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.
i shut off the projector.
it may be best to keep an open mind, but i have found in practice that you have to have some kind of working theory which you must proceed to prove is either right or wrong.
tentatively, i decided that for generations the citizens of granite city had been in an organized conspiracy to defraud manhattan-universal and its predecessors of hundreds upon hundreds of thousands of dollars in false accident claims.
maybe they made their whole livelihood off us before the quarry opened up.
i used my pocket innercom and had my secretary get me a plane reservation and a gun.
after so many profitable decades, granite city wasn't going to take kindly to my spoil-sport interference.
the absinthe flight to springfield was jolly and relatively fast. despite headwinds we managed mach 1.6 most of the way. my particular stewardess was a blonde, majoring in video psychotherapy in her night courses. i didn't have much time to get acquainted or more than hear the outline of her thesis on the guilt purgings effected by the life and legend of gary cooper. the paunchy businessman in the next lounge was already nibbling the ear of his red-haired hostess. he was the type of razorback who took the girls for granted and aimed to get his money's worth. i gave helen, the blonde, a kiss on the cheek and began flipping through the facsimiles in my briefcase as we chute-braked for a landing at the greater ozarks.
it took me a full five minutes to find out that i couldn't take a copter to granite city. something about downdrafts in the mountains.
since that put me back in the days of horsepower, i trotted over to the automobile rental and hired a few hundred of them under the hood of a rolls. that was about the only brand of car that fit me. i hadn't been able to get my legs into any other foreign car since i was fifteen, and i have steadfastly refused to enter an american model since they all sold out their birthrights as passenger cars and went over to the tractor-trailer combinations they used only for cargo trucks when i was a boy. dragging around thirty feet of car is sheer nonsense, even for prestige.
it was a tiresome fifty-mile drive, on manual all the way after i left the radar-channel area of the city. up and down, slowing for curves, flipping into second for the hills.
the whole trip hardly seemed worth it when i saw the cluster of painted frame buildings that was granite city. they looked like a tumble of dingy building blocks tossed in front of a rolled-up indigo sports shirt. that was granite mountain in the near foreground. but i remembered that over the course of some forty years the people in these few little stacks of lumber had taken manhattan-universal for three quarters of a megabuck.
i turned off onto the gravel road, spraying my fenders with a hail of a racket. then i stepped down hard on my brakes, bracing myself to keep from going through the windscreen. i had almost sideswiped an old man sitting at the side of the road, huddled in his dusty rags.
"are you okay?" i yelled, thumbing down the window.
"i've suffered no harm at your hands—or your wheels, sir. but i could use some help," the old man said. "could i trouble you for a lift when you leave town?"
i wasn't too sure about that. most of these guys who are on the hobo circuit talking like they owned some letters to their names besides their initials belonged to some cult or other. i try to be as tolerant as i can, and some of my best friends are thugs, but i don't want to drive with them down lonely mountain roads.
"we'll see what we can work out," i said. "right now can you tell me where i can find marshal thompson?"
"i can," he said. "but you will have to walk there."
"okay. it shouldn't be much of a walk in granite city."
"it's the house at the end of the street."
"it is," i said. "why shouldn't i drive up there? the street's open."
the old man stared at me with red-shot eyes. "marshal thompson doesn't like people to run automobiles on the streets of granite city."
"so i'll just lock the car up and walk over there. i couldn't go getting tire tracks all over your clean streets."
the old man watched as i climbed down and locked up the rolls.
"you would probably get killed if you did run the car here, you know," he said conversationally.
"well," i said, "i'll be getting along." i tried to walk sideways so i could keep an eye on him.
"come back," he said, as if he had doubts.
the signs of a menacing conspiracy were growing stronger, i felt. i had my automatic inside my shirt, but i decided i might need a less lethal means of expression. without breaking stride, i scooped up a baseball-size hunk of bluish rock from the road and slipped it into my small change pocket.
i have made smarter moves in my time.
as i approached the house at the end of the lane, i saw it was about the worse construction job i had seen in my life. it looked as architecturally secure as a four-year-old's drawing of his home. the angles were measurably out of line. around every nail head were two nails bent out of shape and hammered down, and a couple of dozen welts in the siding where the hammer had missed any nail. the paint job was spotty and streaked. half the panes in the windows were cracked. i fought down the dust in my nose, afraid of the consequences of a sneeze to the place.
my toe scuffed the top porch step and i nearly crashed face first into the front door. i had been too busy looking at the house, i decided. i knocked.
moments later, the door opened.
the lean-faced man who greeted me had his cheeks crisscrossed with razor nicks and his shirt on wrong side out. but his eyes were bright and sparrow alert.
"are you mr. marshal thompson, the agent for manhattan-universal insurance?" i put to him.
"i'm the marshal, name of thompson. but you ain't the first to take my title for my christian name. you from the company?"
"yes," i said. "were you expecting me?"
thompson nodded. "for forty-one years."
thompson served the coffee in the chipped cups, favoring only slightly his burned fingers.
catching the direction of my glance, he said, "company is worth a few scalds, mr. madison."
i accepted the steaming cup and somehow it very nearly slipped out of my hands. i made a last microsecond retrieve.
the marshal nodded thoughtfully. "you're new here."
"first time," i said, sipping coffee. it was awful. he must have made a mistake and put salt into it instead of sugar.
"you think the claims i've been filing for my people are false?"
"the home office has some suspicions of that," i admitted.
"i don't blame them, but they ain't. look, the company gambles on luck, doesn't it?"
"no. it works on percentages calculated from past experience."
"but i mean it knows that there will be, say, a hundred fatal car crashes in a day. but it doesn't know if maybe ninety of them will be in iowa and only ten in the rest of the country."
"there's something to that. we call it probability, not luck."
"well, probability says that more accidents are going to occur in granite city than anywhere else in the country, per capita."
i shook my head at thompson. "that's not probability. theoretically, anything can happen but i don't—i can't—believe that in this town everybody has chanced to be an accident prone. some other factor is operating. you are all deliberately faking these falls and fires—"
"we're not," thompson snapped.
"or else something is causing you to have this trouble. maybe the whole town is a bunch of dope addicts. maybe you grow your own mescalin or marijuana; it's happened before."
thompson laughed.
"whatever is going on, i'm going to find it out. i don't care what you do, but if i can find a greater risk here and prove it, the commission will let us up our rates for this town. probably beyond the capacity of these people, i'm afraid."
"that would be a real tragedy, mr. madison. insurance is vital to this town. nobody could survive a year here without insurance. people pay me for their premiums before they pay their grocery bills."
i shrugged, sorrier than i could let on. "i won't be able to pay for my own groceries, marshal, if i don't do the kind of job the company expects. i'm going to snoop around."
"all right," he said grudgingly, "but you'll have to do it on foot."
"yes, i understood you didn't like cars on your streets. at least not the cars of outsiders."
"that doesn't have anything to do with it. nobody in granite city owns a car. it would be suicide for anybody to drive a car, same as it would be to have a gas or oil stove, instead of coal, or to own a bathtub."
i took a deep breath.
"showers," thompson said. "with nonskid mats and handrails."
i shook hands with him. "you've been a great help."
"four o'clock," he said. "roads are treacherous at night."
"there's always a dawn."
thompson met my eyes. "that's not quite how we look at it here."
