"Sure," he said. "You want some coffee?"
"Thank you."
"You can sit in that chair there. That was Jafe's."
I settled gingerly in the cloth-and-plastic foldaway chair he'd pointed
at, and he went over to the kitchen area of the dome to start coffee. I
took the opportunity to look the dome over. It was the first portable
dome I'd ever been inside.
* * *
It was all one room, roughly circular, with a diameter of about fifteen
feet. The sides went straight up for the first seven feet, then curved
gradually inward to form the roof. At the center of the dome, the
ceiling was about twelve feet high.
The floor of the room was simply the asteroidal rock surface, not
completely level and smooth. There were two chairs and a table to the
right of the entry lock, two foldaway cots around the wall beyond them,
the kitchen area next and a cluttered storage area around on the other
side. There was a heater standing alone in the center of the room, but
it certainly wasn't needed now. Sweat was already trickling down the
back of my neck and down my forehead into my eyebrows. I peeled off my
shirt and used it to wipe sweat from my face. "Warm in here," I said.
"You get used to it," he muttered, which I found hard to believe.
He brought over the coffee, and I tasted it. It was rotten, as bitter as
this old hermit's soul, but I said, "Good coffee. Thanks a lot."
"I like it strong," he said.
I looked around at the room again. "All the comforts of home, eh? Pretty
ingenious arrangement."
"Sure," he said sourly. "How about getting to the point, Mister?"
There's only one way to handle a blunt old man. Be blunt right back.
"I'll tell you how it is," I said. "The company isn't accusing you of
anything, but it has to be sure everything's on the up and up before it
pays out any ten thousand credits. And your partner just happening to
fill out that cash-return form just before he died--well, you've got to
admit it is a funny kind of coincidence."
"How so?" He slurped coffee, and glowered at me over the cup. "We made
this strike here," he said. "We knew it was the big one. Jafe had that
insurance policy of his in case he never did make the big strike. As
soon as we knew this was the big one, he said, 'I guess I don't need
that retirement now,' and sat right down and wrote out the cash-return.
Then we opened a bottle of liquor and celebrated, and he got himself
killed."
The way Karpin said it, it sounded smooth and natural. _Too_ smooth and
natural. "How did this accident happen anyway?" I asked him.
"I'm not one hundred per cent sure of that myself," he said. "I was
pretty well drunk myself by that time. But he put on his suit and said
he was going out to paint the X. He was falling all over himself, and I
tried to tell him it could wait till we'd had some sleep, but he
wouldn't pay any attention to me."
"So he went out," I said.
He nodded. "He went out first. After a couple minutes, I got lonesome in
here, so I suited up and went out after him. It happened just as I was
going out the lock, and I just barely got a glimpse of what happened."
* * *
He attacked the coffee again, noisily, and I prompted him, saying, "What
did happen, Mister Karpin?"
"Well, he was capering around out there, waving the paint tube and such.
There's a lot of sharp rock sticking out around here. Just as I got
outside, he lost his balance and kicked out, and scraped right into some
of that rock, and punctured his suit."
"I thought the body was lost," I said.
He nodded. "It was. The last thing in life Jafe ever did was try to
shove himself away from those rocks. That, and the force of air coming
out of that puncture for the first second or two, was enough to throw
him up off the surface. It threw him up too high, and he never got back
down."
My doubt must have showed in my face, because he added, "Mister, there
isn't enough gravity on this place to shoot craps with."
He was right. As we talked, I kept finding myself holding unnecessarily
tight to the arms of the chair. I kept having the feeling I was going to
float out of the chair and hover around up at the top of the dome if I
were to let go. It was silly of course--there was _some_ gravity on that
planetoid, after all--but I just don't seem to get used to low-gee.
Nevertheless, I still had some more questions. "Didn't you try to get
his body back? Couldn't you have reached him?"
"I tried to, Mister," he said. "Old Jafe McCann was my partner for
fifteen years. But I was drunk, and that's a fact. And I was afraid to
go jumping up in the air, for fear _I'd_ go floating away, too."
