"Help him?" I murmured.
"Yes. Oh, Mr. Fanning—"
"Jim is shorter," I interjected.
"—Jim, you see, we couldn't believe father is a criminal. Captured maybe and forced to operate his ship by these bandits, and appealing to us for help."
Desperate adventure indeed. But they had tackled it; had taken passage on the little Seven Stars which they understood would pass very close to Asteroid-9, this voyage. And they had known completely nothing of the Seven Stars' cargo or of any plot which the raider might have against her! Brenda gasped now when I told her of those angles.
And there were still other angles that puzzled me. "Brenda, have you ever heard of an Earth-criminal called the Chameleon?"
She had not; and when I described his exploits of a few years ago, she was convinced that by no possible chance could her aged father have been secretly doing things like that. Nor Philip either, for that matter. She declared it vehemently, and I believed her. But the man with the metal skull had been on the Seven Stars as stowaway, or spy among the passengers, ship's officers or crew. I had seen him there in young Carson's stateroom.
Brenda, when I was chasing her, had eluded me. "I saw you fighting with somebody at Philip's window," she told me now. "I was going to escape from the ship then."
"Even though Philip was dead, you were going on with your plans alone?"
"Yes, why not?" She smiled her twisted little smile. "Then I saw you fall to the deck. I ran, bent over you. I—I thought you were dead. So I—I ran down to the porte and took off. Philip and I had planned it so carefully. Oh, poor Philip!"