been ninety, but he was probably somewherethe other side of fifty. His hair was black and limp and thinning,ruffled in little wisps across his wrinkled pate. His forehead andcheeks were lined like a plowed field, and were much the same color. Hiseyes were wide apart and small, so deep-set beneath shaggy brows thatthey seemed black. His mouth was thin, almost lipless. The hand holdingthe revolver was nothing but bones and blue veins covered with tautskin.
He was wearing a dirty undershirt and an old pair of trousers that hadbeen cut off raggedly just above his knobby knees. Faded slippers wereon his feet. He had good reason for dressing that way, the temperatureinside the dome must have been nearly ninety degrees. The dome wasn'treflecting 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 onhis 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 orthe imagination to murder his partner seemed ridiculous.
Apparently, I spent too much time looking him over, because he saidagain, "Who are you?" And this time he motioned impatiently with therevolver.
"Stanton," I told him. "Ged Stanton, Tangiers Mutual Insurance. I haveidentification, 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, thenreached into my trouser pocket and took out my ID clip. I flipped itopen and showed him the card bearing my signature and picture and rightthumb-print and the name of the company I represented, and he nodded,satisfied, and tossed the revolver over onto his bed. "I got to becareful," 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 aboutJafe'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 pointedat, and he went over to the kitchen area of the dome to start coffee. Itook the opportunity to look the dome over. It was the first portabledome I'd ever been inside.
* * *
It was all one room, roughly circular, with a diameter of about fifteenfeet. The sides went straight up for the first seven feet, then curvedgradually inward to form the roof. At the center of the dome, theceiling was about twelve feet high.
The floor of the room was simply the asteroidal rock surface, notcompletely level and smooth. There were two chairs and a table to theright of the entry lock, two foldaway cots around the wall beyond them,the kitchen area next and a cluttered storage area around on the otherside. There was a heater standing alone in the center of the room, butit certainly wasn't needed now. Sweat was already trickling down theback of my neck and down my forehead into my eyebrows. I peeled off myshirt 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 asthis 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? Prettyingenious 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 ofanything, but it has to be sure everything's on the up and up before itpays out any ten thousand credits. And your partner just happening tofill out that cash-return form just before he died--well, you've got toadmit it is a funny kind of coincidence."
"How so?" He slurped coffee, and glowered at me over the cup. "We madethis strike here," he said. "We knew it was the big one. Jafe had thatinsurance policy of his in case he never did make the big strike. Assoon as we knew this was the big one, he said, 'I guess I don't needthat retirement now,' and sat right down and wrote out the cash-return.Then we opened a bottle of liquor and celebrated, and he got himselfkilled."
The way Karpin said it, it sounded smooth and natural. _Too_ smooth andnatural. "How did this accident happen anyway?" I asked him.
"I'm not one hundred per cent sure of that myself," he said. "I waspretty well drunk myself by that time. But he put on his suit and saidhe was going out to paint the X. He was falling all over himself, and Itried to tell him it could wait till we'd had some sleep, but hewouldn'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 inhere, so I suited up and went out after him. It happened just as I wasgoing out the lock, and I just barely got a glimpse of what happened."
* * *
He attacked the coffee again, noisily, and I prompted him, saying, "Whatdid 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 gotoutside, he lost his balance and kicked out, and scraped right into someof 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 toshove himself away from those rocks. That, and the force of air comingout of that puncture for the first second or two, was enough to throwhim up off the surface. It threw him up too high, and he never got backdown."
My doubt must have showed in my face, because he added, "Mister, thereisn't enough gravity on this place to shoot craps with."
He was right. As we talked, I kept finding myself holding unnecessarilytight to the arms of the chair. I kept having the feeling I was going tofloat out of the chair and hover around up at the top of the dome if Iwere to let go. It was silly of course--there was _some_ gravity on thatplanetoid, 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 gethis body back? Couldn't you have reached him?"
"I tried to, Mister," he said. "Old Jafe McCann was my partner forfifteen years. But I was drunk, and that's a fact. And I was afraid togo 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. Butwouldn't McCann's body just go into orbit around this rock? I mean, itwouldn'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 moregravity pull. I don't suppose there's a navigator in the business whocould have computed Jafe's course in advance. He floated up, and then hefloated back over the dome here and seemed to hover for a coupleminutes, and then he just floated out and away. His isn't the only bodycircling around the sun with all these rocks, you know."
I chewed a lip and thought it all over. I didn't know enough aboutasteroid gravity or the conditions out here to be able to say for surewhether Karpin's story was true or not. Up to this point, I couldn'tattack the problem on a fact basis. I had to depend on _feeling_ now,the hunches and instincts of eight years in this job, hearing somepeople tell lies and other people tell the truth.
And my instinct said Ab Karpin was lying in his teeth. That dramaticlittle touch about McCann's body hovering over the dome beforedisappearing into the void, that sounded more like the embellishment offiction than the circumstance of truth. And the string of coincidenceswere just too much. McCann just coincidentally happens to die rightafter he and his partner make their big strike. He happens to write outthe cash-return form just before dying. And his body just happens tofloat away, so nobod
y can look at it and check Karpin's story.
* * *
But no matter what my instinct said, the story was smooth. It was smoothas 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 Icould see. I had to break his story somehow, and in order to do that Ihad to do some nosing around on this planetoid. I couldn't know inadvance what I was looking for, I could only look. I'd know it when Ifound
The Risk Profession Page 3
