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Title: Dangerous Quarry

Author: Jim Harmon

Release date: January 6, 2020 [eBook #61119]
                Most recently updated: April 12, 2023

Language: English

Credits: Greg Weeks, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team


*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK DANGEROUS QUARRY ***




                           DANGEROUS QUARRY

                             BY JIM HARMON

                   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.

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."


                                  II

The quarry was a mess.

I couldn't see any in the way they sliced the granite out of the
mountain. The idea of a four-year-old--a four-year-old moron--going
after a mound of raspberry ice cream kept turning up in my mind as I
walked around.

The workmen were gone; it was after five local time. But here and
there I saw traces of them. Some of them were sandwich wrappers and
cigarette stubs, but most of the traces were smears of blood. Blood
streaked across sharp rocks, blood oozing from beneath heavy rocks,
blood smeared on the handles and working surfaces of sledge hammers and
tools. The place was as gory as a battlefield.

"What are you looking for, bud?"

The low, level snarl had come from a burly character in a syn-leather
jacket and narrow-brimmed Stetson.

"The reason you have so many accidents here," I said frankly. "I'm from
the insurance company. Name's Madison."

"Yeah, I know."

I had supposed he would.

"I'm Kelvin, the foreman here," the big man told me, extending a ham of
a fist to be shook. "Outside, doing my Army time, I noticed that most
people don't have as many slipups as we do here. Never could figure it
out."

"This rock is part of it--"

"What do you mean by that!" Kelvin demanded savagely.

"I mean the way you work it. No system to it. No stratification, no
plateau work..."

"Listen, Madison, don't talk about what you don't know anything
about. The stuff in these walls isn't just rock; it isn't even plain
granite. Granite City exports some of the finest grade of the stone in
the world. And it's used all over the world. We aren't just a bunch
of meatheaded ditch diggers--we are craftsmen. We have to figure a
different way of getting out every piece of stone."

"It's too bad."

"What's too bad?"

"That you chose the wrong way so often," I said.

Kelvin breathed a virile grade of tobacco into my face. "Listen,
Madison, we have been working this quarry for generations, sometimes
more of us working than other times. Today most of us are working
getting the stone out. That's the way we like it. We don't want any
outsider coming in and interfering with that."

"If this quarry has anything to do with defrauding Manhattan-Universal,
I can tell you that I will do something about that!"

As soon as my teeth clicked back together, the sickening feeling hit me
that I shouldn't have said that.

       *       *       *       *       *

The general store was called a supermarket, but it wasn't particularly
superior.

I took a seat at the soda fountain and took a beer, politely declining
the teen-age clerk's offer of a shot of white lightning from the
Pepsi-Cola fountain syrup jug for a quarter.

Behind me were three restaurant tables and one solitary red-upholstered
booth. Two men somewhere between forty and sixty sat at the nearest
table playing twenty-one.

Over the foam of my stein I saw the old man I had almost run down in
the road. He marched through the two-thirds of the building composed of
rows of can goods and approached the fat man at the cash register.

"Hello, Professor," the fat man said. "What can we do for you?"

"I'd like to mail a letter," he said in an urgent voice.

"Sure, Professor, I'll send it right off on the facsimile machine as
soon as I get a free moment."

"You're sure you can send it? Right away?"

"Positive. Ten cents, Professor."

The professor fumbled in his pants' pocket and fished out a dime. He
fingered it thoughtfully.

"I suppose the letter can wait," he said resignedly. "I believe I will
buy a pair of doughnuts, Mr. Haskel."

"Why not get a hamburger, Professor? Special sale today. Only a dime.
And since you're such a good customer I'll throw in a cup of coffee and
the two sinkers for nothing."

"That's--kind of you," the old man said awkwardly.

Haskel shrugged. "A man has to eat."

The man called "the professor" came over and sat down two stools away,
ignoring me. The clerk dialed his hamburger and served it.

I stayed with my beer and my thoughts.

More and more, I was coming to believe that Granite City wasn't a job
for an investigative adjuster like myself but a psychological adjuster.
Crime is a structural flaw in a community, yes. But when the whole
society is criminal, distorted, you can't isolate the flaw. The whole
village was meat for a sociologist; let him figure out why otherwise
decent citizens felt secure in conspiracy to defraud an honored
corporation.

I didn't feel that I was licked or that the trip had been a failure.
I had merely established to my intuitive satisfaction that the job was
not in my field.

I glanced at the old man. The proprietor of the store knew him and
evidently thought him harmless enough to feed.

"I think I can make it down the mountain before dark, Old Timer," I
called over to him. "You can come along if you like."

The acne-faced kid behind the counter stared at me. I looked over and
caught the bright little eyes of Haskel, the proprietor, too. Finally,
the old professor turned on his stool, his face pale and his eyes sad
and resigned.

"I doubt very much if either of us will be leaving, Mr. Madison," he
said. "Now."

       *       *       *       *       *

I took my beer and the professor his coffee over to the single booth.
We looked at each other across the shiny table and our beverage
containers.

