"Of course," said Henderson, emphasizing this point with an upraised
chubby finger, "these men are still uninsurables. This is a retirement
plan only, not an insurance policy. There is no beneficiary other than
the client himself."
And there was the gimmick. I knew a little something of the actuarial
statistics concerning uninsurables, particularly Belt prospectors. Not
many of them lived to be forty-five, and the few who would survive the
Belt and come home to collect the retirement wouldn't last more than a
year or two. A man who's spent the last twenty or thirty years on
low-gee asteroids just shrivels up after a while when he tries to live
on Earth.
It needed a company like Tangiers Mutual to dream up a racket like that.
The term "uninsurables" to most insurance companies means those people
whose jobs or habitats make them too likely as prospects for obituaries.
To Tangiers Mutual, uninsurables are people who have money the company
can't get at.
"Now," said Henderson importantly, "we come to the problem at hand." He
ruffled his up-to-now-neat In basket and finally found the folder he
wanted. He studied the blank exterior of this folder for a few seconds,
pursing his lips at it, and said, "One of our clients under the Double
R-P was a man named Jafe McCann."
"Was?" I echoed.
He squinted at me, then nodded at my sharpness. "That's right, he's
dead." He sighed heavily and tapped the folder with all those pudgy
fingers. "Normally," he said, "that would be the end of it. File closed.
However, this time there are complications."
Naturally. Otherwise, he wouldn't be telling _me_ about it. But
Henderson couldn't be rushed, and I knew it. I kept the alert look on my
face and thought of other things, while waiting for him to get to the
point.
"Two weeks after Jafe McCann's death," Henderson said, "we received a
cash-return form on his policy."
"A cash-return form?" I'd never heard of such a thing. It didn't sound
like anything Tangiers Mutual would have anything to do with. We _never_
return cash.
* * *
"It's something special in this case," he explained. "You see, this
isn't an insurance policy, it's a retirement plan, and the client can
withdraw from the retirement plan at any time, and have seventy-five per
cent of his paid-up premiums returned to him. It's, uh, the law in plans
such as this."
"Oh," I said. That explained it. A law that had snuck through the World
Finance Code Commission while the insurance lobby wasn't looking.
"But you see the point," said Henderson. "This cash-return form arrived
two weeks after the client's death."
"You said there weren't any beneficiaries," I pointed out.
"Of course. But the form was sent in by the man's partner, one Ab
Karpin. McCann left a hand-written will bequeathing all his possessions
to Karpin. Since, according to Karpin, this was done before McCann's
death, the premium money cannot be considered part of the policy, but as
part of McCann's cash-on-hand. And Karpin wants it."
"It can't be that much, can it?" I asked. I was trying my best to point
out to him that the company would spend more than it would save if it
sent me all the way out to the asteroids, a prospect I could feel coming
and one which I wasn't ready to cry hosannah over.
"McCann died," Henderson said ponderously, "at the age of fifty-six. He
had set his retirement age at sixty. He took out the policy at the age
of thirty-four, with monthly payments of fifty credits. Figure it out
for yourself."
I did--in my head--and came up with a figure of thirteen thousand and
two hundred credits. Seventy-five per cent of that would be nine
thousand and nine hundred credits. Call it ten thousand credits even.