Preferred Risk Page 7

  And he had complimented me for it!

  I couldn’t help wondering, though, whether the compliment Defoe gave me was part of some still subtler scheme…

  Defoe nodded curtly to the expediter-captain at the door, who saluted and pressed the teleswitch that summoned Defoe’s limousine.

  Defoe turned to me. “I have business in Rome and must leave at once. You will have to certify Zorchi’s suspension this afternoon; since I won’t be here, you’ll have to come back to the clinic for it. After that, Thomas, you can begin your assignment.”

  I said uncertainly, “What—where shall I begin?”

  One eyebrow lifted a trifle. “Where? Wherever you think proper, Thomas. Or must I handle this myself?”

  The proper answer, and the one I longed to make, was “Yes.” Instead I said, “Not at all, Mr. Defoe. It’s only that I didn’t even know there was an undercover group until you told me about it a few moments ago; I don’t know exactly where to start. Gogarty never mentioned—”

  “Gogarty,” he cut in, “is very likely to be relieved as District Administrator before long. I should like to replace him with someone already on the scene—” he glanced at me to be sure I understood—“provided, that is, that I can find someone of proven competence. Someone who has the ability to handle this situation without the necessity of my personal intervention.”

  The limousine arrived then, with an armed expediter riding beside the chauffeur. Defoe allowed me to open the door for him and follow him in.

  “Do you understand me?” he asked as the driver started off.

  “I think so,” I said.

  “Good. I do not suppose that Gogarty has given you any information about the malcontents in this area.”

  “No.”

  “It may be for the best; his information is clearly not good.” Defoe stared broodingly out the window at the silent groups of men and women on the grass before the clinic. “Your information is there,” he said as they passed out of sight. “Learn what you can. Act when you know enough. And, Thomas—”

  “Yes?”

  “Have you given thought to your future?”

  I shifted uncomfortably. “Well, I’ve only been a Claims Adjuster a little while, you know. I suppose that perhaps I might eventually get promoted, even become a District Administrator—”

  He looked at me impersonally. “Dream higher,” he advised.

  * * * *

  I stood watching after Defoe’s limousine, from the marquee of the hotel where he had left me to take a room and freshen up. Dream higher. He had the gift of intoxication.

  Higher than a District Administrator! It could mean only—the Home Office.

  Well, it was not impossible, after all. The Home Office jobs had to go to someone; the supermen who held them now—the Defoes and the Carmodys and the dozen or more others who headed up departments or filled seats on the Council of Underwriters—couldn’t live forever. And the jobs had to be filled by someone.

  Why not me? Only one reason, really. I was not a career man. I hadn’t had the early academy training from adolescence on; I had come to the service of the Company itself relatively late in life. The calendar legislated against me.

  Of course, I thought to myself, I was in a pretty good position, in a way, because of Defoe’s evident interest in me. With him helping and counseling me, it might be easier.

  I thought that and then I stopped myself, shocked. I was thinking in terms of personal preferment. That was not the Company way! If I had learned anything in my training, I had learned that Advancement was on merit alone.

  Advancement had to be on merit alone…else the Company became an oligarchy, deadly and self-perpetuating.

  Shaken, I sat in the dingy little hotel room that was the best the town of Anzio had for me and opened my little Black Book. I thumbed through the fine-printed pages of actuarial tables and turned to the words of Millen Carmody, Chief Underwriter, in the preface. They were the words that had been read to me and the others at our graduation at the Home Office, according to the tradition:

  Remember always that the Company serves humanity, not the reverse. The Company’s work is the world’s work. The Company can end, forever, the menace of war and devastation; but it must not substitute a tyranny of its own. Corruption breeds tyrants. Corruption has no place in the Company.

  They were glorious words. I read them over again, and stared at the portrait of Underwriter Carmody that was the frontispiece of the handbook. It was a face to inspire trust—wise and human, grave, but with warmth in the wide-spaced eyes.

