The Ninth Science Fiction Megapack

by Arthur C. Clarke

  His eyes were staring. Ignoring the blood spurting from his stumps, ignoring my attempts to say something, he pounded his abdomen. “Twelve times I have been cut—do you see even a scar? My appendix, it is bad; it traps filth, and the filth makes me sick. And I have it cut out—and it grows again; and I have it cut out again, and it grows back. And the pain, Weels, the pain never stops!” He flung the robe open, slapped his narrow, hairy chest.

  I gasped. Under the scraggly hair was a rubble of boils and wens, breaking and matting the hair as he struck himself in frenzy. “Envy me, Weels!” he shouted. “Envy the man whose body defends itself against everything! I will live forever, I promise it, and I will always be in pain, and someone will pay for every horrible moment of it! Now get out, get out!”

  I left under the hating eyes of the sharp-faced secretary who silently led me to the door.

  * * * *

  I had put Zorchi through a tantrum and subjected myself to as disagreeable a time as I’d ever had. And I hadn’t accomplished a thing. I knew that well enough. And if I hadn’t known it by myself, I would have found out.

  Gogarty pointed it out to me, in detail. “You’re a big disappointment to me,” he moaned sourly. “Ah, the hell with it. What were you trying to accomplish, anyway?”

  I said defensively, “I thought I might appeal to his altruism. After all, you didn’t give me very explicit instructions.”

  “I didn’t tell you to remember to wipe your nose either,” he said bitterly. He shook his head, the anger disappearing. “Well,” he said disconsolately, “I don’t suppose we’re any worse off than we were. I guess I’d better try this myself.” He must have caught a hopeful anticipatory gleam in my eye, because he said quickly, “Not right now, Wills. You’ve made that impossible. I’ll just have to wait until he cools off.”

  I said nothing; just stood there waiting for him to let me go. I was sorry things hadn’t worked out but, after all, he had very little to complain about. Besides, I wanted to get back to my desk and the folder about Rena dell’Angela. It wasn’t so much that I was interested in her as a person, I reminded myself. I was just curious…

  Once again, I had to stay curious for a while. Gogarty had other plans for me. Before I knew what was happening, I was on my way out of the office again, this time to visit another Neapolitan hospital, where some of the severely injured in the recent war were waiting final settlement of their claims. It was a hurry-up matter, which had been postponed too many times already; some of the injured urgently required major medical treatment, and the hospital was howling for approval of their claims before they’d begin treatment.

  This one was far from a marble palace. It had the appearance of a stucco tenement, and all of the patients were in wards. I was a little surprised to see expediters guarding the entrance.

  I asked one of them, “Anything wrong?”

  He looked at me with a flicker of astonishment, recognizing the double-breasted Claim Adjuster uniform, surprised, I think, at my asking him a question. “Not as long as we’re here, sir,” he said.

  “I mean, I was wondering what you were doing here.”

  The surprise became overt. “Vaults,” he said succinctly.

  I prodded no further. I knew what he meant by vaults, of course. It was part of the Company’s beneficent plan for ameliorating the effects of even such tiny wars as the Naples-Sicily affair that those who suffered radiation burns got the best treatment possible. And the best treatment, of course, was suspended animation. The deadly danger of radiation burns lay in their cumulative effect; the first symptoms were nothing, the man was well and able to walk about. Degeneration of the system followed soon, the marrow of the bone gave up on its task of producing white corpuscles, the blood count dropped, the tiny radiant poisons in his blood spread and worked their havoc. If he could be gotten through the degenerative period he might live. But, if he lived, he would still die. That is, if his life processes continued, the radiation sickness would kill him. The answer was to stop the life process, temporarily, by means of the injections and deep-freeze in the vaults. It was used for more than radiation, of course. Marianna, for instance—

  Well, anyway, that was what the vaults were. These were undoubtedly just a sort of distribution point, where local cases were received and kept until they could be sent to the main Company vaults up the coast at Anzio.

