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 could.
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 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.”