f 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 eve