  I wasn’t questioning the presence of vaults there; I was only curious why the Company felt they needed guarding.

  I found myself so busy, though, that I had no time to think about it. A good many of the cases in this shabby hospital really needed the Company’s help. But a great many of them were obvious attempts at fraud.

  There was a woman, for instance, in the maternity ward. During the war, she’d had to hide out after the Capodichino bombing and hadn’t been able to reach medical service. So her third child was going to be a girl, and she was asking indemnity under the gender-guarantee clause. But she had only Class-C coverage and her first two had been boys; a daughter was permissive in any of the first four pregnancies. She began swearing at me before I finished explaining these simple facts to her.

  I walked out of the ward, hot under the collar. Didn’t these people realize we were trying to help them? They didn’t appear to be aware of it. Only the terribly injured, the radiation cases, the amputees, the ones under anesthetic—only these gave me no arguments, mainly because they couldn’t talk.

  Most of them were on their way to the vaults, I found. My main job was revision of their policies to provide for immobilization. Inevitably, there are some people who will try to take advantage of anything.

  The retirement clause in the basic contract was the joker here. Considering that the legal retirement age under the universal Blue Heaven policy was seventy-five years—calendar years, not metabolic years—there were plenty of invalids who wanted a few years in the vaults for reasons that had nothing to do with health. If they could sleep away two or three decades, they could, they thought, emerge at a physical age of forty or so and live idly off the Company the rest of their lives.

  They naturally didn’t stop to think that if any such practice became common the Company would simply be unable to pay claims. And they certainly didn’t think, or care that, if the Company went bankrupt, the world as we knew it would end.

  It was a delicate problem; we couldn’t deny them medical care, but we couldn’t permit them the vaults unless they were either in clearly urgent need, or were willing to sign an extension waiver to their policies…

  I saw plenty of that, that afternoon. The radiation cases were the worst, in that way, because they still could talk and argue. Even while they were being loaded with drugs, even while they could see with their own eyes the blood-count graph dipping lower and lower, they still complained at being asked to sign the waiver.

  There was even some fear of the vaults themselves—though every living human had surely seen the Company’s indoctrination films that showed how the injected drugs slowed life processes and inhibited the body’s own destructive enzymes; how the apparently lifeless body, down to ambient air temperature, would be slipped into its hermetic plastic sack and stacked away, row on row, far underground, to sleep away the months or years or, if necessary, the centuries. Time meant nothing to the suspendees. It was hard to imagine being afraid of as simple and natural a process as that!

  Although I had to admit that the vaults looked a lot like morgues…

  I didn’t enjoy it. I kept thinking of Marianna. She had feared the vaults too, in the childish, unreasoning, feminine way that was her characteristic. When the Blue Blanket technicians had turned up the diagnosis of leukemia, they had proposed the sure-thing course of putting her under suspension while the slow-acting drugs—specially treated to operate even under those conditions—worked their cure, but she had refused. There had been, they admitted, a ninety-nine and nine-tenths percent prospect of a cure without suspension…

  It just happened that Marianna was
in the forlorn one-tenth that died.

  I couldn’t get her out of my mind. The cases who protested or whined or pleaded or shrieked that they were being tortured and embalmed alive didn’t help. I was glad when the afternoon was over and I could get back to the office.

  * * * *

  As I came in the door, Gogarty was coming in, too, from the barbershop downstairs. He was freshly shaved and beaming.

  “Quitting time, Tom,” he said amiably, though his eyes were memorizing the pile of incomplete forms on my desk. “All work and no play, you know.” He nudged me. “Not that you need reminding, eh? Still, you ought to tell your girl that she shouldn’t call you on office time, Tom.”

  “Call me? Rena called me?”

  He nodded absently, intent on the desk. “Against Company rules, you know. Say, I don’t like to push you, but aren’t you running a little behind here?”

  I said with some irritation, “I don’t have much chance to catch up, the way I’ve been racing around the country, you know. And there’s plenty to be done.”

