“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 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.”