Preferred Risk

by Lester Del Rey

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, red-crossed 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.”

  CHAPTER III

  Of course I still believed in the Company.

  But all the same, it was the first time since I went to work for the Company that I had even had to ask myself that question.

  That long, long day in Hammond’s puny little branch office, sweltering in the smell of the hemp fields, pushing across the mountains of lire to the grimfaced policyholders left me a little less sure of things. Nearly all of the first hundred or so to pass my desk had been in the crowd that the expediters had fired on. A few had fresh bandages to show where stones had missed the expediters, but found targets all the same. Nearly all of them were hostile. There was no casual conversation, very few “Grazies” as they received their payments.

  But at last the day was at an end. Hammond snapped an order to one of the clerks, who shoved his way through the dwindling line to close the door and bang down the shutters. I put through the last few applications, and we were through.

  It was hot and muggy out in the streets of New Caserta. Truce teams of expediters were patrolling the square, taken off their regular assignments of enforcing the peace between Naples and Sicily to keep down Caserta’s own mobs. Hammond suggested dinner, and we went to a little Blue Plate in the palace itself.

  Hammond held Class-A food policies, but he was politeness itself; he voluntarily led the way to the Class-B area. We presented our policy-cards to the waiter for canceling, and sat back to enjoy the air conditioning.

  I was still troubled over the violence. I said, “Has there been any trouble around here before?”

  Hammond said ruefully, “Plenty. All over Europe, if you want my opinion. Of course, you never see it in the papers, but I’ve heard stories from field workers. They practically had a revolution in the Sudeten strip after the Prague-Vienna affair.” He stopped talking as the waiter set his Meal-of-the-Day in front of him. Hammond looked at it sourly. “Oh, the hell with it, Wills,” he said. “Have a drink with me to wash this stuff down.”

  * * * *

  We ordered liquor, and Hammond shoved his Class-A card at the waiter. I am not a snoop, but I couldn’t help noticing that the liquor coupons were nearly all gone; at his present rate, Hammond would use up his year’s allotment by the end of the summer, and be paying cash for his drinks.

  Dinner was dull. Hammond made it dull, because he was much more interested in his drinking than in me. Though I was never much of a drinker, I’d had a little experience in watching others tank up; Hammond I classified as the surly and silent type. He wasn’t quite rude to me, but after the brandy with his coffee, and during the three or four straight whiskies that followed that, he hardly spoke to me at all.

  We left the Blue Plate in a strained silence and, after the cooled restaurant, the heat outside was painful. The air was absolutely static, and the odor from the hemp fields soaked into our clothes like a bath in a sewer.

  Overhead it was nearly dark, and there were low black clouds. “We’d better get going,” I ventured. “Looks like rain.”

  Hammond said nothing, only grunted. He lurched ahead of me toward the narrow street that led back to the branch office, where our transport was waiting.

  The distance was easily half a mile. Now I am not terribly lazy, and even in the heat I was willing enough to walk. But I didn’t want to get caught in a rain. Maybe it was superstition on my part—I knew that the danger was really slight—but I couldn’t forget that three separate atomic explosions had gone off in the area around Caserta and Naples within only a few months, and there was going to be a certain amount of radioactivity in every drop of rain that fell for a hundred miles around.

  I started to tell Hammond about it, but he made a disgusted noise and stumbled ahead.

  It wasn’t as if we had to walk. Caserta was not well equipped with cabs, but there were a few; and both Hammond and myself ranked high enough in the Company to have been able to get a lift from one of the expediter cars that were cruising about.

  There was a flare of lightning over the eastern mountains and, in a moment, the pounding roll of thunder. And a flat globule of rain splattered on my face.

  I said, “Hammond, let’s wait here for a lift.”

  Surprisingly he came along with me.

  If he hadn’t, I would have left him in the street.

  * * * *

  We were in a street of tenements. It was almost deserted; I rapped on the nearest door. No answer, no sound inside. I rapped again, then tried the door. It was locked.