"I am Doctor Arnold Parnell of Duke University," the professor said. "I
left on my sabbatical five months ago. I have been here ever since."

I looked at his clothes. "You must not have been very well fixed for a
year's vacation, Professor."

"I," he said, "have enough traveler's checks with me to paper a
washroom. Nobody in this town will cash them for me."

"I can understand why you want to go somewhere where people are more
trusting in that case."

"They know the checks are good. It's _me_ they refuse to trust to leave
this place. They think they _can't_ let me go."

"I don't see any shackles on you," I remarked.

"Just because you can't see them," he growled, "doesn't mean they
aren't there. Marshal Thompson has the only telephone in the village.
He has politely refused to let me use it. I'm a suspicious and
undesirable character; he's under no obligation to give me telephone
privileges, he says. Haskel has the Post Office concession--the Telefax
outfit behind the money box over there. He takes my letters but I never
see him send them off. And I never get a reply."

"Unfriendly of them," I said conservatively. "But how can they stop you
from packing your dental floss and cutting out?"

"Haskel has the only motor vehicle in town--a half-ton pick-up, a
minuscule contrivance less than the size of a passenger car. He makes
about one trip a week down into the city for supplies and package mail.
He's been the only one in or out of Granite City for five months."

It seemed incredible--more than that, unlikely, to me. "How about the
granite itself? How do they ship it out?"

"It's an artificial demand product, like diamonds," Professor Parnell
said. "They stockpile it and once a year the executive offices for the
company back in Nashville runs in a portable monorail railroad up the
side of the mountain to take it out. That won't be for another four
months, as nearly as I can find out. I may not last that long."

"How are you living?" I asked. "If they won't take your checks--"

"I do odd jobs for people. They feed me, give me a little money
sometimes."

"I can see why you want to ride out with me," I said. "Haven't you ever
thought of just _walking_ out?"

"Fifty miles down a steep mountain road? I'm an old man, Mr. Madison,
and I've gotten even older since I came to Granite City."

I nodded. "You have any papers, any identification, to back this up?"

Wordlessly, he handed over his billfold, letters, enough identification
to have satisfied Allen Pinkerton or John Edgar Hoover.

"Okay," I drawled. "I'll accept your story for the moment. Now answer
me the big query: Why are the good people of Granite City doing this to
you? By any chance, you wouldn't happen to know of a mass fraud they
are perpetrating on Manhattan-Universal?"

"I know nothing of their ethical standards," Parnell said, "but I do
know that they are absolutely _subhuman_!"

"I admit I have met likelier groups of human beings in my time."

"No, understand me. These people are literally subhuman--they are
inferior to other human beings."

"Look, I know the Klan is a growing organization but I can't go along
with you."

"Madison, understand me, I insist. Ethnologically speaking, it is well
known that certain tribes suffer certain deficiencies due to diet,
climate, et cetera. Some can't run, sing, use mathematics. The people
of Granite City have the most unusual deficency on record, I admit.
Their _psionic_ senses have been impaired. They are completely devoid
of any use of telepathy, precognition, telekinesis."

       *       *       *       *       *

"Because they aren't supermen, that doesn't mean that they are submen,"
I protested. "I don't have any psionic abilities either."

"But you do!" Parnell said earnestly. "Everybody has some psionics
ability, but we don't realize it. We don't have the fabulous abilities
of a few recorded cases of supermen, but we have some, a trace. Granite
City citizens have _no_ psionic ability whatsoever, not even the little
that you and I and the rest of the world have!"

"You said you were Duke University, didn't you?" I mused. "Maybe you
know what you are talking about; I've never been sure. But these
people can't suffer very much from their lack of what you call psi
ability."

"I tell you they do," he said hoarsely. "We never realize it but we all
have some power of precognition. If we didn't, we would have a hundred
accidents a day--just as these people _do_. They can't foresee the
bump in the road the way we can, or that that particular match will
flare a little higher and burn their fingers. There are other things,
as well. You'll find it is almost impossible to carry on a lengthy
conversation with any of them--they have no telepathic ability, no
matter how slight, to see through the semantic barrier. None of them
can play ball. They don't have the unconscious psionic ability to
influence the ball in flight. All of us can do that, even if the case
of a 'Poltergeist' who can lift objects is rare."

"Professor, you mean these people are holding you here simply so you
won't go out and tell the rest of the world that they are submen?"

"They don't want the world to know _why_ they are psionically
subnormal," he said crisply. "It's the _granite_! I don't understand
why myself. I'm not a physicist or a biologist. But for some reason the
heavy concentration and particular pattern of the radioactive radiation
in its matrix is responsible for both inhibiting the genes that
transmit psi powers from generation to generation _and_ affecting those
abilities in the present generation. A kind of psionic sterility."

"How do you know this?"

"We haven't the time for all that. But think about it. What else
_could_ it be? It's that granite that they are shipping all over the
world, spreading the contamination. I want to stop that contamination.
To the people of Granite City that means ruining their only industry,
putting them all out of work. They are used to this psionic sterility;
they don't see anything so bad about it. Besides, like everybody else,
they have some doubts that there really are such things as telepathy
and the rest to be affected."

