t to one of the major companies, and that company
would come along and chop this chunk of rock to pieces, getting the
valuable metal out, and McCann's body would turn up in the first week of
operations if Karpin were stupid enough to bury it here.

Ten hours between McCann's death and Karpin's departure for Chemisant
City. He'd admitted that already. And I was willing to bet he'd spent at
least part of that time carrying McCann's body to some other asteroid,
one he was sure was nothing but worthless rock. If that were true, it
meant the mortal remains of Jafe McCann were now somewhere--_anywhere_--in
the Asteroid Belt. Even if I assumed that the body had been hidden on an
asteroid somewhere between here and Chemisant City--which wasn't
necessarily so--that wouldn't help at all. The relative positions of
planetoids in the Belt just keep on shifting. A small chunk of rock that
was between here and Chemisant City a few weeks ago--it could be almost
anywhere in the Belt right now.

The body, that was the main item. I'd more or less counted on finding it
somehow. At the moment, I couldn't think of any other angle for
attacking Karpin's story.

As I clopped morosely back to the dome, I nibbled at Karpin's story in
my mind. For instance, why go to Chemisant City? It was closer, he said,
but it couldn't have been closer by more than a couple of hours. The way
I understood it, Karpin was well-known back on Atronics City--it was the
normal base of operations for he and his partner--and he didn't know a
soul at Chemisant City. Did it make sense for him to go somewhere he
wasn't known after his partner's death, even if it _was_ an hour closer?
No, it made a lot more sense for a man in that situation to go where
he's known, go someplace where he has friends who'll sympathize with him
and help him over the shock of losing a partner of fifteen years'
standing, even if going there does mean traveling an hour longer.

And there was always the cash-return form. That was what I was here
about in the first place. It just didn't make sense for McCann to have
held up his celebration while he filled out a form that he wouldn't be
able to mail until he got back to Atronics City. And yet the company's
handwriting experts were convinced that it wasn't a forgery, and I could
pretty well take their word for it.

Mulling these things over as I tramped back toward the dome, I suddenly
heard a distant bell ringing way back in my head. The glimmer