Читать книгу Frederik Pohl Super Pack - Frederik Pohl - Страница 8

The Naples branch of the Company lay in the heart of the city. I took a cab to a sort of dome-roofed thing called a galleria, and walked under its skeletal steel ceiling to my new office. Once the galleria had been roofed with glass, but the glass had powdered down from the concussion of the Mt. Vesuvius bomb, or the Capodichino bomb, or one of the other hammerblows the Sicilians had rained on the principality of Naples in the recent unpleasantness.

I entered the office and looked around. The blonde girl named Susan appeared to double as the office receptionist. She nodded efficiently and waved me to a fenced-off enclosure where Sam Gogarty sat, plump and untroubled, at an enormous desk.

I pushed open the swinging gate.

Gogarty looked at me icily. “You’re late,” he said.

He had no hangover, it was clear. I said apologetically, “Sorry, I’m—”

“Never mind. Just don’t let it happen again.” It was clear that, in the office, business was business; the fact that we had been drinking together the night before would not condone liberties the morning after. Gogarty said, “Your desk is over there, Wills. Better get started.”

I felt considerably deflated as I sat down at my desk and stared unhappily at the piles of blue and yellow manifolds before me.

The Company had trained me well. I didn’t need to be coached in order to get through the work; it was all a matter of following established techniques and precedents. I checked the coverage, reduced the claim to tape-code, fed the tapes into a machine.

If the claim was legitimate, the machine computed the amounts due and issued a punch-card check. If there was anything wrong, the machine flashed a red light and spat the faulty claim out into a hopper.

And there were plenty of claims. Every adult in Naples, of course, carried the conventional War-and-Disaster policy—the so-called Blue Bolt coverage. Since few of them had actually been injured in the war, the claims were small—mostly for cost of premiums on other policies, under the disability clauses. (For if war prevented a policyholder from meeting his Blue Plate premiums, for instance, the Company itself under Blue Bolt would keep his policies paid—and the policyholder fed.)

But there were some big claims, too. The Neapolitan government had carried the conventional Blue Bolt policies and, though the policy had been canceled by the Company before hostilities broke out—thus relieving the Company of the necessity of paying damages to the principality of Naples itself—still there were all the subsidiary loss and damage claims of the Neapolitan government’s bureaus and departments, almost every one of them non-canceling.

It amounted to billions and billions of lire. Just looking at the amounts on some of the vouchers before me made my head swim. And the same, of course, would be true in Sicily. Though that would naturally be handled by the Sicilian office, not by us.

However, the cost of this one brief, meager little war between Naples and Sicily, with less than ten thousand casualties, lasting hardly more than a week, must have set the Company’s reserves back hundreds of millions of dollars.

And to think that some people didn’t like the Company! Why, without it, the whole peninsula of Italy would have been in financial ruin, the solvent areas dragged down with the combatants!

Naturally, the Regional Office was understaffed for this volume of work—which is why they had flown in new Adjusters like myself.

*

I looked up from my desk, surprised. Susan was standing next to me, an aspirin and a paper cup of water in her hand. “You look like you might need this,” she whispered. She winked and was gone.

I swallowed it gratefully, although my hangover was almost gone. I was finding in these dry papers all the romance and excitement I had joined the Company’s foreign service for. Here before me were human lives, drama, tragedy, even an occasional touch of human-interest comedy.

For the Company was supporting most of Naples and whatever affected a Neapolitan life showed up somehow in the records of the Company.

It was a clean, dedicated feeling to work for the Company. The monks of the Middle Ages might have had something of the same positive conviction that their work in the service of a mighty churchly empire was right and just, but surely no one since.

I attacked the mountain of forms with determination, taking pleasure in the knowledge that every one I processed meant one life helped by the Company.

It was plain in history, for all to see. Once the world had been turbulent and distressed, and the Company had smoothed it out. It had started with fires and disease. When the first primitive insurance companies—there were more than one, in the early days—began offering protection against the hazards of fire, they had found it wise to try to prevent fires. There were the advertising campaigns with their wistful-eyed bears pleading with smokers not to drop their lighted cigarettes in the dry forest; the technical bureaus like the Underwriter’s Laboratory, testing electrical equipment, devising intricate and homely gimmicks like the underwriter’s knot; the Fire Patrol in the big cities that followed up the city-owned Fire Department; the endless educational sessions in the schools… And fires decreased.

