I did my best to make my ears perk.
“I told you that McCann’s death occurred under somewhat suspicious circumstances.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “you did.”
“McCann and Karpin,” he said, “have been partners—unincorporated, of course—for the last fifteen years. They had found small rare-metal deposits now and again, but they had never found that one big strike all the Belt prospectors waste their lives looking for. Not until the day before McCann died.”
“Ah hah,” I said. “Then they found the big strike.”
“Exactly.”
“And McCann’s death?”
“Accidental.”
“Sure,” I said. “What proof have we got?”
“None. The body is lost in space. And law is few and far between that far out.”
“So all we’ve got is this guy Karpin’s word for how McCann died, is that it?”
“That’s all we have. So far.”
“Sure. And now you want me to go on out there and find out what’s cooking, and see if I can maybe save the company ten thousand credits.”
“Exactly,” said Henderson.
The copter took me to the spaceport west of Cairo, and there I boarded the good ship Demeter for Luna City and points Out. I loaded up on g-sickness pills and they worked fine. I was sick as a dog.
By the time we got to Atronics City, my insides had grown resigned to their fate. As long as I didn’t try to eat, my stomach would leave me alone.
Atronics City was about as depressing as a Turkish bath with all the lights on. It stood on a chunk of rock a couple of miles thick, and it looked like nothing more in this world than a welder’s practice range.
From the outside, Atronics City is just a derby-shaped dome of nickel-iron, black and kind of dirty-looking. I suppose a transparent dome would have been more fun, but the builders of the company cities in the asteroids were businessmen, and they weren’t concerned with having fun. There’s nothing to look at outside the dome but chunks of rock and the blackness of space anyway, and you’ve got all this cheap iron floating around in the vicinity, and all a dome’s supposed to do is keep the air in. Besides, though the Belt isn’t as crowded as a lot of people think, there is quite a lot of debris rushing here and there, bumping into things, and a transparent dome would just get all scratched up, not to mention punctured.
From the inside, Atronics City is even jollier. There’s the top level, directly under the dome, which is mainly parking area for scooters and tuggers of various kinds, plus the office shacks of the Assayer’s Office, the Entry Authority, the Industry Troopers and so on. The next three levels have all been burned into the bowels of the planetoid.
Level two is the Atronics plant, and a noisy plant it is. Level three is the shopping and entertainment area— grocery stores and clothing stores and movie theaters and bars—and level four is housing, two rooms and kitchen for the unmarried, four rooms and kitchen plus one room for each child for the married.
All of these levels have one thing in common. Square corners, painted olive drab. The total effect of the place is suffocating. You feel like you’re stuck in the middle of a stack of packing crates.
Most of the people living in Atronics City work, of course, for International Atronics, Incorporated. The rest of them work in the service occupations—running the bars and grocery stores and so on—that keep the company employees alive and relatively happy.
Wages come high in the places like Atronics City. Why not, the raw materials come practically for free. And as for working conditions, well, take a for instance. How do you make a vacuum tube? You fiddle with the innards and surround it all with glass. And how do you get the air out? No problem, boy, there wasn’t any air in there to begin with.
At any rate, there I was at Atronics City. That was as far as Demeter would take me. Now, while the ship went on to Ludlum City and Chemisant City and the other asteroid business towns, my two suitcases and I dribbled down the elevator to my hostelry on level four.
Have you ever taken an elevator ride when the gravity is practically non-existent? Well, don’t. You see, the elevator manages to sink faster than you do. It isn’t being lowered down to level four, it’s being pulled down.
What this means is that the suitcases have to be lashed down with the straps provided, and you and the operator have to hold on tight to the hand-grips placed here and there around the wall. Otherwise, you’d clonk your head on the ceiling.
But we got to level four at last, and off I went with my suitcases and the operator’s directions. The suitcases weighed about half an ounce each out here, and I felt as though I weighed the same. Every time I raised a foot, I was sure I was about to go sailing into a wall. Local citizens eased by me, their feet occasionally touching the iron pavement as they soared along, and I gave them all dirty looks.
Level four was nothing but walls and windows. The iron floor went among these walls and windows in a straight straight line, bisecting other “streets” at perfect right angles, and the iron ceiling sixteen feet up was lined with a double row of fluorescent tubes. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic already.
The Chalmers Hotel—named for an Atronics vice-president—had received my advance registration, which was nice. I was shown to a second-floor room—nothing on level four had more than two stories—and was left to unpack my suitcases as best I may.
I had decided to spend a day or two at Atronics City before taking a scooter out to Ab Karpin’s claim. Atronics City had been Karpin’s and McCann’s home base. All of McCann’s premium payments had been mailed from here, and the normal mailing address for both of them was GPO Atronics City.
I wanted to know as much as possible about Ab Karpin before I went out to see him. And Atronics City seemed like the best place to get my information.
But not today. Today, my stomach was very unhappy, and my head was on sympathy strike. Today, I was going to spend my time exclusively in bed, trying not to float up to the ceiling.
The Mapping & Registry Office, it seemed to me the next day, was the best place to start. This was where prospectors filed their claims, but it was a lot more than that. The waiting room of M&R was the unofficial club of the asteroid prospectors. This is where they met with one another, talked together about the things that prospectors discuss, and made and dissolved their transient partnerships.
In this way, Karpin and McCann were unusual. They had maintained their partnership for fifteen years. That was about sixty times longer than most such arrangements lasted.
Searching the asteroid chunks for rare and valuable metals is basically pretty lonely work, and it’s inevitable that the prospectors will every once in a while get hungry for human company and decide to try a team operation. But, at the same time, work like this attracts people who don’t get along very well with human company. So the partnerships come and go, and the hatreds flare and are forgotten, and the normal prospecting team lasts an average of three months.
At any rate, it was to the Mapping & Registry Office that I went first. And, since that office was up on the first level, I went by elevator.
Riding up in that elevator was a heck of a lot more fun than riding down. The elevator whipped up like mad, the floor pressed against the soles of my feet, and it felt almost like good old Earth for a second or two there. But then the elevator stopped, and I held on tight to the hand-grips to keep from shooting through the top of the blasted thing.
The operator—a phlegmatic sort—gave me directions to the M&R, and off I went, still trying to figure out how to sail along as gracefully as the locals.
The Mapping & Registry Office occupied a good-sized shack over near the dome wall, next to the entry lock. I pushed open the door and went on in.
The waiting room was cozy and surprisingly large, large enough to comfortably hold the six maroon leather sofas scattered here and there on the pale green carpet, flanked by bronze ashtray stands. There were only six prospectors here at the moment, chatting together in two groups of three, and they all looked alike. Grizzled, ageless, watery-eyed, their clothing clean but baggy. I passed them and went on to the desk at the far end, behind
