yacht, with girl stewards and manicurists and the choicest wines and finest gourmet chefs, and ...

Eventually, husky Quarl helped little Scotty guide the faltering footsteps of the stumbling giant up the steep stairs to the little green room on the second floor where the two miners often slept off their night�s carousal at the Spaceman's Rest, at the end of a long and usually successful voyage.

Scotty put his snoring friend to bed and fell into bed himself.

Below, spacemen marvelled over Barlow�s remarkable discovery, and enviously vied with each other in estimating the enormous value of the seven strange black gems the big man had discovered in the age-old Asterian sepulchre�or whatever�it was.

As for Star Pirate and his Venusian sidekick, Phath, they finished their wine, and had a cup of strong black coffee, before going back to their ship. The two space adventurers were returning to their secret base in the Belt after a voyage to one of the moons of Uranus, where they had been instrumental in frustrating the plans of a brilliant but deranged scientist who had attempted to use his formidable intelligence and technical wizardry to subjugate bands of innocent natives to his own unscrupulous ends. On their way back to Haven, as Star�s hidden headquarters was called, they had stopped off briefly here at Ganymede to replace worn receptor coils with new ones aboard their trim little speedster, the Jolly Roger.

The two had just reached the door of the saloon and were about to venture out into the dark alleyway beyond, when they were frozen in their tracks by a screech of unearthly horror sounding from one of the little rooms above�

"Bill!�Bill! Curse you, get off him, you fiend! Oh, Gawd help me! Help me, somebody�the black ghost is murderin' me partner�!"

A bartender is always the soberest, most alert man in any saloon�since he's working, not drinking, unlike everyone else in the place. So it was not surprising that the echoes of Scotty McGuire's anguished plea for assistance had barely died away before the huge and hefty Uranian had vaulted over the bar, a stout cudgel clasped in one thick-fingered hand, and went charging up the steep wooden stair to the rooms above.

And, since they were already on their feet, it was also no wonder that Star Pirate and his Venusian sidekick, Phath, were on his very heels, their proton needles in their hands, ready for trouble.

While the Jovian moon had its own constabulary, of course, the spaceport and its precincts happened to be under the direct authority of the Space Patrol, so it was a veteran Patrol officer who was dispatched to investigate the murder of Big Bill Barlow�for that it was obviously murder no one could doubt.

This officer was a granite-jawed man in his middle years, with thin disapproving lips and cold, colorless eyes. He was lean and trim, his spare figure taut in the dead-black tunic and leggings of the Patrol, and the silver crescent moon of an inspector-major gleamed on his high collar. His name was Branigan, and, as it happened, he and Star were rivals from the days of old.

When the rangy redhead had been a cunning and elusive rogue back in the wild and reckless days of his outlawry, it had been Branigan's bad luck to be assigned the task of bringing Star to justice. But the mischievous young daredevil had outsmarted him at every twist and turn, leaving him to writhe in impotent fury as Star Pirate vanished into the void with the loot from his most recent caper.

These things rankle in a lawman's soul; and even in these later days, when Star had received a full pardon for his crimes�from a grateful System government for a favor done freely, Branigan still held a grudge against the impudent youth who had dared make such mock of him in the old days. Hence it came as no surprise to any when at the very sight of his arch-nemesis and the slim Venusian, Branigan swore by twenty spacedevils, and his hard face flushed crimson.

"So, you�re mixed up in this affair, are you, you sly young devil! Well, maybe this time you've just possibly outsmarted yourself, for once!" grated Branigan.

Those green eyes twinkled with innocent merriment into his own gimlet gaze. "Doubt it, Branigan," Star drawled with a wry grin. "Thirty customers will tell you that Phath and I were nearly out of the door when McGuire called out from the floor above that his partner was being murdered by a �black ghost��whatever he meant by that."

"He�s right," rumbled the moonfaced Uranian. "And�I was the first one in the room, just before these two." In a sober voice and without wasting words the bartender told how he had found the babbling little Scotsman crouched tearfully over the corpse of his partner. A few quick questions from Branigan brought out the whole story�the mystery moon, the secret tomb, the treasure of black pearls.

"What happened to the gem Barlow was flashing around?" demanded the inspector. Quarl shrugged, his wide moon yellow face wearing a baffled expression.

"Search me, inspector! It�s�it�s gone!"

"Aye," barked Branigan gruffly. "Search you I will, and everybody else on the scene�starting with you, Pirate!"

"Search away," grinned the redhead. "But please be careful around the ribs�I�m awfully ticklish!"