  Millen Carmody was not a man you could doubt. As long as men like him ran the Company—and he was the boss of them all, the Chief Underwriter, the highest position the Company had to offer—there could be no question of favoritism or corruption.

  * * * *

  After eating, I shaved, cleaned up a little and went back to the clinic.

  There was trouble in the air, no question of it. More expediters were in view, scattered around the entrance, a dozen, cautious yards away from the nearest knots of civilians. Cars with no official company markings, but with armor-glass so thick that it seemed yellow, were parked at the corners. And people were everywhere.

  People who were quiet. Too quiet. There were some women—but not enough to make the proportion right. And there were no children.

  I could almost feel the thrust of their eyes as I entered the clinic.

  Inside, the aura of strain was even denser. If anything, the place looked more normal than it had earlier; there were more people. The huge waiting room was packed and a dozen sweating clerks were interviewing long lines of persons. But here, as outside, the feeling was wrong; the crowds weren’t noisy enough; they lacked the nervous boisterousness they should have had.

  Dr. Lawton looked worried. He greeted me and showed me to a small room near the elevators. There was a cocoon of milky plastic on a wheeled table; I looked closer, and inside the cocoon, recognizable through the clear plastic over the face, was the waxlike body of Luigi Zorchi. The eyes were closed and he was completely still. I would have thought him dead if I had not known he was under the influence of the drugs used in the suspension of life in the vaults.

  I said: “Am I supposed to identify him or something?”

  “We know who he is,” Lawton snorted. “Sign the commitment, that’s all.”

  I signed the form he handed me, attesting that Luigi Zorchi, serial number such-and-such, had requested and was being granted immobilization and suspension in lieu of cash medical benefits. They rolled the stretcher-cart away, with its thick foam-plastic sack containing the inanimate Zorchi.

  “Anything else?” I asked. Lawton shook his head moodily. “Nothing you can help with. I told Defoe this was going to happen!”

  “What?”

  He glared at me. “Man, didn’t you just come in through the main entrance? Didn’t you see that mob?”

  “Well, I wouldn’t call it a mob,” I began.

  “You wouldn’t now,” he broke in. “But you will soon enough. They’re working themselves up. Or maybe they’re waiting for something. But it means trouble, I promise, and I warned Defoe about it. And he just stared at me as if I was some kind of degenerate.”

  I said sharply, “What are you afraid of? Right outside, you’ve got enough expediters to fight a war.”

  “Afraid? Me?” He looked insulted. “Do you think I’m worried about my own skin, Wills? No, sir. But do you realize that we have suspendees here who need protection? Eighty thousand of them. A mob like that—”

  “Eighty thousand?” I stared at him. The war had lasted only a few weeks!

  “Eighty thousand. A little more, if anything. And every one of them is a ward of the Company as long as he’s suspended. Just think of the damage suits, Wills.”

  I said, still marveling at the enormous number of casualties out of that little war, “Surely the suspendees are safe here, aren’t they?”

  “Not against mobs. The vaults c
an handle anything that might happen in the way of disaster. I don’t think an H-bomb right smack on top of them would disturb more than the top two or three decks at most. But you never know what mobs will do. If they once get in here— And Defoe wouldn’t listen to me!”

  As I went back into the hall, passing the main entrance, the explosion burst.

  I stared out over the heads of the dreadfully silent throng in the entrance hall, looking toward the glass doors, as was everyone else inside. Beyond the doors, an arc of expediters was retreating toward us; they paused, fired a round of gas-shells over the heads of the mob outside, and retreated again.

  Then the mob was on them, in a burst of screaming fury. Hidden gas guns appeared, and clubs, and curious things that looked like slingshots. The crowd broke for the entrance. The line of expediters wavered but held. There was a tangle of hand-to-hand fights, each one a vicious struggle. But the expediters were professionals; outnumbered forty to one, they savagely chopped down their attackers with their hands, their feet and the stocks of their guns. The crowd hesitated. No shot had yet been fired, except toward the sky.

