"Then you've seen Karpin and McCann. Exactly the same. It doesn't matter
if a man's thirty or sixty or what. It doesn't matter what he was like
before he came out here. If he's been here a few years, he looks exactly
like the bunch you saw outside there."
"That's appearance," I said. "What I was looking for was personality."
"Same thing," he said. "All of them. Close-mouthed, anti-social,
fiercely independent, incurably romantic, always convinced that the big
strike is just a piece of rock away. McCann, now, he was a bit more
realistic than most. He'd be the one I'd expect to take out a retirement
policy. A real pence-pincher, that one, though I shouldn't say it as
he's dead. But that's the way he was. Brighter than most Belt boys when
it came to money matters. I've seen him haggle over a new piece of
equipment for their scooter, or some repair work, or some such thing,
and he was a wonder to watch."
"And Karpin?" I asked him.
"A prospector," he said, as though that answered my question. "Same as
everybody else. Not as sharp as McCann when it came to money. That's why
all the money stuff in the partnership was handled by McCann. But Karpin
was one of the sharpest boys in the business when it came to mineralogy.
He knew rocks you and I never heard of, and most times he knew them by
sight. Almost all of the Belt boys are college grads--you've got to know
what you're looking for out here and what it looks like when you've
found it--but Karpin has practically all of them beat. He's _sharp_."
* * *
"Sounds like a good team," I said.
"I guess that's why they stayed together so long," he said. "They
complemented each other." He leaned forward, the inevitable prelude to a
confidential remark. "I'll tell you something off the record, Mister,"
he said. "Those two were smarter than they knew. Their partnership was
never legalized, it was never anything more than a piece of paper. And
there's a bunch of fellas around here mighty unhappy about that today.
Jafe McCann is the one who handled all the money matters, like I said.
He's got IOU's all over town."
"And they can't collect from Karpin?"
He nodded. "Jafe McCann died just a bit too soon. He was sharp and
cheap, but he was honest. If he'd lived, he would have repaid all his
debts, I'm sure of it. And if this strike they made is as good as I
hear, he would have been able to repay them with no trouble at all."
I nodded, somewhat impatiently. I had the feeling by now that I was
talking to a man who was one of those who had a Jafe McCann IOU in his
pocket. "How long has it been since you've seen Karpin?" I asked him,
wondering what Karpin's attitude and expression was now that his partner
was dead.
"Oh, Lord, not for a couple of months," he said. "Not since they went
out together the last time and made that strike."
"Didn't Karpin come in to make his claim?"
"Not here. Over to Chemisant City. That was the nearest M&R to the
strike."
"Oh." That was a pity. I would have liked to have known if there had
been a change of any kind in Karpin since his partner's death. "I'll
tell you what the situation is," I said, with a false air of
truthfulness. "We have some misgivings about McCann's death. Not
suspicions, exactly, just misgivings. The timing is what bothers us."
"You mean, because it happened just after the strike?"
"That's it," I answered frankly.
He shook his head. "I wouldn't get too excited about that, if I were
you," he said. "It wouldn't be the first time it's happened. A man makes
the big strike after all, and he gets so excited he forgets himself for
a minute and gets careless. And you only have to be careless once out
here."
"That may be it," I said. I got to my feet, knowing I'd picked up all
there was from this man. "Thanks a lot for your cooperation," I said.
"Any time," he said. He stood and shook hands with me.
I went back out through the chatting prospectors and crossed the echoing
cavern that was level one, aiming to rent myself a scooter.
* * * * *
I don't like rockets. They're noisy as the dickens, they steer hard and
drive erratically, and you can never carry what _I_ would consider a
safe emergency excess of fuel. Nothing like the big steady-g
interplanetary liners. On those I feel almost human.
The appearance of the scooter I was shown at the rental agency didn't do
much to raise my opinion of this mode of transportation. The thing was a
good ten years old, the paint scraped and scratched all over its
egg-shaped, originally green-colored body, and the windshield--a silly
term, really, for the front window of a craft that spends most of its
time out where there isn't any wind--was scratched and pockmarked to the
point of translucency by years of exposure to the asteroidal dust.
The rental agent was a sharp-nosed thin-faced type who displayed this
refugee from a melting vat without a blush, and still didn't blush when
he told me the charges. Twenty credits a day, plus fuel.
I paid without a murmur--it was the company's money, not mine--and paid
an additional ten credits for the rental of a suit to go with it. I
worked my way awkwardly into the suit, and clambered into the driver's
seat of the relic. I attached the suit to the ship in all the necessary
places, and the agent closed and spun the door.
Most of the black paint had worn off the handles of the controls, and
insulation peeked through rips in the plastic siding here and there. I
wondered if the thing had any slow leaks and supposed fatalistically
that it had. The agent waved at me, stony-faced, the conveyor belt
trundled me outside the dome, and I kicked the weary rocket into life.
The scooter had a tendency to roll to the right. If I hadn't kept
fighting it back, it would have soon worked up a dandy little spin. I
was spending so much time juggling with the controls that I practically
missed a couple of my beacon rocks, and that would have been just too
bad. If I'd gotten off the course I had carefully outlined for myself,
I'd never have found my bearings again, and I would have just floated
around amid the scenery until some passerby took pity and towed me back
home.
But I managed to avoid getting lost, which surprised me, and after four
nerve-wracking hours I finally spotted the yellow-painted X of a
registered claim on a half-mile-thick chunk of rock dead ahead. As I got
closer, I spied a scooter parked near the X, and beside it an inflated
portable dome. The scooter was somewhat larger than mine, but no newer
and probably even less safe. The dome was varicolored, from repeated
patching.
This would be the claim, and this is where I would find Karpin, sitting
on his property while waiting for the sale to go through. Prospectors
like Karpin are free-lance men, working for no particular company. They
register their claims in their own names, and then sell the rights to
whichever company shows up first with the most attractive offer. There's
a lot of paperwork to such a sale, and it's all handled by the company.
While waiting, the smart prospector sits on his claim and makes sure
nobody chips off a part of it for himself, a stunt that still happens
now and again. It doesn't take too much concentrated explosive to make
two rocks out of one rock, and a man's claim is only the rock with his X
on it.
I set the scooter down next to the other one, and flicked the toggle for
the air pumps, then put on the fishbowl and went about unattaching the
suit from the ship. When the red light flashed on and off, I spun the
door, opened it, and stepped out onto the rock, moving very cautiously.
It isn't that I don't believe the magnets in the boot soles will work,
it's just that I know for a fact that they won't work if I happen to
raise both feet at the same time.
[Illustration]
I clumped across the crude X to Karpin's dome. The dome had no viewports
at all, so I wasn't sure Karpin was aware of my presence. I rapped my
metal glove on the metal outer door of the lock, and then I was sure.
But it took him long enough to open up. I had just about decided he'd
joined his partner in the long sleep when the door cracked open an inch.
I pushed it open and stepped into the lock, ducking my head. The door
was only five feet high, and just as wide as the lock itself, three
feet. The other dimensions of the lock were: height, six feet six;
width, one foot. Not exactly room to dance in.
* * *
When the red light high on the left-hand wall clicked off, I rapped on
the inner door. It promptly opened, I stepped through and removed the
fishbowl.
Karpin stood in the middle of the room, a small revolver in his hand.
"Shut the door," he said.