Then there was life insurance. Each time a death benefit was paid, a digit rang up on the actuarial scoreboard. Was tuberculosis a major killer? Establish mobile chest X-rays; alert the people to the meaning of a chronic cough. Was it heart disease? Explain the dangers of overweight, the idiocy of exercise past forty. People lived longer.

Health insurance followed the same pattern. It had begun by paying for bills incurred during sickness, and ended by providing full medical sickness prevention and treatment for all. Elaborate research programs reduced the danger of disease to nearly nothing. Only a few rare cases, like that of Marianna…

I shook myself away from the thought. Anyway, it was neither fire nor health insurance that concerned me now, but the Blue Bolt anti-war complex of the Company’s policies. It was easy enough to see how it had come about. For with fire and accident and disease ameliorated by the strong protecting hand of the Company, only one major hazard remained—war.

And so the Company had logically and inevitably resolved to wipe out war.

*

I looked up. It was Susan again, this time with a cardboard container of coffee. “You’re an angel,” I said. She set the coffee down and turned to go. I looked quickly around to make sure that Gogarty was busy, and stopped her. “Tell me something?”

“Sure.”

“About this girl, Rena. Does she work for the Company?”

Susan giggled. “Heavens, no. What an idea!”

“What’s so strange about it?”

She straightened out her face. “You’d better ask Sam—Mr. Gogarty, that is.

Didn’t you have a chance to talk to her last night? Or were you too busy with other things?”

“I only want to know how she happened to be with you.”

Susan shrugged. “Sam thought you’d like to meet her, I guess. Really, you’ll have to ask him. All I know is that she’s been in here quite a lot about some claims. But she doesn’t work here, believe me.” She wrinkled her nose in amusement. “And I won’t work here either, if I don’t get back to my desk.”

I took the hint. By lunch time, I had got through a good half of the accumulation on my desk. I ate briefly and not too well at a nearby trattoria with a “B” on the Blue Plate medallion in its window. After the dinner of the night before, I more than half agreed with Gogarty’s comments about the Blue Plate menus.

Gogarty called me over when I got back to the office. He said, “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you about Luigi Zorchi.”

I nodded eagerly. I had been hoping for some explanations.

Gogarty went on, “Since you were on the scene when he took his dive, you might as well follow up. God knows you can’t do worse than the rest of us.”

I said dubiously, “Well, I saw the accident, if that’s what you mean.”

“Accident! What accident? This is the twelfth time he’s done it, I tell you.” He tossed a file folder at me. “Take a look! Loss of limbs—four times. Internal injuries—six times. Loss of vision, impaired hearing, hospitalization and so on— good lord, I can’t count the number of separate claims. And, every one, he has collected on. Go ahead, look it over.”

I peered at the folder. The top sheet was a field report on the incident I had watched, when the locomotive of the Milan express had severed both legs. The one below it, dated five weeks earlier, was for flash burns suffered in the explosion of a stove, causing the loss of the right forearm nearly to the elbow.

Curious, I thought, I hadn’t noticed anything when I saw the man on the platform. Still, I hadn’t paid too much attention to him at first, and modern prosthetic devices were nearly miraculous. I riffled through the red-bordered sheets. The fifth claim down, nearly two years before, was—

I yelped, “Mr. Gogarty! This is a fraud!”

“What?”

“Look at this! ‘On 21st October, the insured suffered severe injuries while trapped in a rising elevator with faulty safety equipment, resulting in loss of both legs above knees, multiple lacerations of—’ Well, never mind the rest of it. But look at that, Mr. Gogarty! He already lost both legs! He can’t lose them twice, can he?”

Gogarty sat back in his chair, looking at me oddly. “You startled me,” he complained. “Wills, what have I been trying to tell you? That’s the whole point, boy! No, he didn’t lose his legs twice. It was five times!”