  The air whined and shook. From low on the horizon, a needle-nosed jet thundered in. A plane! Aircraft never flew in the restricted area over the Company’s major installations. Aircraft didn’t barrel in at treetop height, fast and low, without a hint of the recognition numbers every aircraft had to carry.

  From its belly sluiced a silvery milt of explosives as it came in over the heads of the mob, peeled off and up and away, then circled out toward the sea for another approach. A hail of tiny blasts rattled in the clear space between the line of expediters and the entrance. The big doors shook and cracked.

  * * * *

  The expediters stared white-faced at the ship. And the crowd began firing. An illegal hard-pellet gun peppered the glass of the doors with pockmarks. The guarding line of expediters was simply overrun.

  Inside the waiting room, where I stood frozen, hell broke out. The detachment of expediters, supervising the hundreds inside leaped for the doors to fight back the surging mob. But the mob inside the doors, the long orderly lines before the interviewing clerks, now split into a hundred screaming, milling centers of panic. Some rushed toward the doors; some broke for the halls of the vaults themselves. I couldn’t see what was going on outside any more. I was swamped in a rush of women panicked out of their senses.

  Panic was like a plague. I saw doctors and orderlies struggling against the tide, a few scattered expediters battling to turn back the terrified rush. But I was swept along ahead of them all, barely able to keep my feet. An expediter fell a yard from me. I caught up his gun and began striking out. For this was what Lawton had feared—the mob loose in the vaults!

  I raced down a side corridor, around a corner, to the banked elevators that led to the deeps of the clinic. There was fighting there, but the elevator doors were closed. Someone had had the wit to lock them against the mob. But there were stairs; I saw an emergency door only a few yards away. I hesitated only long enough to convince myself, through the fear, that my duty was to the Company and to the protection of its helpless wards below. I bolted through the door and slammed it behind me, spun the levers over and locked it. In a moment, I was running down a long ramp toward the cool immensities of the vaults.

  If Lawton had not mentioned the possible consequences of violence to the suspendees, I suppose I would have worried only about my own skin. But here I was. I stared around, trying to get my bearings. I was in a sort of plexus of hallways, an open area with doors on all sides leading off to the vaults. I was alone; the noise from above and outside was cut off completely.

  No, I was not alone! I heard running footsteps, light and quick, from another ramp. I turned in time to see a figure speed down it, pause only a second at its base, and disappear into one of the vaults. It was a woman, but not a woman in nurse’s uniform. Her back had been to me, yet I could see that one hand held a gas gun, the other something glittering and small.

  I followed, not quite believing what I had seen. For I had caught only a glimpse of her face, far off and from a bad angle—but I was as sure as ever I could be that it was Rena dell’Angela!

  She didn’t look back. She was hurrying against time, hurrying toward a destination that obsessed her thoughts. I followed quietly enough, but I think I might have thundered like an elephant herd and still been unheard.

  We passed a strange double-walled door with a warning of some sort lettered on it in red; then she swung into a side corridor where the passage was just wide enough for one. On either side were empty tiers of shelves waiting for suspendees. I speeded up to reach the corner before she could disappear.

  But she wasn’t hurrying now. She had come to a bay of shelves where a hundred or so bodies lay wrapped in their plastic sacks, each to his own shelf. Dropping to her knees, she began checking the tags on the cocoons at the lowest level.

  She whispered something sharp and imploring. Then, straightening abruptly, she dropped the gas gun and took up the glittering thing in her other hand. Now I could see that it was a hypodermic kit in a crystal case. From it she took a little flask of purplish liquid and, fingers shaking, shoved the needle of the hypodermic into the plastic stopper of the vial.

  Moving closer, I said: “It won’t work, Rena.”

  She jumped and swung to face me, holding the hypodermic like a stiletto. Seeing my face, she gasped and wavered.

