“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 of.
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 that 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?”