Branigan had brought with him two husky ratings of the Port patrol. Together they made short work of�searching the patrons of the Spaceman�s Rest, and the murder room. They found nothing of consequence: in particular, they did not find the mysterious black pearl the two miners had found in space.

When they were done, and Branigan grudgingly permitted the now-sobered patrons to leave the saloon in the dim pink light of morning, Star Pirate took him aside.

"Have you come to any conclusion as yet, or are you as baffled by all this as I am?" asked Star.

The inspector smirked nastily.

"What, the great Star Pirate�mystified? Well, I�m not. It�s open and shut. Nothing to it; easiest case I ever cracked," he said in tones redolent of self-satisfaction.

"Pray enlighten me, then," murmured Star politely.

"When you�re confronted with a case of murder, look for motive," the inspector said sententiously. "Who profits most by the man�s death? His partner, of course, McGuire�"

"Not before the law," said Star instantly. "Barlow has a niece who keeps house for the two men. They have a little shack out in the back-country, where they rest up between voyages and raise a small crop of vegetables. As Barlow�s only heir, the girl inherits everything he leaves. The fifty-fifty agreement between the two partners was only verbal, a mutual agreement, and was to be terminated by the death of either one of them, Not that Miss Barlow won�t, most likely, be extremely generous with McGuire, who has been as much an uncle to her as Barlow himself ever was."

Branigan�s mouth was hanging open. He noticed the fact, and closed it. "H-how did you ... latch onto all this?" he asked.

"Easy," Star grinned. "I talked to McGuire."

Branigan purpled, then, restraining his temper with a visible effort, he growled, "Those pearls were taken on a mining trip, and it�ll be a pretty problem for the courts to decide whether they�re Barlow's private property or belonged to both men, since they shared the proceeds from their mining trips equally. But that�s for the courts to worry about�me, I look for motive, then for opportunity. McGuire had both� nobody else was in the room when you and your web-footed sidekick and this fat-faced Uranian came busting in, was there?�

"Nobody . . . that�I could see, " mused Star Pirate thoughtfully.

Branigan smirked and spread his hard hands. "Then there it is, smart guy! It had to be McGuire ... take him away, boys."

Star and Phath and the yellow-skinned bartender stood in silence as the Patrol squad manacled a pale and muttering Scotty McGuire and led him away.

They said nothing because there was really nothing to say.

The medical examiner who performed the official autopsy on the body of Big Bill Barlow was a gaunt, gloomy-faced Mercurian with teak-dark skin and eyes like hot gold coins. He received Star Pirate and the Venusian in a cramped and dusty, airless little cubicle of an office. The desk was buried under a snowfall of papers and the windowpane so fogged by dust and grime that you could not have told by eye alone whether it was day or night outside. Star came to the point at once, as he had apparently interrupted the doctor during his lunch hour.

"Yep, strangled," grunted the medical examiner, munching juicily on a ham sandwich. "Powerful feller, the murderer�dang powerful. Feller�s throat was literally crushed."

"By human hands?" inquired Star. The doctor, whose name was Hurgo, stared meditatively at a taded, ten-year-old calendar which hung on the wall, chewing on a succulent slice of pickle.

"Jovian might of done it," he said at last. "Heavy gravity planet like Jupiter makes 'em stronger than other fellers. But I doubt it. The victim�what's his name ? Barlow? � was a big man, too; thick neck like a bull. And from the way the muscles of his throat were mashed and mangled �" here he paused to pick his teeth with a sliver of wood, while Phath looked sickly out of the bleared window and began to wish he had waited in the dirty lobby below�"mashed and mangled, I say . . . nope, not even a Jovian could have done it."

"With a strangling cord? A rope, maybe?" pressed Star Pirate keenly. The coroner blinked bland gold eyes at him, and glugged down a swig of cold black coffee into which he first poured a large and liberal slug of Mercurian brandy.

"You're think' mebbe this Barlow feller was garrotted, heh?" he guessed shrewdly. "Not a chance, young feller ... it would have taken a woven-steel hawser and a power-winch to have done such a job on Barlow's throat. Believe me!"

When the two adventurers got downstairs, Phath took a deep breath of fresh air and felt the minor surge of sickness pass. He wondered�but only briefly�whatever in the name of thirty space-devils possessed a man, to make him wish to become a coroner and spend his time messing around with cadavers.

"Where now, chief?" he inquired somewhat more cheerfully.

"Now we find ourselves a lawyer," said the rangy redhead, "and post bail for Scotty McGuire."