  I stepped by her and looked down at the tag on the cocooned figure. Benedetto dell’Angela, Napoli, it said, and then the long string of serial numbers that identified him.

  It was what I had guessed.

  “It won’t work,” I repeated. “Be smart about this, Rena. You can’t revive him without killing him.”

  Rena half-closed her eyes. She whispered, “Would death be worse than this?”

  I hadn’t expected this sort of superstitious nonsense from her. I started to answer, but she had me off guard. In a flash, she raked the glittering needle toward my face and, as I stumbled back involuntarily, her other hand lunged for the gas gun I had thrust into my belt.

  Only luck saved me. Not being in a holster, the gun’s front sight caught and I had the moment I needed to cuff her away. She gasped and spun up against the tiers of shelves. The filled hypodermic shattered against the floor, spilling the contents into a purple, gleaming pool of fluorescence.

  Rena took a deep breath and stood erect. There were tears in her eyes again.

  She said in a detached voice: “Well done, Mr. Wills.”

  “Are you crazy?” I crackled. “This is your father. Do you want to kill him? It takes a doctor to revive him. You’re an educated woman, Rena, not a witch-ridden peasant! You know better than this!”

  She laughed—a cold laugh. “Educated! A peasant woman would have kicked you to death and succeeded. I’m educated, all right! Two hundred men, a plane, twenty women risking themselves up there to get me through the door. All our plans—and I can’t remember a way to kill you in time. I’m too educated to hate you, Claims Adjuster Wills!” She choked on the words. Then she shook her head dully. “Go ahead, turn me in and get it over with.”

  I took a deep breath. Turn her in? I hadn’t thought that far ahead. True, that was the obvious thing to do; she had confessed that the whole riot outside was a diversion to get her down in the vaults, and anyone who could summon up that sort of organized anti-Company violence was someone who automatically became my natural enemy.

  But perhaps I was too educated and too soft as well. There had been tears on her face, over her father’s body. I could not remember having heard that conspirators cried.

  And I sympathized a little. I had known what it was like to weep over the body of someone I loved. Despite our difficulties, despite everything, I would have done anything in the world to bring Marianna back to life. I couldn’t. Rena—she believed—could revive her father.

  I didn’t want to turn her in.

  I shouldn’t turn her in. It wa
s my duty not to turn her in, for hadn’t Defoe himself ordered me to investigate the dissident movement of which she was clearly a part? Wouldn’t it be easier for me to win her confidence, and trick her into revealing its secrets, than to have her arrested?

  The answer, in all truth, was No. She was not a trickable girl, I was sure. But it was, at least, a rationale, and I clung to it.

  I coughed and said: “Rena, will you make a bargain?”

  She stared drearily. “Bargain?”

  “I have a room at the Umberto. If I get you out of here, will you go to my room and wait for me there?”

  Her eyes narrowed sharply for a second. She parted her lips to say something, but only nodded.

  “Your word, Rena? I don’t want to turn you in.”

  She looked helplessly at the purple spilled pool on the floor, and wistfully at the sack that held her father. Then she said, “My word on it. But you’re a fool, Tom!”

  “I know it!” I admitted.

  I hurried her back up the ramp, back toward the violence upstairs. If it was over, I would have to talk her out of the clinic, somehow cover up the fact that she had been in the vaults. If it was still going on, though—

  It was.

  We blended ourselves with the shouting, rioting knots. I dragged her into the main waiting room, saw her thrust through the doors. Things were quieting even then. And I saw two women hastening toward her through the fight, and I do not think it was a coincidence that the steam went out of the rioters almost at once.

  I stayed at the clinic until everything was peaceful again, though it was hours.

  I wasn’t fooling myself. I didn’t have a shred of real reason for not having her arrested. If she had information to give, I was not the type to trick it out of her—even if she really was waiting at the Umberto, which was, in itself, not likely. If I had turned her in, Defoe would have had the information out of her in moments; but not I.

  She was an enemy of the Company.