The Fifth Science Fiction Megapack

by Gardner Dozois

  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.

  I set the scooter down next to the other one, and flicked the toggle for the air pumps, then put on the fishbowl and went about unattaching the suit from the ship. When the red light flashed on and off, I spun the door, opened it, and stepped out onto the rock, moving very cautiously. It isn’t that I don’t believe the magnets in the boot soles will work, it’s just that I know for a fact that they won’t work if I happen to raise both feet at the same time.

  I clumped across the crude X to Karpin’s dome. The dome had no viewports at all, so I wasn’t sure Karpin was aware of my presence. I rapped my metal glove on the metal outer door of the lock, and then I was sure.

  But it took him long enough to open up. I had just about decided he’d joined his partner in the long sleep when the door cracked open an inch. I pushed it open and stepped into the lock, ducking my head. The door was only five feet high, and just as wide as the lock itself, three feet. The other dimensions of the lock were: height, six feet six; width, one foot. Not exactly room to dance in.

  When the red light high on the left-hand wall clicked off, I rapped on the inner door. It promptly opened, I stepped through and removed the fishbowl.

  Karpin stood in the middle of the room, a small revolver in his hand. “Shut the door,” he said.

  I obeyed, moving slowly. I didn’t want that gun to go off by mistake.

  “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.”

  Blunt old men irritate me. “Well,” I said, “we do have to investigate.”

  “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 tha
t 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 he
ad 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.