"Who are you?" Karpin demanded. The M&R man had been right. Ab Karpin
was a dead ringer for all those other prospectors I'd seen back at
Atronics City. Short and skinny and grizzled and ageless. He could have
been forty, and he could have been ninety, but he was probably somewhere
the other side of fifty. His hair was black and limp and thinning,
ruffled in little wisps across his wrinkled pate. His forehead and
cheeks were lined like a plowed field, and were much the same color. His
eyes were wide apart and small, so deep-set beneath shaggy brows that
they seemed black. His mouth was thin, almost lipless. The hand holding
the revolver was nothing but bones and blue veins covered with taut
skin.
He was wearing a dirty undershirt and an old pair of trousers that had
been cut off raggedly just above his knobby knees. Faded slippers were
on his feet. He had good reason for dressing that way, the temperature
inside the dome must have been nearly ninety degrees. The dome wasn't
reflecting away the sun's heat as well as it had when it was young.
I looked at Karpin, and despite the revolver and the tense expression on
his face, he was the least dangerous-looking man I'd ever run across.
All at once, the idea that this anti-social old geezer had the drive or
the imagination to murder his partner seemed ridiculous.
Apparently, I spent too much time looking him over, because he said
again, "Who are you?" And this time he motioned impatiently with the
revolver.
"Stanton," I told him. "Ged Stanton, Tangiers Mutual Insurance. I have
identification, but it's in my pants pocket, down inside this suit."
"Get it," he said. "And move slow."
"Right you are."
I moved slow, as per directions, and peeled out of the suit, then
reached into my trouser pocket and took out my ID clip. I flipped it
open and showed him the card bearing my signature and picture and right
thumb-print and the name of the company I represented, and he nodded,
satisfied, and tossed the revolver over onto his bed. "I got to be
careful," he said. "I got a big claim here."
"I know that," I told him. "Congratulations for it."
"Thanks," he said, but he still looked peevish. "You're here about
Jafe's insurance, right?"
"That I am."
"Don't want to pay up, I suppose. That doesn't surprise me."