"Frankly," I said, "I'm no expert on low gravity and asteroids. But
wouldn't McCann's body just go into orbit around this rock? I mean, it
wouldn't simply go floating off into space, would it?"
"It sure would," he said. "There's a lot of other rocks out here, too,
Mister, and a lot of them are bigger than this one and have a lot more
gravity pull. I don't suppose there's a navigator in the business who
could have computed Jafe's course in advance. He floated up, and then he
floated back over the dome here and seemed to hover for a couple
minutes, and then he just floated out and away. His isn't the only body
circling around the sun with all these rocks, you know."
I chewed a lip and thought it all over. I didn't know enough about
asteroid gravity or the conditions out here to be able to say for sure
whether Karpin's story was true or not. Up to this point, I couldn't
attack the problem on a fact basis. I had to depend on _feeling_ now,
the hunches and instincts of eight years in this job, hearing some
people tell lies and other people tell the truth.
And my instinct said Ab Karpin was lying in his teeth. That dramatic
little touch about McCann's body hovering over the dome before
disappearing into the void, that sounded more like the embellishment of
fiction than the circumstance of truth. And the string of coincidences
were just too much. McCann just coincidentally happens to die right
after he and his partner make their big strike. He happens to write out
the cash-return form just before dying. And his body just happens to
float away, so nobody can look at it and check Karpin's story.
* * *
But no matter what my instinct said, the story was smooth. It was smooth
as glass, and there was no place for me to get a grip on it.
What now? There wasn't any hole in Karpin's story, at least none that I
could see. I had to break his story somehow, and in order to do that I
had to do some nosing around on this planetoid. I couldn't know in
advance what I was looking for, I could only look. I'd know it when I
found it. It would be something that conflicted with Karpin's story.
And for that, I had to be sure the story was complete. "You said McCann
had gone out to paint the X," I said. "Did he paint it?"
Karpin shook his head. "He never got a chance. He spent all his time
dancing, up till he went and killed himself."
"So you painted it yourself."
He nodded.
"And then you went on into Atronics City and registered your claim, is
that the story?"
"No. Chemisant City was closer than Atronics City right then, so I went
there. Just after Jafe's death, and everything--I didn't feel like being
alone any more than I had to."
"You said Chemisant City was closer to you _then_," I said. "Isn't it
now?"
"Things move around a lot out here, Mister," he said. "Right now,
Chemisant City's almost twice as far from here as Atronics City. In
about three days, it'll start swinging in closer again. Things keep
shifting around out here."
"So I've noticed," I said. "When you took off to go to Chemisant City,
didn't you make a try for your partner's body then?"
He shook his head. "He was long out of sight by then," he said. "That
was ten, eleven hours later, when I took off."
"Why's that? All you had to do was paint the X and take off."
"Mister, I told you. I was drunk. I was falling down drunk, and when I
saw I couldn't get at Jafe, and he was dead anyway, I came back in here
and slept it off. Maybe if I'd been sober I would have taken the scooter
and gone after him, but I was _drunk_."
"I see." And there just weren't any more questions I could think of to
ask, not right now. So I said, "I've just had a shaky four-hour ride
coming out here. Mind if I stick around a while before going back?"
"Help yourself," he said, in a pretty poor attempt at genial
hospitality. "You can sleep over, if you want."
"Fine," I said. "I think I'd like that."
"You wouldn't happen to play cribbage, would you?" he asked, with the
first real sign of animation I'd seen in him yet.
"I learn fast," I told him.
"Okay," he said. "I'll teach you." And he produced a filthy deck of
cards and taught me.
* * * * *
After losing nine straight games of cribbage, I quit, and got to my
feet. I was at my most casual as I stretched and said, "Okay if I wander
around outside for a while? I've never been on an asteroid like this
before. I mean, a little one like this. I've just been to the company
cities up to now."
"Go right ahead," he said. "I've got some polishing and patching to do,
anyway." He made his voice sound easy and innocent, but I noticed his
eyes were alert and wary, watching me as I struggled back into my suit.
I didn't bother to put my shirt back on first, and that was a mistake.
