That stiffened me. I could see the blob of him standing there with her. The folds of his hooded cape, like hers, fell almost to his feet. But his arm held the cape draped a little to one side. I could see his white shirt; he was wearing no jacket. It would be in his sleeping cubby then.
For a moment more I crouched in the shelter of the little loading engine; I caught a few more fragments, but they were not important.
A wallet in young Carson's cubby, with a map in it? I shifted silently backward, reached the side deck and padded aft. The smoking lounge was empty now. The little interior cross corridor of the superstructure was dim and silent. Carson and his sister had connecting rooms, with corridor doors side by side. Cautiously I tried them. They were locked.
In a moment I was out to the side deck. Carson's window was closed; I pulled at the vertical sash and it yielded, slid outward. The room was dim, with just a faint glow of the corridor light coming over the lattice-grille above the door.
I jumped over the sill; landed silently in the room. No need for any lengthy search; his jacket was here, folded on a chair. The wallet was in a pocket. Swiftly I riffled through it, came upon a folded square of notepaper. The map? I was opening it. By the dim sheen of reflected light I could see its penciled scrawl. And suddenly I was stricken by the sound of footsteps in the corridor outside. Someone coming. I jumped on the chair. Through the grille I could catch a glimpse of a cloaked figure coming along the corridor. Carson or the girl—in that second I could not tell which.
But at all events I had no desire to get caught here by either of them. I got back out the window just in time. Aft down the side deck there was the blob of a loitering figure, a big, bulky silhouette. It was Walter Livingston, the Earth-Mars Ambassador. The tip of his cigarette glowed in the dimness as he stood by one of the side bull's-eyes. Was he watching these windows of Carson and the girl? Did he see me? I had no way of telling. I ran forward, ducked around the superstructure corner. The bow-peak triangle was empty; the chairs where the group of us had been sitting were still here.
There was enough light for me to examine the folded sheet of paper I had purloined. It seemed a crude map. A rough, penciled sketch. But a map of what? There were the ragged outlines of what might be intended to represent mountains. The scribbled word: "Andros." A dotted line through what might be a mountain pass. And then a tiny X.
I stared at the thing, puzzled. A few hundred years ago the fabled surface-ship pirates of Earth's romantic sea-history supposedly made maps like this. Maps of buried treasure. Pirates' gold. Were Carson and his young sister after some treasure? Where? On Earth? Mars? Little Deimos? Asteroid-9? That thought leaped at me. Certainly they had shown a queer interest in my chance remark about Asteroid-9. We were not far from it now. Fifty thousand miles perhaps—would pass at our closest point to it in an hour of two. I stared through the bull's-eye beside me. It was down there, diagonally ahead of us—a full-round, putty-colored disk, with the configurations of its mountains and the turgid clouds of its atmosphere beginning to be visible.
But what could any of that have to do with the Phantom raider, or the attack on the patrolship and the impending attack upon us? Surely there was no treasure on Asteroid-9. The treasure, if you could call it that, was right here on board the little Seven Stars.