I goggled at him. “But—”

“But, but. But he did. Wait a minute—” he held up a hand to stop my questions—“just take a look through the folder. See for yourself.” He waited while, incredulously, I finished going through the dossier. It was true. I looked at Gogarty wordlessly.

He said resentfully, “You see what we’re up against? And none of the things you are about to say would help. There is no mistake in the records—they’ve been double and triple-checked. There is no possibility that another man, or men, substituted for Zorchi—fingerprints have checked every time. The three times he lost his arms, retina-prints checked. There is no possibility that the doctors were bribed, or that he lost a little bit more of his leg, for instance, in each accident—the severed sections were recovered, and they were complete. Wills, this guy grows new arms and legs like a crab!”

I looked at him in a daze. “What a fantastic scientific discovery!” I said.

He snorted. “Fantastic pain in the neck! Zorchi can’t go on like this; he’ll bankrupt the Company. We can’t stop him. Even when we were tipped off this time—we couldn’t stop him. And I’ll tell you true, Wills, that platform was loaded with our men when Zorchi made his dive. You weren’t the only Adjuster of the Company there.”

He picked a folded sheet of paper out of his desk. “Here. Zorchi is still in the hospital; no visitors allowed today. But I want you to take these credentials and go to see him tomorrow. You came to us with a high recommendation from the Home Office, Wills—” That made me look at him sharply, but his expression was innocent. “You’re supposed to be a man of intelligence and resourcefulness. See if you can come up with some ideas on dealing with that situation. I’d handle it myself, but I’ve got—” he grimaced—“certain other minor administrative difficulties to deal with. Oh, nothing important, but you might as well know that there appears to be a little, well, popular underground resentment toward the Company around here.”

“Incredible!” I said.

He looked at me thoughtfully for a moment. “Well,” he said, “it’s quitting time. See you in the morning.”

I had a lonely dinner at the same cheap restaurant where I’d had my lunch. I spent an hour in my room with my Company-issued Adjuster’s Handbook, looking for some precedent that had some sort of bearing on the case of a man who could grow new arms and legs. There wasn’t anything, of course. I went out for a walk… and still it wasn’t nearly time for me to retire to bed.

So I did what I had been avoiding doing. I looked in the phone book for Rena dell’Angela’s number. There was, it developed, a Benedetto dell’Angela at the address she’d given the cab driver; but the phone was disconnected.

So I wandered around some more, and then I went to sleep, dreaming about Benedetto dell’Angela. I saw him as a leather-faced, white-bearded and courtly old gentleman. Rena’s father, surely. Possibly even her elder brother. Certainly not her husband.

It was a dull finish to the first full day of my rich, exciting new life…

*

The “minor administrative difficulties” got major. So I didn’t get to see Zorchi the next day, after all.

A Junior Adjuster named Hammond—he was easily sixty, but the slow-moving, unenterprising type that would stay junior till the day he died—came white-faced into the office a few minutes after opening and huddled with Gogarty for a quarter of an hour.

Then Gogarty called me over. He said, “We’re having a spot of trouble. Hammond needs a little help; you’re elected. Draw what you need, take a couple of expediters along, report back to me this evening.”

Hammond and I stopped at the cashier’s office to draw three dispatch-cases full of lira-notes. Outside, an armored car was waiting for us, with a full crew of six uniformed expediters. We raced off down the narrow streets with the sirens wailing, climbing the long hill road past the radioactive remains of Capodichino, heading out toward the farmlands.

Hammond worriedly filled me in on the way. He had got in early to his branch office that morning, but no earlier than the first of a long line of policyholders. There had, it appeared, been some kind of rumor spread that the Company was running out of money. It was preposterous on the face of it—after all, who printed the money?—but you can’t argue with a large group of people and, before the official hour of opening the branch, there were more than a hundred in the knotted line outside the door.

Hammond had rushed into the Naples office for help, leaving his staff to do the best they could. He said gloomily, staring out through the view-slits at the farmlands and vineyards we were passing through, “I just hope we still have a branch office. This is a bad spot, Wills. Caserta. It got bombed out, you know; the whole southern end of the town is radioactive. And it has a long history of trouble. Used to be the summer royal seat of the old Italian monarchy; then the Americans used it for a command headquarters in the war Mussolini got into—the first atom war.