The temperature inside an atmosphere suit is a steady sixty-eight
degrees. That had never seemed particularly chilly before, but after
the heat of that dome, it seemed cold as a blizzard inside the suit.
I went on out through the airlock, and moved as briskly as possible in
the cumbersome suit, while the sweat chilled on my back and face, and I
accepted the glum conviction that one thing I was going to get out of
this trip for sure was a nasty head cold.
I went over to the X first, and stood looking at it. It was just an X,
that's all, shakily scrawled in yellow paint, with the initials "J-A"
scrawled much smaller beside it.
I left the X and clumped away. The horizon was practically at arm's
length, so it didn't take long for the dome to be out of sight. And then
I clumped more slowly, studying the surface of the asteroid.
What I was looking for was a grave. I believed that Karpin was lying,
that he had murdered his partner. And I didn't believe that Jafe
McCann's body had floated off into space. I was convinced that his body
was still somewhere on this asteroid. Karpin had been forced to concoct
a story about the body being lost because the appearance of the body
would prove somehow that it had been murder and not accident. I was
convinced of that, and now all I had to do was prove it.
But that asteroid was a pretty unlikely place for a grave. That wasn't
dirt I was walking on, it was rock, solid metallic rock. You don't dig a
grave in solid rock, not with a shovel. You maybe can do it with
dynamite, but that won't work too well if your object is to keep anybody
from seeing that the hole has been made. Dirt can be patted down.
Blown-up rock looks like blown-up rock, and that's all there is to it.
I considered crevices and fissures in the surface, some cranny large
enough for Karpin to have stuffed the body into. But I didn't find any
of these either as I plodded along, being sure to keep one magnetted
boot always in contact with the ground.
Karpin and McCann had set their dome up at just about the only really
level spot on that entire planetoid. The rest of it was nothing but
jagged rock, and it wasn't easy traveling at all, maneuvering around
with magnets on my boots and a bulky atmosphere suit cramping my
movements.
* * *
And then I stopped and looked out at space and cursed myself for a
ring-tailed baboon. McCann's body might be anywhere in the Solar System,
anywhere at all, but there was one place I could be sure it wasn't, and
that place was this asteroid. No, Karpin had not blown a grave or
stuffed the body into a fissure in the ground. Why not? Because this
chunk of rock was valuable, that's why not. Because Karpin was in the
process of selling it to one of the major companies, and that company
would come along and chop this chunk of rock to pieces, getting the
valuable metal out, and McCann's body would turn up in the first week of
operations if Karpin were stupid enough to bury it here.
Ten hours between McCann's death and Karpin's departure for Chemisant
City. He'd admitted that already. And I was willing to bet he'd spent at
least part of that time carrying McCann's body to some other asteroid,
one he was sure was nothing but worthless rock. If that were true, it
meant the mortal remains of Jafe McCann were now somewhere--_anywhere_--in
the Asteroid Belt. Even if I assumed that the body had been hidden on an
asteroid somewhere between here and Chemisant City--which wasn't
necessarily so--that wouldn't help at all. The relative positions of
planetoids in the Belt just keep on shifting. A small chunk of rock that
was between here and Chemisant City a few weeks ago--it could be almost
anywhere in the Belt right now.
The body, that was the main item. I'd more or less counted on finding it
somehow. At the moment, I couldn't think of any other angle for
attacking Karpin's story.
As I clopped morosely back to the dome, I nibbled at Karpin's story in
my mind. For instance, why go to Chemisant City? It was closer, he said,
but it couldn't have been closer by more than a couple of hours. The way
I understood it, Karpin was well-known back on Atronics City--it was the
normal base of operations for he and his partner--and he didn't know a
soul at Chemisant City. Did it make sense for him to go somewhere he
wasn't known after his partner's death, even if it _was_ an hour closer?
No, it made a lot more sense for a man in that situation to go where
he's known, go someplace where he has friends who'll sympathize with him
and help him over the shock of losing a partner of fifteen years'
standing, even if going there does mean traveling an hour longer.