The milky-skinned Venusian examined his comrade with an albino-pink gaze. "You don't figure Scotty did this guy Barlow in, then, right?"

"Of course not," scoffed Star. "Barlow was three times McGuire's weight, with hands like a couple of hams and biceps as thick as most men's thighs. Even dead drunk, he could have mopped the floor with three Scotty's. Uh, I've no doubt the wiry little Scotsman can hold his own in a barroom brawl, but�did you see his hands? Small as a woman's. It is not physically possible that he inflicted such wounds with those hands as were found on Barlow's throat ... you remember what Dr. Hurgo said ... 'mashed and mangled' ..."

Phath looked sick, swallowed with difficulty, and suggested they change the subject. Star grinned to himself and restrained from making the quip he longed to make.

Three days later, their second task completed, they called the mechanic at the field, learned their ship was ready. Then, after a quick lunch at the Spaceport Cafe, they went to the field, where the Jolly Roger, newly outfitted with her sparkling fresh copper receptor coils, awaited them; they blasted off and headed south across the many miles and miles of thick, quaint jungles of curious trees which covered most of the surface of tropic Ganymede.

The queer, tall, nodding growths of pale, flabby balsa-solt fiber were not so much trees as giant stalks of vegetable which resembled celery as much as any other earthly analog. The fibrous trunks sucked up moisture from the rich soil and converted it to nutritious tissue which the Ganymedian colonists served at table, either baked in thin, chewy cutlets, or cubed in succulent stews and ragouts, or boiled into thick, creamy soups.

The flavor, a bit too bitter for Earthlings, was mostly favored only by the colonists, and the stuff was seldom shipped off-world.

Phath set the Jolly Roger down in a small, raw clearing crudely hacked from the weird forest of pallid, nodding stalks. Here stood a small shack of prefabricated plastic panels, and a couple of small outbuildings, one of them a shed with sheet-metal sides and roof which looked to be large enough to house the Sweet Sue, and, as later came out, did in fact serve as a hangar for the battered, rusty little two-man tug when she was resting up between space-ventures.

In the rear of the plastic shack the two caught a glimpse of a sizeable patch of cultivated soil arranged in neatly hoed rows, where grew potatoes, onions, carrots, green peppers, what looked from this distance to be lima beens, lettuce, beets and tomatoes. There were also a couple of rows of ripe golden corn, a small but heavy-laden apple tree, and a patch devoted to watermelons and canteloupes.

"Guess they do all right for themselves here," observed Phath. As chef and general factotum of Star�s secret base, he grew the same fruits and vegetables, but in hothouses and hydroponics tanks, as Haven's atmosphere, temperature and supply of sunlight were not as good as those to be found here on jungle-clad Ganymede.

The two got out of the cabin of their craft and started to walk across the raw, muddy clearing towards the crude little shack, but came to a halt when a slim figure emerged onto the little porch and showed them the glistening, brassy prong of a proton needle. The weapon was held by a slender, tanned girl in her twenties with a curly mop of honey-blond hair, a dusting of freckles across her small nubbin of a nose, and clear steady gray eyes that did not waver as she confronted the two men. She was slim, with long legs, and wore a loose, dark red sweater and tan slacks. Even in these drab garments, her figure was enticing, thought Star to himself with an appreciative gleam in his emerald eyes.

"You can stop right there," the girl said stoutly, "and turn around. Go back to your ship, get in, and take off. Can't you leave Uncle Scotty alone? He's worn out with mourning Uncle Bill�s death, and I worry about his health. If you Patrol officers have to pester him with more of your eternal questions, call us on the televisor phone!�

"I'm not a Patrol officer, Miss Barlow," Star said, "I'm the man that arranged your uncle's bail. They call me ... Star Pirate."

The blonde girl paled, gasped, swayed for a moment, staring. Then the proton needle sagged, savered, dropped, and she looked about to faint. Star raced to help her, but the lithe and nimble Phath got there first and eased her gently to the flooring of the porch.

The fiery liquid in Phath's hip-flask of strong Venusian brandy proved to be a potent restorative. A swig or two of the golden fluid set the slim girl coughing, and very soon she was herself again.

"You must forgive me, please!" she said, limpid blue eyes pleading. "But the last few days have been a hellish ordeal for Uncle Scotty and me, and to ... suddenly realize we had a friend Like Star Pirate ... well, I�I�"

Star grinned that impish grin of his, and silenced her with a lifted hand. "No need to apologize, Miss Barlow," he said. "We�re here to help,"

"My name is Susan," she said with a wan smile. His green eyes sparkled.

