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 permissible 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 per cent 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.