And there was always the cash-return form. That was what I was here
about in the first place. It just didn't make sense for McCann to have
held up his celebration while he filled out a form that he wouldn't be
able to mail until he got back to Atronics City. And yet the company's
handwriting experts were convinced that it wasn't a forgery, and I could
pretty well take their word for it.
Mulling these things over as I tramped back toward the dome, I suddenly
heard a distant bell ringing way back in my head. The glimmering of an
idea, not an idea yet but just the hint of one. I wasn't sure where it
led, or even if it led anywhere at all, but I was going to find out.
* * * * *
Karpin opened the doors for me. By the time I'd stripped off the suit he
was back to work. He was cleaning the single unit which was his
combination stove and refrigerator and sink and garbage disposal.
I looked around the dome again, and I had to admit that a lot of
ingenuity had gone into the manufacture and design of this dome and its
contents. The dome itself, when deflated, folded down into an oblong box
three feet by one foot by one foot. The lock itself, of course, folded
separately, into another box somewhat smaller than that.
As for the gear inside the dome, it was functional and collapsible, and
there wasn't a single item there that wasn't needed. There were the two
chairs and the two cots and the table, all of them foldaway. There was
that fantastic combination job Karpin was cleaning right now, and that
had dimensions of four feet by three feet by three feet. The clutter of
gear over to the left wasn't as much of a clutter as it looked. There
was a Geiger counter, an automatic spectrograph, two atmosphere suits, a
torsion densimeter, a core-cutting drill, a few small hammers and picks,
two spare air tanks, boxes of food concentrate, a paint tube, a doorless
jimmy-john and two small metal boxes about eight inches cube. These last
were undoubtedly Karpin's and McCann's pouches, where they kept whatever
letters, money, address books or other small bits of possessions they
owned. Back of this mound of gear, against the wall, stood the air
reconditioner, humming quietly to itself.
In this small enclosed space there was everything a man needed to keep
himself alive. Everything except human company. And if you didn't need
human company, then you had everything. Just on the other side of that
dome, there was a million miles of death, in a million possible ways. On
this side of the dome, life was cozy, if somewhat Spartan and very hot.
I knew for sure I was going to get a head cold. My body had adjusted to
the sixty-eight degrees inside the suit, finally, and now was very
annoyed to find the temperature shooting up to ninety again.
Since Karpin didn't seem inclined to talk, and I would rather spend my
time thinking than talking anyway, I took a hint from him and did some
cleaning. I'd noticed a smeared spot about nose-level on the faceplate
of my fishbowl, and now was as good a time as any to get rid of it. It
had a tendency to make my eyes cross.
My shirt was sodden and wrinkled by this time anyway, having first been
used to wipe sweat from my face and later been rolled into a ball and
left on the chair when I went outside, so I used it for a cleaning rag,
buffing like mad the silvered surface of the faceplate. Faceplates are
silvered, not so the man inside can look out and no one else can look
in, but in order to keep some of the more violent rays of the sun from
getting through to the face.
I buffed for a while, and then I put the fishbowl on my head and looked
through it. The spot was gone, so I went over and reattached it to the
rest of the suit, and then settled back in my chair again and lit a
cigarette.
Karpin spoke up. "Wish you wouldn't smoke. Makes it tough on the
conditioner."
"Oh," I said. "Sorry." So I just sat, thinking morosely about non-forged
cash-return forms, and coincidences, and likely spots to hide a body in
the Asteroid Belt.
* * *
Where would one dispose of a body in the asteroids? I went back through
my thinking on that topic, and I found holes big enough to drive
Karpin's claim through. This idea of leaving the body on some worthless
chunk of rock, for instance. If Karpin had killed his partner--and I was
dead sure he had--he'd planned it carefully and he wouldn't be leaving
anything to chance. Now, an asteroid isn't worthless to a prospector
until that prospector has landed on it and tested it. _Karpin_ might
know that such-and-such an asteroid was nothing but worthless stone, but
the guy who stops there and finds McCann's body might _not_ know it.
No, Karpin wouldn't leave that to chance. He would get rid of that body,
and he would do it in such a way that nobody would _ever_ find it.