"As in Sweet Sue,�I suppose?"

She nodded and sat up, thanking Phath for the brandy with a nod. "Uncle Scotty is resting, but I'll have to wake him pretty soon to have his lunch. The doctor said he must keep his strength up�... you can talk to him then."

"Fair enough," Star said cheerfully. "And the first thing I'll want to know is�where are the other six gems your uncles discovered on that uncharted moon? Branigan says they were not on the person of either man, nor in their little craft, and that McGuire refused to reveal their hiding place.�I very much need to examine the gems for myself."

"Hid 'em in the only place no one'd think to look, Mr. Star Pirate," said a weak voice from the doorway leading to one of the other rooms. "Big Bill, he put the metal box right smack in the firing chamber of Sweet Sue's cyclotron!" They turned to see the thin little Scotsman leaning against the door. He gave them a shaky grin, then came faltering over to wring Star's hand in a grateful grip.

"Clever!" murmured Star Pirate, and Sue Barlow sat her uncle down and began serving him a hot, nourishing soup, with a thick chicken sandwich and a bowl of fresh chopped salad. "No one is likely to go poking around in the middle of the atomic motor which powered the little tug."

A little while later, having retrieved the queer alloy box from its secret hiding place, the redheaded space adventurer was examining the six shimmering black pearls with a variety of cunningly miniaturized instruments he had fetched with him from his ship.

"Find anything, chief?" inquired the Venusian when he was finished. Star shrugged.

"Nothing, really," he said, rather ruefully. "The pearls have no magnetic charge, are not radioactive�outside of their unexpected weight, there's nothing odd about them except their rarity. Mineralogy knows nothing of such stones ... only the lost Asterites mined them, I guess."

"And are they really as rare and valuable as Uncle Scotty says they are?" demanded Sue Barlow, breathlessly.

"Worth a huge fortune, I�d say," grinned the Pirate. "Enough to send you to the classiest finishing-school back on Earth, and buy you all the pretty dresses and fine jewelry any girl's heart could desire."

The Jolly Roger shrieked like a meteor as it flashed through the misty skies of Ganymede. At the giant spaceport, the trim little craft rode down on a blazing pillar of rocket-fire as it settled into a landing-pit of blistered metal. Within moments, Star Pirate and his Venusian comrade strode Into Madame Ong�s Cafe and were met by Branigan.

Star looked around swiftly, sharp green eyes missing little. In the case of this particular establishment, he correctly guessed that "cafe" was a polite euphemism for "house of joy," for the dancing-girls were slim and young and of seductive loveliness, and beyond the huge square stone-walled room of the cafe, in a number of small cubicles, discreetly veiled behind tinkling bead curtains, were dispensed pipes of the forbidden Saturnian drug quang, if his keen nostrils were any judge.

He examined the girl�s body swiftly, discovering nothing to surprise him. She had been a lovely young creature, her dusky bronze skin and slanting amber eyes denoting an exotic mixture of the blood of several foreign worlds.

Madame Ong herself was a buttery-skinned Uranian, hugely fat and grotesquely painted with enough cosmetics to adorn half-a-dozen women. The abiq-plumes in her jewelled headdress quivered and trembled in the sweet, smoky air as she shook with fear, recounting the horror she had seen.

"P-poor little Ydara! Been one of my girls for two years, now, come next dragon-bird festival! What a horrible way to die!" the madame moaned, fanning herself with a greasy pack of gambling cards.

"Just tell me everything you saw," urged Star.

"A cloud of black smoke, it was like, the murderous thing," quivered the fat Uranian woman. "You could see right through it, like�like a ghost! A black, murdering ghost ... little Ydara, she had just finished her dance and was about to go upstairs with a customer�" she caught Branigan's grim, steely eye and flushed purple. "I�I mean, about to have a cup of wine with an old and valued patron," she said, in hurried, flustered tones. "When the dark shape settled about her, and part of it sort of ... shaped itself into something like�like�"

"A�tentacle?" rapped Star Pirate keenly. The Uranian madame blinked long, thick, and obviously artificial lashes at him with a grateful smirk oil her painted features.

"Yes, kind sir�like a tentacle, which whipped about her slim and pretty neck, and�and�" She whipped out a bit of perfumed lace, buried her lace in its folds, and moaned, flapping one bejewelled hand at the dead body eloquently.

