I said nothing; just stood there waiting for him to let me go. I was sorry things hadn’t worked out but, after all, he had very little to complain about. Besides, I wanted to get back to my desk and the folder about Rena dell’Angela. It wasn’t so much that I was interested in her as a person, I reminded myself. I was just curious…
Once again, I had to stay curious for a while. Gogarty had other plans for me. Before I knew what was happening, I was on my way out of the office again, this time to visit another Neapolitan hospital, where some of the severely injured in the recent war were waiting final settlement of their claims. It was a hurry-up matter, which had been postponed too many times already; some of the injured urgently required major medical treatment, and the hospital was howling for approval of their claims before they’d begin treatment.
This one was far from a marble palace. It had the appearance of a stucco tenement, and all of the patients were in wards. I was a little surprised to see expediters guarding the entrance.
I asked one of them, “Anything wrong?”
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 permissive 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 percent 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