How? Not by leaving it on a worthless asteroid, and not by just pushing
it off into space. The distance between asteroids is large, but so's the
travel. McCann's body, floating around in the blackness, might just be
found by somebody.
And that, so far as I could see, eliminated the possibilities. McCann's
body was in the Belt. I'd eliminated both the asteroids themselves and
the space around the asteroids as hiding places. What was left?
The sun, of course.
I thought that over for a while, rather surprised at myself for having
noticed the possibility. Now, let's say Karpin attaches a small rocket
to McCann's body, stuffed into its atmosphere suit. He sets the rocket
going, and off goes McCann. Not that he aims it toward the sun, that
wouldn't work well at all. Instead of falling into the sun, the body
would simply take up a long elliptical orbit _around_ the sun, and would
come back to the asteroids every few hundred years. No, he would aim
McCann _back_, in the direction opposite to the direction or rotation of
the asteroids. He would, in essence, slow McCann's body down, make it
practically stop in relation to the motion of the asteroids. And then it
would simply _fall_ into the sun.
None of my ideas, it seemed, were happy ones. If McCann's body were even
at this moment falling toward the sun, it was just as useful to me as if
it were on some other asteroid.
But, wait a second. Karpin and McCann had worked with the minimum of
equipment, I'd already noticed that. They didn't have extras of
anything, and they certainly wouldn't have extra rockets. Except for one
fast trip to Chemisant City--when he had neither the time nor the excuse
to buy a jato rocket--Karpin had spent all of his time since McCann's
death right here on this planetoid.
So that killed that idea.
While I was hunting around for some other idea, Karpin spoke up again,
for the first time in maybe twenty minutes. "You think I killed him,
don't you?" he said, not looking around from his cleaning job.
I considered my answer. There was no reason at all to be overly polite
to this sour old buzzard, but at the same time I am naturally the
soft-spoken type. "We aren't sure," I said. "We just think there are
some odd items to be explained."
"Such as what?" he demanded.
"Such as the timing of McCann's cash-return form."
"I already explained that," he said.
"I know. You've explained everything."
"He wrote it out himself," the old man insisted. He put down his
cleaning cloth, and turned to face me. "I suppose your company checked
the handwriting already, and Jafe McCann is the one who wrote that
form."
He was so blasted sure of himself. "It would seem that way," I said.
"What other odd items you worried about?" he asked me, in a rusty
attempt at sarcasm.
"Well," I said, "there's this business of going to Chemisant City. It
would have made more sense for you to go to Atronics City, where you
were known."
"Chemisant was closer," he said. He shook a finger at me. "That company
of yours thinks it can cheat me out of my money," he said. "Well, it
can't. I know my rights. That money belongs to me."
"I guess you're doing pretty well without McCann," I said.
His angry expression was replaced by one of bewilderment. "What do you
mean?"
"They told me back at Atronics City," I explained, "that McCann was the
money expert and you were the metals expert, and that's why McCann
handled all your buying on credit and stuff like that. Looks as though
you've got a pretty keen eye for money yourself."
"I know what's mine," he mumbled, and turned away. He went back to
scrubbing the stove coils again.
I stared at his back. Something had happened just then, and I wasn't
sure what. He'd just been starting to warm up to a tirade against the
dirty insurance company, and all of a sudden he'd folded up and shut up
like a clam.
And then I saw it. Or at least I saw part of it. I saw how that
cash-return form fit in, and how it made perfect sense.
Now, all I needed was proof of murder. Preferably a body. I had the rest
of it. Then I could pack the old geezer back to Atronics City and get
proof for the part I'd already figured out.
I'd like that. I'd like getting back to Atronics City, and having this
all straightened out, and then taking the very next liner straight back
to Earth. More immediately, I'd like getting out of this heat and back
into the cool sixty-eight degrees of--
And then it hit me. The whole thing hit me, and I just sat there and
stared. They did not carry extras, Karpin and McCann, they did not carry
one item of equipment more than they needed.
I sat there and looked at the place where the dead body was hidden, and
I said, "Well, I'll be a son of a gun!"
