which sat a young man in official gray, slowly turning the crank of a microfilm reader.
He looked up at my approach. I flashed my company identification and asked to speak to the manager. He went away, came back, and ushered me into an office which managed to be Spartan and sumptuous at the same time. The walls had been plastic-painted in textured brown, the iron floor had been lushly carpeted in gray, and the desk had been covered with a simulated wood coating.
The manager—a man named Teaking—went well with the office. His face and hands were spare and lean, but his uniform was immaculate, covered with every curlicue the regulations allowed. He welcomed me politely, but curiously, and I said, “I wonder if you know a prospector named Ab Karpin?”
“Karpin? Of course. He and old Jafe McCann—pity about McCann. I hear he got killed.”
“Yes, he did.”
“And that’s what you’re here for, eh?” He nodded sagely. “I didn’t know the Belt boys could get insurance,” he said.
“It isn’t exactly that,” I said. “This concerns a retirement plan, and—well, the details don’t matter.” Which, I hoped, would end his curiosity in that line. “I was hoping you could give me some background on Karpin. And on McCann, too, for that matter.”
He grinned a bit. “You saw the men sitting outside?”
I nodded.
“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.
