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—
Night had fallen on the jungle moon, as the Jolly Roger rode down on a column of blazing atom-fire into the scorched and muddy clearing where the little cabin stood under the weird glory of the many moons aloft. Sue Barlow and Scotty McGuire came out to regard the two adventurers in surprise.
The blond girl stared at Star with wide, wondering eyes.
"We heard it on the newscast" she said breathlessly. "That you had discovered and unmasked the ghost-murderer—"
"Aye, and captured the black phantom, to boot!” crowed Scotty McGuire, reaching up to clap Star on one hard, muscular shoulder. "Come into the cabin, aye, and your Venusian friend, too. We'll share a bottle of good Uranian wine to celebrate, and you can tell us all about it!"
8. Phantom from the Past
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!"