  He said soothingly, “Now, take it easy, Tom. I was only trying to say that there might be some easier way to handle these things.” He speared a form, glanced over it casually. He frowned. “Take this, for instance. The claim is for catching cold as a result of exposure during the evacuation of Cerignola. What would you do with that one?”

  “Why—pay it, I suppose.”

  “And put in the paper work? Suppose it’s a phony, Tom? Not one case of coryza in fifty is genuine.”

  “What would you do?” I asked resentfully.

  He said without hesitation, “Send it back with Form CBB-23A192. Ask for laboratory smear-test reports.”

  I looked over the form. A long letter was attached; it said in more detail than was necessary that there had been no laboratory service during the brief war, at least where the policyholder happened to be, and therefore he could submit only the affidavits of three registered physicians. It looked like a fair claim to me. If it was up to me, I would have paid it automatically.

  I temporized. “Suppose it’s legitimate?”

  “Suppose it is? Look at it this way, Tom. If it’s phony, this will scare him off, and you’d be saving the Company the expense and embarrassment of paying off a fraudulent claim. If it’s legitimate, he’ll resubmit it—at a time when, perhaps, we won’t be so busy. Meanwhile that’s one more claim handled and disposed of, for our progress reports to the Home Office.”

  I stared at him unbelievingly. But he looked back in perfect calm, until my eyes dropped. After all, I thought, he was right in a way. The mountain of work on my desk was certainly a logjam, and it had to be broken somehow. Maybe rejecting this claim would work some small hardship in an individual case, but what about the hundreds and thousands of others waiting for attention? Wasn’t it true that no small hardship to an individual was as serious as delaying all those others?

  It was, after all, that very solicitude for the people at large that the Company relied on for its reputation—that, and the ironclad guarantee of prompt and full settlement.

  I said, “I suppose you’re right.”

  He nodded, and turned away. Then he paused. “I didn’t mean to bawl you out for that phone call, Tom,” he said. “Just tell her about the rule, will you?”

  “Sure. Oh, one thing.” He waited. I coughed. “This girl, Rena. I don’t know much about her, you know. Is she, well, someone you know?”

  He said, “Heavens, no. She was making a pest out of herself around here, frankly. She has a claim, but not a very good one. I don’t know all the details, because it’s encoded, but the machines turned it down automatically. I do know that she, uh—” he sort of half winked—“wants a favor. Her old man is in trouble. I’ll look it up for you some time, if you want, and get the details. I think he’s in the cooler—that is, the clinic—up at Anzio.”

  He scratched his plump jowls. “I didn’t think it was fair to you for me to have a girl at dinner and none for you; Susan promised to bring someone along, and this one was right here, getting in the way. She said she liked Americans, so I told her you would be assigned to her case.” This time he did wink. “No harm, of course. You certainly wouldn’t be influenced by any, well, personal relationship, if you happened to get into one. Oh, a funny thing. She seemed to recognize your name.”

  That was a jolt. “She what?”

  Gogarty shrugged. “Well, she reacted to it. ‘Thomas Wills,’ I said. She’d been acting pretty stand-offish, but she warmed up quick. Maybe she just likes the name, but right then is when she told me she liked Americans.”

  I cleared my throat. “Mr. Gogarty,” I said determinedly, “please get me straight on something. You say this girl’s father is in some kind of trouble, and you imply she knows me. I want to know if you’ve ever had any kind of report, or even heard any kind of rumor, that would make you think that I was in the least sympathetic to any anti-Company groups? I’m aware that there were stories—”

  He stopped me. “I never heard any, Tom,” he said definitely.

  I hesitated. It seemed like a good time to open up to Gogarty; I opened my mouth to start, but I was too late. Susan called him off for what she claimed was an urgent phone call and, feeling let-down, I watched him waddle away.

  Because it was, after all, time that I took down my back hair with my boss.

