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 grim-faced 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.