the cumbersome suit, while the sweat chilled on my back and face, and I
accepted the glum conviction that one thing I was going to get out of
this trip for sure was a nasty head cold.

I went over to the X first, and stood looking at it. It was just an X,
that's all, shakily scrawled in yellow paint, with the initials "J-A"
scrawled much smaller beside it.

I left the X and clumped away. The horizon was practically at arm's
length, so it didn't take long for the dome to be out of sight. And then
I clumped more slowly, studying the surface of the asteroid.

What I was looking for was a grave. I believed that Karpin was lying,
that he had murdered his partner. And I didn't believe that Jafe
McCann's body had floated off into space. I was convinced that his body
was still somewhere on this asteroid. Karpin had been forced to concoct
a story about the body being lost because the appearance of the body
would prove somehow that it had been murder and not accident. I was
convinced of that, and now all I had to do was prove it.

But that asteroid was a pretty unlikely place for a grave. That wasn't
dirt I was walking on, it was rock, solid metallic rock. You don't dig a
grave in solid rock, not with a shovel. You maybe can do it with
dynamite, but that won't work too well if your object is to keep anybody
from seeing that the hole has been made. Dirt can be patted down.
Blown-up rock looks like blown-up rock, and that's all there is to it.

I considered crevices and fissures in the surface, some cranny large
enough for Karpin to have stuffed the body into. But I didn't find any
of these either as I plodded along, being sure to keep one magnetted
boot always in contact with the ground.

Karpin and McCann had set their dome up at just about the only really
level spot on that entire planetoid. The rest of it was nothing but
jagged rock, and it wasn't easy traveling at all, maneuvering around
with magnets on my boots and a bulky atmosphere suit cramping my
movements.

* * *

And then I stopped and looked out at space and cursed myself for a
ring-tailed baboon. McCann's body might be anywhere in the Solar System,
anywhere at all, but there was one place I could be sure it wasn't, and
that place was this asteroid. No, Karpin had not blown a grave or
stuffed the body into a fissure in the ground. Why not? Because this
chunk of rock was valuable, that's why not. Because Karpin was in the
process of selling i