The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  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 wit
h 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.

  I explained my business. He contemptuously waved me to a brocaded chair, and left me alone for a good half hour.

  By the time Zorchi was ready to see me, I was boiling. Nobody could treat a representative of the Company like an errand boy! I did my best to take into consideration the fact that he had just undergone major surgery—first under the wheels of the train, then under the knives of three of Naples’ finest surgeons.

  I said as pleasantly as I could, “I’m glad to see you at last.”

  The dark face on the pink embroidered pillow turned coldly toward me. “Che volete?” he demanded. The secretary opened his mouth to translate.

  I said quickly, “Scusí; parlo un po’ la lingua. Non bisogno un traduttore.”

  Zorchi said languidly in Italian, “In that case, Mario, you may go. What do you want with me, Weels?”

  I explained my duties as a Claims Adjuster for the Company, pointing out that it was my task, indeed my privilege, to make settlement for injuries covered by Company policies. He listened condescendingly. I watched him carefully while I talked, trying to estimate the approach he might respond to if I was to win his confidence.

  He was far from an attractive young man, I thought. No longer behind the shabby porter’s uniform he had worn on the platform of the station, he still had an unkempt and slipshod appearance, despite the heavy silken dressing gown he wore and the manifest costliness of his room. The beard was still on his face; it, at least, had not been a disguise. It was not an attractive beard. It had been weeks, at the least, since any hand had trimmed it to shape and his hair was just as shaggy.

  Zorchi was not impressed with my friendly words. When I had finished, he said coldly, “I have had claims against the Company before, Weels. Why is it that this time you make speeches at me?”

  I said carefully, “Well, you must admit you are a rather unusual case.”

  “Case?” He frowned fiercely. “I am no case, Weels. I am Zorchi, if you please.”

  “Of course, of course. I only mean to say that—”

  “That I am a statistic, eh?” He bobbed his head. “Surely. I comprehend. But I am not a statistic, you see. Or, at best, I am a statistic which will not fit into your electronic machines, am I not?”

  I admitted, “As I say, you are a rather unusual ca—a rather unusual person, Mr. Zorchi.”

  He grinned coldly. “Good. We are agreed. Now that we have come to that understanding, are we finished with this interview?”

  I coughed. “Mr. Zorchi, I’ll be frank with you.” He snorted, but I went on, “According to your records, this claim need not be paid. You see, you already have been paid for total disability, both a lump sum and a continuing settlement. There is no possibility of two claims for the loss of your legs, you must realize.”

  He looked at me with a touch of amusement. “I must?” he asked. “It is odd. I have discussed this, you understand, with many attorneys. The premiums were paid, were they not? The language of the policy is clear, is it not? My legs—would you like to observe the stumps yourself?”

  He flung the silken covers off. I averted my eyes from the white-bandaged lower half of his torso, hairy
and scrawny and horribly less than a man’s legs should be.

  I said desperately, “Perhaps I spoke too freely. I do not mean, Mr. Zorchi, that we will not pay your claim. The Company always lives up to the letter of its contracts.”

  He covered himself casually. “Very well. Give the check to my secretary, please. Are you concluded?”

  “Not quite.” I swallowed. I plunged right in. “Mr. Zorchi, what the hell are you up to? How do you do it? There isn’t any fraud, I admit it. You really lost your legs—more than once. You grew new ones. But how? Don’t you realize how important this is? If you can do it, why not others? If you are in some way pecu—that is, if the structure of your body is in some way different from that of others, won’t you help us find out how so that we can learn from it? It isn’t necessary for you to live as you do, you know.”

  He was looking at me with a hint of interest in his close-set, dull eyes. I continued, “Even if you can grow new legs, do you enjoy the pain of having them cut off? Have you ever stopped to think that someday, perhaps, you will miscalculate, and the wheels of the train, or the truck, or whatever you use, may miss your legs and kill you? That’s no way for a man to live, Mr. Zorchi. Why not talk freely to me, let me help you? Why not take the Company into your confidence, instead of living by fraud and deceit and—”

  I had gone too far. Livid, he snarled, “Ass! That will cost your Company, I promise. Is it fraud for me to suffer like this? Do I enjoy it, do you think? Look, ass!” He flung the covers aside again, ripped at the white bandages with his hands— Blood spurted. He uncovered the raw stumps and jerked them at me.

  I do not believe any sight of my life shocked me as much as that; it was worse than the Caserta hemp fields, worse than the terrible gone moment when Marianna died, worse than anything I could imagine.

  He raved, “See this fraud, look at it closely! Truly, I grow new legs, but does that make it easier to lose the old? It is the pain of being born, Weels, a pain you will never know! I grow legs, I grow arms, I grow eyes. I will never die! I will live on like a reptile or a fish.”