"Yes, of course. I'll make sure—" He lowered his voice and I lost the rest of it.
"When?" she murmured.
"I'll just take a look presently. We're not there yet—closer in a few hours."
What, in Heaven's name, could that mean? Were these two spies, planted here on the Seven Stars by the phantom-bandits? Were they discussing the attack which Captain Wilkes and I feared? Certainly it did not seem so. Young Philip Carson wasn't much older than his sister. Slim, handsome, rather effeminate-looking fellow, with a weak jaw and slack mouth. He wore black and white trousers, somewhat like hers. He and she seemed devoted to each other. Rankin had told me that Philip Carson had a bad record of gambling and bad companions. Was the girl entangled because of him?
My mind went back to the meager details which Rankin had given me. Brenda and Philip Carson came of a cultured and once-rich family in New York. Their father—their only close living relative—had been a research physicist. An eccentric old fellow; he had built a laboratory down on Long Island where, working in secret, he was laboriously experimenting on something. Two years ago the place had exploded. Presumably he had been killed. But in the wreckage his body had not been found; nor was there anything to give a clue as to what he had been doing there.
Had he been building the phantom space-raider? The thought was obvious now. Brenda and Philip had denied knowing, when the authorities had questioned them. And now they were going to Mars, on this of all voyages, and for no reason that they had been able to give. Was the vanished eccentric Professor Robert Carson the Phantom raider? My heart leaped as I heard another fragment from the girl.
"You think you got his message correctly?"
"Yes, of course I did."
"If we can do it safely—Oh, Phil—the location."
"I've got it all figured out, Bren," he insisted. "Even made a little map—got it in the wallet of my jacket."