It’s been fought over time and again.”

I said reasonably, “But don’t they know the Company has all the resources in the world?”

“Sure they do—when they’re thinking. Right now they’re not thinking. They’ve got it in their heads that the Company isn’t going to pay off. They’re scared. You can’t tell them anything. You can’t even give them checks—they want cash on the line.”

I said, “That’s pretty silly, isn’t it? I mean—ugh!” I retched, as I suddenly got a whiff of the most unpleasant and penetrating odor I had ever encountered in my life. It was like death and destruction in gaseous form; a sickly sweet, clinging stink that oozed in through the pores of my skin to turn my stomach. “Wow!” I said, gasping.

Hammond looked at me in bewilderment; then he grinned sourly. “New here, aren’t you?” he inquired. “That’s hemp. They grow the stuff for the fibers; and to get the fibers out, they let it get good and rotten. You’ll get used to it,” he promised.

I tried. I tried pretty hard to get used to it; I hardly heard a word he said all the rest of the way in to Caserta, I was trying so hard. But I didn’t get used to it.

Then I had my mind taken off my troubles. The branch was still doing business when we got there, though there were easily three or four hundred angrily shouting policyholders milling around in front of it. They scattered before us as the armored car came racing in; we skidded to a stop, siren blasting, and the expediters leaped out with their weapons at the ready.

Hammond and I climbed out of the armored car with our bags of money. There was an audible excitement in the crowd as the word spread back that the Company had brought in enormous stores of lire, more than any man had ever seen, to pay off the claims. We could hear the chatter of many voices, and we almost could feel the tension slack off.

It looked like the trouble was over.

Then there was a shrill whistle. It sounded very much like the alarm whistle of one of our expediters but, thinking back, I have never been sure.

Perhaps it was a nervous expediter, perhaps it was an agent provocateur in the crowd. But, whoever pulled the trigger, the explosion went off.

There was a ragged yell from the crowd, and rocks began whizzing through the air. The pacifists in the mob began heading for the doorways and alleys around; women screamed, men shouted and bellowed, and for a moment it looked like we would be swamped. For not very many of them were pacifists, and there were at least a hundred screaming, gesticulating men lunging at us.

One cobblestone shattered the theoretically unbreakable windshield of the truck next to my head; then the expediters, gas guns spitting, were ringing around us to protect the money.

It was a short fight but vicious. By the time the first assault was repulsed there were at least fifty persons lying motionless in the street.

I had never seen that sort of violence before. It did something to my stomach. I stood weaving, holding to the armored car, while the expediters circled the area around the branch office, firing hurry-up shots at the running rioters. Hammond looked at me questioningly.

“That smell,” I said apologetically.

He said only, “Sure.” True, the fetid aroma from the hemp fields was billowing all around us, but he knew as well as I that it was not the smell that was bothering me.

In a few moments, as we were locking the bags of money into the office safe, redcrossed vehicles bearing the Company insignia appeared in the street outside, and medics began tending to the victims. Each one got a shot of something—an antidote to the sleep-gas from the expediters’ guns, I guessed—and was loaded unceremoniously into the ambulances.

Hammond appeared beside me. “Ready for business?” he asked. “They’ll be back any minute now, the ones that can still walk. We’ll be paying off until midnight, the way it looks.”

I said, “Sure. That—that gas doesn’t hurt them any, does it? I mean, after they go to the hospital they’ll be all right, won’t they?”

Hammond, twirling a pencil in his fingers, stared broodingly at the motionless body of one policyholder. He was a well-dressed man of fifty or so, with a reddish mustache, unusual in that area, and shattered rimless glasses. Not at all the type I would expect to see in a street fight; probably, I thought, a typical innocent bystander.

Hammond said absently, “Oh, sure. They’ll be all right. Never know what hit them.” There was a tiny sharp crack and the two halves of the pencil fell to the floor. He looked at it in surprise. “Come on, Wills. Let’s get to work.”