The Risk Profession Read online

  Produced by Greg Weeks, Stephen Blundell and the OnlineDistributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net

  Illustrated by IVIE]

  _The men who did dangerous work had a special kind of insurance policy. But when somebody wanted to collect on that policy, the claims investigator suddenly became a member of ..._

  The RISK PROFESSION

  By DONALD E. WESTLAKE

  Mister Henderson called me into his office my third day back inTangiers. That was a day and a half later than I'd expected. Rovingclaims investigators for Tangiers Mutual Insurance Corporation don'tusually get to spend more than thirty-six consecutive hours at homebase.

  Henderson was jovial but stern. That meant he was happy with the job I'djust completed, and that he was pretty sure I'd find some crookedshenanigans on this next assignment. That didn't please me. I'mbasically a plain-living type, and I hate complications. I almost wishedfor a second there that I was back on Fire and Theft in Greater NewYork. But I knew better than that. As a roving claim investigator, Iavoided the more stultifying paper work inherent in this line of workand had the additional luxury of an expense account nobody everquestioned.

  It made working for a living almost worthwhile.

  When I was settled in the chair beside his desk, Henderson said, "Thatwas good work you did on Luna, Ged. Saved the company a pretty pence."

  I smiled modestly and said, "Thank you, sir." And reflected to myselffor the thousandth time that the company could do worse than split thatsaving with the guy who'd made it possible. Me, in other words.

  "Got a tricky one this time, Ged," said my boss. He had done hisback-patting, now we got down to business. He peered keenly at me, or atleast as keenly as a round-faced tiny-eyed fat man _can_ peer. "What doyou know about the Risk Profession Retirement Plan?" he asked me.

  "I've heard of it," I said truthfully. "That's about all."

  He nodded. "Most of the policies are sold off-planet, of course. It's aform of insurance for non-insurables. Spaceship crews, asteroidprospectors, people like that."

  "I see," I said, unhappily. I knew right away this meant I was going tohave to go off-Earth again. I'm a one-gee boy all the way. Gravitychanges get me in the solar plexus. I get g-sick at the drop of anelevator.

  * * *

  "Here's the way it works," he went on, either not noticing my sad faceor choosing to ignore it. "The client pays a monthly premium. He can beas far ahead or as far behind in his payments as he wants--the policyhas no lapse clause--just so he's all paid up by the Target Date. TheTarget Date is a retirement age, forty-five or above, chosen by theclient himself. After the Target Date, he stops paying premiums, and webegin to pay him a monthly retirement check, the amount determined bythe amount paid into the policy, his age at retiring, and so on. Clear?"

  I nodded, looking for the gimmick that made this a paying propositionfor good old Tangiers Mutual.

  "The Double R-P--that's what we call it around the office here--assuresthe client that he won't be reduced to panhandling in his old age,should his other retirement plans fall through. For Belt prospectors, ofcourse, this means the big strike, which maybe one in a hundred find.For the man who never does make that big strike, this is something tofall back on. He can come home to Earth and retire, with a guaranteedincome for the rest of his life."

  I nodded again, like a good company man.

  "Of course," said Henderson, emphasizing this point with an upraisedchubby finger, "these men are still uninsurables. This is a retirementplan only, not an insurance policy. There is no beneficiary other thanthe client himself."

  And there was the gimmick. I knew a little something of the actuarialstatistics concerning uninsurables, particularly Belt prospectors. Notmany of them lived to be forty-five, and the few who would survive theBelt and come home to collect the retirement wouldn't last more than ayear or two. A man who's spent the last twenty or thirty years onlow-gee asteroids just shrivels up after a while when he tries to liveon Earth.

  It needed a company like Tangiers Mutual to dream up a racket like that.The term "uninsurables" to most insurance companies means those peoplewhose jobs or habitats make them too likely as prospects for obituaries.To Tangiers Mutual, uninsurables are people who have money the companycan't get at.

  "Now," said Henderson importantly, "we come to the problem at hand." Heruffled his up-to-now-neat In basket and finally found the folder hewanted. He studied the blank exterior of this folder for a few seconds,pursing his lips at it, and said, "One of our clients under the DoubleR-P was a man named Jafe McCann."

  "Was?" I echoed.

  He squinted at me, then nodded at my sharpness. "That's right, he'sdead." He sighed heavily and tapped the folder with all those pudgyfingers. "Normally," he said, "that would be the end of it. File closed.However, this time there are complications."

  Naturally. Otherwise, he wouldn't be telling _me_ about it. ButHenderson couldn't be rushed, and I knew it. I kept the alert look on myface and thought of other things, while waiting for him to get to thepoint.

  "Two weeks after Jafe McCann's death," Henderson said, "we received acash-return form on his policy."

