One little village couldn't have
a monopoly on all the bad breaks
in the world. They did, though!
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from
Worlds of If Science Fiction, March 1962.
Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that
the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
They say automation makes jobs, especially if "they" are trying to keep
their own job of selling automation machines. I know the Actuarvac made
one purple passion of a job for me, the unpleasantly fatal results of
which are still lingering with me.
Thad McCain, my boss at Manhattan-Universal Insurance, beamed over
the sprawling automatic brain's silver gauges and plastic toggles as
proudly as if he had just personally gave birth to it. "This will
simplify your job to the point of a pleasant diversion, Madison."
"Are you going to keep paying me for staying with my little hobby?" I
asked, suspiciously eyeing my chrome competitor.
"The Actuarvac poses no threat to your career. It will merely keep you
from flying off on wild-goose chases. It will unvaryingly separate from
the vast body of legitimate claims the phony ones they try to spike us
for. Then all that remains is for you to gather the accessory details,
the evidence to jail our erring customers."
"Fine," I said. I didn't bother to inform him that that was all my job
had ever been.
McCain shuffled his cards. They were cards for the machine, listing new
individual claims on company policies. Since the two-month-old machine
was literate and could read typewriting, the cards weren't coded or
punched. He read the top one. "Now this, for instance. No adjuster
need investigate this accident. The circumstances obviously are such
that no false claim could be filed. Of course, the brain will make
an unfailing analysis of all the factors involved and clear the claim
automatically and officially."
McCain threaded the single card into the slot for an example to me.
He then flicked the switch and we stood there watching the monster
ruminate thoughtfully. It finally rang a bell and spit the card back at
Manhattan-Universal's top junior vice-president.
He took it like a man.
"That's what the machine is for," he said philosophically. "To detect
human error. Hmm. What kind of a shove do you get out of this?"
He handed me the rejected claim card. I took it, finding a new, neatly
typed notation on it. It said:
Investigate the Ozark village of Granite City.
"You want me to project it in a movie theater and see how it stands it
all alone in the dark?" I asked.
"Just circle up the wagon train and see how the Indians fall," McCain
said anxiously.
"It's too general. What does the nickel-brained machine mean by
investigating a whole town? I don't know if it has crooked politics,
a polygamy colony or a hideout for supposedly deported gangsters. I
don't care much either. It's not my business. How could a whole town be
filing false life and accident claims?"
"Find that out," he said. "I trust the machine. There have been cases
of mass collusion before. Until you get back, we are making no more
settlements with that settlement."
* * * * *
Research. To a writer that generally means legally permissible
plagiarism. For an insurance adjuster, it means earnest work.
Before I headed for the hills, or the Ozark Mountains, I walked a few
hundred feet down the hall and into the manual record files. The brain
abstracted from empirical data but before I planed out to Granite City
I had to find the basis for a few practical, nasty suspicions.
Four hours of flipping switches and looking at microfilm projections
while a tawny redhead in a triangular fronted uniform carried me reels
to order gave me only two ideas. Neither was very original. The one
that concerned business was that the whole village of Granite City must
be accident-prone.
I rejected that one almost immediately. While an accident-prone was
in himself a statistical anomaly, the idea of a whole town of them
gathered together stretched the fabric of reality to the point where
even an invisible re-weaver couldn't help it.
There was an explanation for the recent rise in the accident rate down
there. The rock quarry there had gone into high-level operation. I
knew why from the floor, walls, ceiling border, table trimmings in the
records room. They were all granite. The boom in granite for interior
and exterior decoration eclipsed earlier periods of oak, plastics,
wrought iron and baked clay completely. The distinctive grade of
granite from Granite City was being put into use all over the planet
and in the Officer's Clubs on the Moon and Mars.
Yet the rise in accident, compared to the rise in production, was out
of all proportion.
Furthermore, the work at the quarry could hardly explain the excessive
accident reports we had had from the village as far back as our records
went.
We had paid off on most of the claims since they seemed irrefutably
genuine. All were complete with eye-witness reports and authenticated
circumstances.
There was one odd note in the melodic scheme: We had never had a claim
for any kind of automobile accident from Granite City.