That doesn't surprise me."

Blunt old men irritate me. "Well," I said, "we do have to investigate."

"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.

* * *

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 ope