Preferred Risk. Lester Del Rey

hundred in the knotted line outside the door.

      Hammond had rushed into the Naples office for help, leaving his staff to do the best they could. He said gloomily, staring out through the view-slits at the farmlands and vineyards we were passing through, “I just hope we still have a branch office. This is a bad spot, Wills. Caserta. It got bombed out, you know; the whole southern end of the town is radioactive. And it has a long history of trouble. Used to be the summer royal seat of the old Italian monarchy; then the Americans used it for a command headquarters in the war Mussolini got into—the first atom war. It’s been fought over time and again.”

      I said reasonably, “But don’t they know the Company has all the resources in the world?”

      “Sure they do—when they’re thinking. Right now they’re not thinking. They’ve got it in their heads that the Company isn’t going to pay off. They’re scared. You can’t tell them anything. You can’t even give them checks—they want cash on the line.”

      I said, “That’s pretty silly, isn’t it? I mean—ugh!” I retched, as I suddenly got a whiff of the most unpleasant and penetrating odor I had ever encountered in my life. It was like death and destruction in gaseous form; a sickly sweet, clinging stink that oozed in through the pores of my skin to turn my stomach. “Wow!” I said, gasping.

      Hammond looked at me in bewilderment; then he grinned sourly. “New here, aren’t you?” he inquired. “That’s hemp. They grow the stuff for the fibers; and to get the fibers out, they let it get good and rotten. You’ll get used to it,” he promised.

      I tried. I tried pretty hard to get used to it; I hardly heard a word he said all the rest of the way in to Caserta, I was trying so hard. But I didn’t get used to it.

      Then I had my mind taken off my troubles. The branch was still doing business when we got there, though there were easily three or four hundred angrily shouting policyholders milling around in front of it. They scattered before us as the armored car came racing in; we skidded to a stop, siren blasting, and the expediters leaped out with their weapons at the ready.

      Hammond and I climbed out of the armored car with our bags of money. There was an audible excitement in the crowd as the word spread back that the Company had brought in enormous stores of lire, more than any man had ever seen, to pay off the claims. We could hear the chatter of many voices, and we almost could feel the tension slack off.

      It looked like the trouble was over.

      Then there was a shrill whistle. It sounded very much like the alarm whistle of one of our expediters but, thinking back, I have never been sure.

      Perhaps it was a nervous expediter, perhaps it was an agent provocateur in the crowd. But, whoever pulled the trigger, the explosion went off.

      There was a ragged yell from the crowd, and rocks began whizzing through the air. The pacifists in the mob began heading for the doorways and alleys around; women screamed, men shouted and bellowed, and for a moment it looked like we would be swamped. For not very many of them were pacifists, and there were at least a hundred screaming, gesticulating men lunging at us.

      One cobblestone shattered the theoretically unbreakable windshield of the truck next to my head; then the expediters, gas guns spitting, were ringing around us to protect the money.

      It was a short fight but vicious. By the time the first assault was repulsed there were at least fifty persons lying motionless in the street.

      I had never seen that sort of violence before. It did something to my stomach. I stood weaving, holding to the armored car, while the expediters circled the area around the branch office, firing hurry-up shots at the running rioters. Hammond looked at me questioningly.

      “That smell,” I said apologetically.

      He said only, “Sure.” True, the fetid aroma from the hemp fields was billowing all around us, but he knew as well as I that it was not the smell that was bothering me.

      In a few moments, as we were locking the bags of money into the office safe, red-crossed vehicles bearing the Company insignia appeared in the street outside, and medics began tending to the victims. Each one got a shot of something—an antidote to the sleep-gas from the expediters’ guns, I guessed—and was loaded unceremoniously into the ambulances.

      Hammond appeared beside me. “Ready for business?” he asked. “They’ll be back any minute now, the ones that can still walk. We’ll be paying off until midnight, the way it looks.”

      I said, “Sure. That—that gas doesn’t hurt them any, does it? I mean, after they go to the hospital they’ll be all right, won’t they?”

      Hammond, twirling a pencil in his fingers, stared broodingly at the motionless body of one policyholder. He was a well-dressed man of fifty or so, with a reddish mustache, unusual in that area, and shattered rimless glasses. Not at all the type I would expect to see in a street fight; probably, I thought, a typical innocent bystander.

      Hammond said absently, “Oh, sure. They’ll be all right. Never know what hit them.” There was a tiny sharp crack and the two halves of the pencil fell to the floor. He looked at it in surprise. “Come on, Wills. Let’s get to work.”