  * * * *

  Well, I hadn’t done anything too terribly bad—anyway, I hadn’t meant to do anything bad. And the circumstances sort of explained it, in a way. And it was all in the past, and—

  And nothing. I faced the facts. I had spent three solid weeks getting blind drunk, ranting and raving and staggering up to every passerby who would listen and whining to him that the Company was evil, the Company was murderous, the Company had killed my wife.

  There was no denying it. And I had capped it all off one bleary midnight, with a brick through the window of the Company branch office that served my home. It was only a drunken piece of idiocy, I kept telling myself. But it was a drunken piece of idiocy that landed me in jail, that had been permanently indorsed on every one of my policies, that was in the confidential pages of my Company service record. It was a piece of idiocy that anyone might have done. But it would have meant deep trouble for me, if it hadn’t been for the intercession of my wife’s remote relative, Chief Underwriter Defoe.

  It was he who had bailed me out. He had never told me how he had found out that I was in jail. He appeared, read the riot-act to me and got me out. He put me over the coals later, yes, but he’d bailed me out. He’d told me I was acting like a child—and convinced me of it, which was harder. And when he was convinced I had snapped out of it, he personally backed me for an appointment to the Company’s school as a cadet Claims Adjuster.

  I owed a considerable debt of gratitude to my ex-remote-in-law, Chief Underwriter Defoe.

  * * * *

  While I still was brooding, Gogarty came back. He looked unhappy. “Hammond,” he said bitterly. “He’s missing. Look, was he drunk when you left him last night?” I nodded. “Thought so. Never showed up for work. Not at his quarters. The daily ledger’s still open at his office, because there’s no responsible person to sign it. So naturally I’ve got to run out to Caserta now, and what Susan will say—” He muttered away.

  I remembered the file that was buried under the papers on my desk, when he mentioned Susan’s name.

  As soon as he was out of the office, I had it open.

  And as soon as I had it open, I stared at it in shock.

  The title page of the sheaf inside was headed: Signorina Renata dell’Angela. Age 22; daughter of Benedetto dell’Angela; accepted to general Class-AA; no employment. There were more details.

  But across all, in big red letters, was a rubber stamp: Policy Canceled. Reassigned Class-E.

  It meant that the sad-eyed Rena was completely uninsurable.

  CHAPTER IV

  Phone or no phone, I still had her address.


  It was still daylight when I got out of the cab, and I had a chance for a good look at the house. It was a handsome place by day; the size of the huge white stucco wall didn’t fit the uninsurable notation on Rena’s claim. That wall enclosed a garden; the garden could hardly hold less than an AA house. And Class-Es were ordinarily either sent to public hostels—at the Company’s expense, to be sure—or existed on the charity of friends or relatives. And Class-Es seldom had friends in Class-AA houses.

  I knocked at the gate. A fat woman, age uncertain but extreme, opened a little panel and peered at me. I asked politely, “Miss dell’Angela?”

  The woman scowled. “Che dice?”

  I repeated: “May I see Miss dell’Angela? I’m a Claims Adjuster for the Company. I have some business with her in connection with her policies.”

  “Ha!” said the woman. She left it at that for a moment, pursing her lips and regarding me thoughtfully. Then she shrugged apathetically. “Momento,” she said wearily, and left me standing outside the gate.

  From inside there was a muttering of unfamiliar voices. I thought I heard a door open, and the sound of steps, but when the fat woman came back she was alone.

  Silently she opened the door and nodded me in. I started automatically up the courtyard toward the enclosed house, but she caught my arm and motioned me toward another path. It led down a flowered lane through a grape arbor to what might, at one time, have been a caretaker’s hut.

  I knocked on the door of the hut, comprehending where Rena dell’Angela lived as a Class-E uninsurable.

  Rena herself opened it, her face flushed, her expression surprised—apprehensive, almost, I thought at first. It was the first time I had seen her by daylight. She was—oh, there was no other word. She was lovely.

  She said quickly, “Mr. Wills! I didn’t expect you.”

  I said, “You phoned me. I came as soon as I could.”