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?"