He turned and looked at me, and then he followed the direction of my
gaze, and he saw what I was staring at, and he made a jump across the
room at the revolver lying on the cot.
* * *
That's what saved me. He moved too fast, jerked his muscles too hard,
and went sailing up and over the cot and ricocheted off the dome wall.
And that gave me plenty of time to get up from the chair, moving more
cautiously than he had, and get my hands on the revolver before he could
get himself squared away again.
I straightened with the gun in my hand and looked into a face white with
frustration and rage. "Okay, Mister McCann," I said. "It's all over."
He knew I had him, but he tried not to show it. "What are you talking
about? McCann's dead."
"Sure he is," I said. "Jafe McCann was the money-minded part of the
team. He was the one who signed for all the loans and all the equipment
bought on credit. With this big strike in, Jafe McCann was the one who'd
have to pay all that money."
"You're babbling," he snapped, but the words were hollow.
"You weren't satisfied with half a loaf," I said. "You should have been.
Half a loaf is better than none. But you wanted every penny you could
get your hands on, and you wanted to pay out just as little money as you
possibly could. So when you killed Ab Karpin, you saw a way to kill your
debts as well. You'd _become_ Ab Karpin, and it would be Jafe McCann who
was dead, and the debts dead with him."
"That's a lie," he said, his voice getting shrill. "_I'm_ Ab Karpin, and
I've got papers to prove it."
"Sure. Papers you stole from a dead man. And you might have gotten away
with it, too. But you just couldn't leave well enough alone, could you?
Not satisfied with having the whole claim to yourself, you switched
identities with your victim to avoid your debts. And not satisfied with
_that_, you filled out a cash-return form and tried to collect your
money as your own heir. _That's_ why you had to go to Chemisant City,
where nobody would recognize Ab Karpin or Jafe McCann, rather than to
Atronics City where you were well-known."
"You don't want to make too many wild accusations," he shouted, his
voice shaking. "You don't want to go around accusing people of things
you can't prove."
"I can prove it," I told him. "I can prove everything I've said. As to
who you are, there's no problem. All I have to do is bring you back to
Atronics City. There'll be plenty of people there to identify you. And
as to proving you murdered Ab Karpin, I think his body will be proof
enough, don't you?"
McCann watched me as I backed slowly around the room to the mound of
gear. The partners had had no extra equipment, no extra equipment at
all. I looked down at the two atmosphere suits lying side by side on the
metallic rock floor.
_Two_ atmosphere suits. The dead man was supposed to be in one of those,
floating out in space somewhere. He was in the suit, right enough, I was
sure of that, but he wasn't floating anywhere.
A space suit is a perfect place to hide a body, for as long as it has to
be hid. The silvered faceplate keeps you from seeing inside, and the
suit is, naturally, a sealed atmosphere. A body can rot away to ashes
inside a space suit, and you'll never notice a thing on the outside.
* * *
I'd had the right idea after all. McCann had planned to get rid of
Karpin's body by attaching a rocket to it, slowing it down, and letting
it fall into the sun. But he hadn't had an opportunity yet to go buy a
rocket. He couldn't go to Atronics City, where he could have bought the
rocket on credit, and he couldn't go to Chemisant City until the claim
sale went through and he had some money to spend. And in the meantime,
Karpin's body was perfectly safe, sealed away inside his atmosphere
suit.
And it would have been safe, too, if McCann hadn't been just a little
bit too greedy. He could kill his partner and get away with it;
policemen on the Belt are even farther apart than the asteroids. He
could swindle his creditors and get away with it; they had no way of
checking up and no reason to suspect a switch in identities. But when he
tried to get his own money back from Tangiers Mutual Insurance; _that's_
when he made his mistake.
I studied the two atmosphere suits, at the same time managing to keep a
wary eye on Jafe McCann, standing rigid and silent across the room.
Which one of those suits contained the body of Ab Karpin?
The one with the new patch on the chest, of course. As I'd guessed,
McCann had shot him, and that's why he had the problem of disposing of
the body in the first place.