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
