ned 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 of