  The next door—ancient and rickety as the first—was also locked, and no one answered. The third door, no one answered. By then it was raining hard; the knob turned under my fingers, and we stepped inside.

  We left the door ajar, on the chance that a squad car or cab might pass, and for light. It was almost dark outside, apart from the light from the lightning flashes, but even so it was darker within. There was no light at all in the narrow, odorous hall; not even a light seeping under the apartment doors.

  In the lightning flare, Hammond’s face was pale. He was beginning to sober up, and his manner was uneasy.

  We were there perhaps half an hour in that silent hall, watching the rain sleet down and the lightning flare and listening to the thunder. Two or three times, squad cars passed, nosing slowly down the drenched streets, but though Hammond looked longingly at them, I still didn’t want to get wet.

  Then the rain slowed and almost simultaneously a civilian cab appeared at the head of the block. “Come on,” I said, tugging at his arm.

  He balked. “Wait for a squad car,” he mumbled.

  “Why? Come on, Hammond, it may start to pour again in a minute.”

  “No!”

  His behavior was exasperating me. Clearly it wasn’t that he was too niggardly to pay for the cab; it was almost as if he were delaying going back to the branch office for some hidden reason. But that was ridiculous, of course.

  I said, “Look, you can stay here if you want to, but I’m going.” I jumped out of the doorway just in time to flag the cab; it rolled to a stop, and the driver backed to where I was standing. As I got in, I looked once more to the doorway where Hammond was standing, his face unreadable.

  He made a gesture of some sort, but the lightning flashed again and I skipped into the cab. When I looked again he was invisible inside the doorway, and I told the driver to take me to the branch office of the Company.

  Curious; but it was not an end to curious things that night. At the branch office, my car was waiting to take me back to Naples.

  I surrendered my travel coupons to the cab driver and jumped from one vehicle to the other.

  Before my driver could start, someone appeared at the window of the car and a sharp voice said, “Un momento, Signore ’Ammond!”

  I stared at the man, a rather badly dressed Neapolitan. I said angrily, “Hammond isn’t here!”

 
The man’s expression changed. It had been belligerent; it now became astonished and apologetic. “A thousand times excuse me,” he said. “The Signore ’Ammond, can you say where he is?”

  I hesitated, but only for a moment. I didn’t like the little man peering in my window, however humble and conciliatory he had become. I said abruptly, “No.” And my driver took off, leaving the man standing there.

  I turned to look back at him as we drove off.

  It was ridiculous, but the way he was standing as we left, holding one hand in his pocket, eyes narrowed and thoughtful, made me think that he was carrying a gun.

  But, of course, that was impossible. The Company didn’t permit lethal weapons, and who in all the world would challenge a rule of the Company?

  * * * *

  When I showed up in the Naples office the next morning, Susan had my coffee ready and waiting for me. I said gratefully, “Bless you.”

  She chuckled. “That’s not all,” she said. “Here’s something else you might like. Just remember though, if anyone asks, you got it out of the files yourself.”

  She slipped a folder under the piles of forms on my desk and disappeared. I peered at it curiously. It was labeled: “Policy BNT-3KT-890776, Blue Bolt Comprehensive. Insuree: Renata dell’Angela”

  I could have been no more grateful had she given me the Company Mint.

  But I had no chance to examine it. Gogarty was calling for me. I hastily swallowed my coffee and reported for orders.

  They were simple enough. The appointment with Zorchi that I hadn’t been able to keep the day before was set up for right then. I was already late and I had to leave without another glance at Rena’s file.

  The hospital Zorchi honored with his patronage was a marble-halled palace on the cliffs that rimmed the southern edge of the Bay of Naples. It was a luxurious, rich man’s hospital, stuffy with its opulence; but the most opulent of all was the plush-lined three-room suite where Zorchi was.

  A white-robed sister of some religious order led me into a silent elevator and along a statued hall. She tapped on a door, and left me in the care of a sharp-faced young man with glasses who introduced himself as Mr. Zorchi’s secretary.