"Did you, or anyone else in the room, happen to notice where the black vaporous ghost came from?" inquired Star, green eyes flicking from face to face. More than a few of the cafe's patrons turned and pointed to a place high up on the far wall. Star took one long look.

"Just as�I suspected�the grill of an air-circulator!" he crowed. "The walls of the room are solid stone, except for the ventilating ducts, and there are no windows. Quick, Phath, the equipment case!"

From the vestibule beyond, the Venusian lugged into the big square room a small, compact case, and opened it to remove a cubicular mechanism of gleaming metal, with a long hoselike attachment, which he plugged into the nearest power-outlet. Meanwhile, Branigan eyed the scene in bewilderment.

"What in the name of thirty spacedevils do you think you�re doing, Pirate?" he demanded.

Star nodded at the machine. "What does that look like to you, Branigan?" he inquired in sweet tones. The Patrol officer studied it belligerently.

"Like a suction-machine," he muttered. "What the devil do you plan to do, Pirate, try to suck the ghost out of the wall with a cursed vacuumcleaner?"

Star grinned and winked mysteriously. Then he attached a large bulk of transparent metal to the front of the suction-pump, and told everybody to stand back�

Star sipped the hearty black wine and stared moodily into the flames which danced on the stone hearth of the little cabin. "It must have been the mysterious Asterites who first discovered the uncanny life-forms," he mused. "They are entities of what seems to be black vapor, but they are actually composed of minute particles of black dust. Somehow or other, they are alive.

"Daylight arouses them, but when kept in darkness they lie dormant, apparently forever. In their dormant stage, the particles condense into perfect spheres, like black pearls. Like the ones you and your partner discovered sealed in an airtight alloy casket, buried within a basalt sarcophagus where the light of day could never penetrate."

"Devils of space!" swore Scotty, his numerous freckles dark against paling skin, eyes haunted. "So, when Big Bill stuck one in his pocket to flourish it around at the Spaceman's Rest� ?"

Star nodded somberly. "He as good as signed his own death-warrant.

Fortunately, he sealed the other six away in the alloy casket and hid them away in the cyclotron. Shortly alter he and you retired, the sphere disintegrated ... came apart into a floating vaporous cloud�and struck. At whomever was closest!"

Scotty's faded blue eyes were haunted by a nameless dread.

"He�he tucked the black pearl under his pillow," whispered the scrawny little Scotsman.

Sue Barlow stared at Star Pirate.

"But . . . why did it�kill?"

Star stirred himself, and poured another sip of the fiery black wine into his cup. "If my old friend, Dr. Zoar, the Martian scientist, were here," he grinned, "he'd use a lot of long words to say what can be said briefly. If a thing is alive, it has to feed on�something."

Phath goggled at him. "Chief! You mean�?"

The redheaded adventurer nodded grimly. "The vapor-devil can solidify some of its substance into a flexible tendril which possesses enormous strength. It must feed on the raw life-force of its victims, which otherwise disperses into the ether at the instant of death."

"But then ... where did it go?" asked the Scotsman.

"When�I examined your room above the saloon,�I noticed the window was open an inch. The vapor-beast drifted out of the window ... but it didn't go far. Long pent in darkness, all those millions of years, the phantom-thing had only enough strength to float a few alleys away, to Madame Ong's Cafe. There it allowed itself to be sucked into the ventilation-system, and reverted for a time to its harmless, dormant state, until at length the lights of Madame Ong's establishment, shining through one of the air-grills, aroused its ... appetite again."

Sue Barlow turned pale, shuddered, and bit her lip.

"After all those eons, it was�... very hungry," said Star Pirate in heavy tones. He then explained how he had employed the mechanism to suck the vaporous entity into the transparent bulb attached to the pump. An opaque black cloth was whisked over the bulb, as soon as Star made certain the pump had drawn all of the phantom-thing from the ventilation-system. Later, at Patrol headquarters, they removed the cloth�briefly�and saw the black pearl lying at the bottom of the glassy bulb, dormant, harmless�but only so long as it was deprived of the light which would otherwise release it to kill�and kill again!

They finished the bottle, and Scotty left the cabin only to return a few minutes later, lugging a rectangular box of queer, glimmering alloy. This he thrust, into Star's hands.

"Here�take the cursed, murderin' things, Mr. Pirate! I never want to see 'em again! Even if they ain't worth all those millions of credits�I figgered to retire on, and set the lass up in a nice finishin' school and all, at least I know, in yer hands, they'll never kill again!"

"You can be certain of that," swore Star Pirate grimly.