"Frankly," I said, hedging only a little, "I don't know what to
make of your story. This is something to be decided by somebody
infallible--like the Pope or the President or Board Chairman of
Manhattan-Universal. But the first thing to do is get you out of here.
We had better get back to my car. I've got good lights to get down the
mountain."

Parnell jumped up eagerly, and brushed over his china mug, staining the
tabletop with brown caffeine.

"Sorry," he said. "I should have been precognizant of that. I try to
stay away from the rock as much as possible, but it's getting to me."

I should have remembered something then. But, naturally, I didn't.

       *       *       *       *       *

It was the time when you could argue about whether it was twilight or
night. In the deep dusk, the Rolls looked to be a horror-flicker giant
bug. I fumbled for the keys. Then the old man made me break stride by
digging narrow fingers into my bicep.

Marshal Thompson and the bulky quarry foreman, Kelvin, stepped out of
the shadow of the car.

"First, throw away that gun of yours, Mr. Madison," the marshal said.

I looked at his old pistol that must have used old powder cartridges,
instead of liquid propellants, and forked out my Smith & Wesson with
two fingers, letting it plop at my feet.

"I'm afraid we can't let you spread the professor's lies, Mr. Madison,"
Thompson said.

"You planning on killing me?" I asked with admirable restraint.

"I hope not. You can have the run of the town, like the professor.
I'll tell your company you are making a _thorough_ investigation. Then
maybe in a few weeks or months I can arrange so it looks like you were
killed--someplace outside."

"We don't aim to let any crazy fanatic like Parnell ruin our business,
our whole town," Kelvin interjected bitterly.

I took a pause to make abstractions on the situation. I glanced at the
little man at my right. "Parnell, my car is our only chance of getting
out of here. If they stop us from getting in that car, we'll be bums
here on town charity for the rest of our lives."

"_No!_" Parnell gave a terrier yell and charged the gun in the old
marshal's hand.

It seemed as if it would take me too long to recover my gun from the
dirt, but almost instinctively I felt the rock in the pocket of my
pants.

I scooped out the sample of granite and heaved it at the head of the
old cop. But my control seemed completely shot. It missed the old man's
head with an appalling gap and hit the roof of the Rolls.

Fortunately, the granite radiations didn't influence non-human-oriented
factors of chance. The stone bounced off the car and struck the
marshal's gun hand.

Thompson dropped his gun and I reached for mine in the dust, vaguely
aware of Kelvin pumping toward me.

I straightened up. He led with his right, of all damn things. I blocked
it with my gun hand and let him have my left in the midst of his solar
plexus. He crumpled prettier than a paper doll.

When the dust cleared, Professor Parnell was sitting on Thompson's
chest.

"Hooray," I said, "for our side."

       *       *       *       *       *

The people had made one mistake. They thought people would believe us.

Parnell and I broke the story to some newspaper friends of mine. They
gave it a play in the mistaken belief the professor and I were starting
our own cult, and the equal-time law is firm. But nobody paid any more
attention to us than to the Hedonists, the Klan, the Soft-shelled
Baptists or the Reformed Agnostics.

I tried to get Thad McCain to realize all the money this cursed
granite was costing us in accident claims, but it wasn't easy.
Manhattan-Universal owned stock in Granite City Products, Inc. And we
had spent a quarter of a megabuck modernizing our offices with granite
only months before.

"McCain," I said earnestly, "will you just let me feed the new data
we've got from Parnell into the Actuarvac? It's infallible. See what it
says."

"Very well," McCain said with a sigh. He let me feed the big brain the
hypothesis I had got from Parnell. It chattered to itself for some
minutes and at last flipped a card into the slot.

I dug the pasteboard out and read it. It said:

    No such place as Granite City exists.

"The rock has got to the machine," I screamed. "Chief, this brain is
stoned. It's made a _mistake_. We _know_ there is such a place."

"Nonsense, my boy," McCain said in a fatherly way. "The Actuarvac
merely means that no such place as you erroneously described could
possibly exist. Why don't you try one of our Hedonist revival meetings
tonight?"

       *       *       *       *       *

Things have got steadily worse since then.

So far nobody has made the big mistake of dropping an H-bomb on anyone,
but that's probably because all the governments made so many smaller
mistakes the people made the mistake (or was it?) of kicking them out
for almost absolute anarchy. But the individuals are doing worse than
the governments...if that's possible.

People have given up going anywhere except by foot, for the most part.

Granite City granite is still as widely disbursed and almost as highly
prized as South African diamonds.

I hope we will find some way out of our current world crisis, although
I can't imagine what it will be.

Meanwhile, I hope you will excuse any typographical errors. It seems as
if I just can't seem to hit the right keys on my typewriter any more,
as my--and all of our--psionic sterility increases.

I ask hugh--wear wall it owl end?






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