  "A cash-return form?" I'd never heard of such a thing. It didn't soundlike anything Tangiers Mutual would have anything to do with. We _never_return cash.

  * * *

  "It's something special in this case," he explained. "You see, thisisn't an insurance policy, it's a retirement plan, and the client canwithdraw from the retirement plan at any time, and have seventy-five percent of his paid-up premiums returned to him. It's, uh, the law in planssuch as this."

  "Oh," I said. That explained it. A law that had snuck through the WorldFinance Code Commission while the insurance lobby wasn't looking.

  "But you see the point," said Henderson. "This cash-return form arrivedtwo weeks after the client's death."

  "You said there weren't any beneficiaries," I pointed out.

  "Of course. But the form was sent in by the man's partner, one AbKarpin. McCann left a hand-written will bequeathing all his possessionsto Karpin. Since, according to Karpin, this was done before McCann'sdeath, the premium money cannot be considered part of the policy, but aspart of McCann's cash-on-hand. And Karpin wants it."

  "It can't be that much, can it?" I asked. I was trying my best to pointout to him that the company would spend more than it would save if itsent me all the way out to the asteroids, a prospect I could feel comingand one which I wasn't ready to cry hosannah over.

  "McCann died," Henderson said ponderously, "at the age of fifty-six. Hehad set his retirement age at sixty. He took out the policy at the ageof thirty-four, with monthly payments of fifty credits. Figure it outfor yourself."

  I did--in my head--and came up with a figure of thirteen thousand andtwo hundred credits. Seventy-five per cent of that would be ninethousand and nine hundred credits. Call it ten thousand credits even.

  I had to admit it. It was worth the trip.

  "I see," I said sadly.

  "Now," said Henderson, "the conditions--the circumstances--of McCann'sdeath are somewhat suspicious. And so is the cash-return form itself."

  "There's a chance it's a forgery?"

  "One would think so," he said. "But our handwriting experts have wornthemselves out with that form, comparing it with every other singlescrap of McCann's writing they can find. And their conclusion is thatnot only is it genuinely McCann's handwriting, but it is McCann'shandwriting at age fifty-six."

  "So McCann must have written it," I said. "Under duress, do you think?"

  "I have no idea," said Henderson complacently. "That's what you'resupposed to find out. Oh, there's just one more thing."

  I did my best to make m
y ears perk.

  "I told you that McCann's death occurred under somewhat suspiciouscircumstances."

  "Yes," I agreed, "you did."

  "McCann and Karpin," he said, "have been partners--unincorporated, ofcourse--for the last fifteen years. They had found small rare-metaldeposits now and again, but they had never found that one big strike allthe Belt prospectors waste their lives looking for. Not until the daybefore McCann died."

  "Ah hah," I said. "_Then_ they found the big strike."

  "Exactly."

  "And McCann's death?"

  "Accidental."

  "Sure," I said. "What proof have we got?"

  "None. The body is lost in space. And law is few and far between thatfar out."

  "So all we've got is this guy Karpin's word for how McCann died, is thatit?"

  "That's all we have. So far."

  "Sure. And now you want me to go on out there and find out what'scooking, and see if I can maybe save the company ten thousand credits."

  "Exactly," said Henderson.

  * * * * *

  The copter took me to the spaceport west of Cairo, and there I boardedthe good ship _Demeter_ for Luna City and points Out. I loaded up ong-sickness pills and they worked fine. I was sick as a dog.

  By the time we got to Atronics City, my insides had grown resigned totheir fate. As long as I didn't try to eat, my stomach would leave mealone.

  Atronics City was about as depressing as a Turkish bath with all thelights on. It stood on a chunk of rock a couple of miles thick, and itlooked like nothing more in this world than a welder's practice range.

  From the outside, Atronics City is just a derby-shaped dome ofnickel-iron, black and kind of dirty-looking. I suppose a transparentdome would have been more fun, but the builders of the company cities inthe asteroids were businessmen, and they weren't concerned with havingfun. There's nothing to look at outside the dome but chunks of rock andthe blackness of space anyway, and you've got all this cheap ironfloating around in the vicinity, and all a dome's supposed to do is keepthe air in. Besides, though the Belt isn't as crowded as a lot of peoplethink, there _is_ quite a lot of debris rushing here and there, bumpinginto things, and a transparent dome would just get all scratched up, notto mention punctured.

  From the inside, Atronics City is even jollier. There's the top level,directly under the dome, which is mainly parking area for scooters andtuggers of various kinds, plus the office shacks of the Assayer'sOffice, the Entry Authority, the Industry Troopers and so on. The nextthree levels have all been burned into the bowels of the planetoid.

  Level two is the Atronics plant, and a noisy plant it is. Level three isthe shopping and entertainment area--grocery stores and clothing storesand movie theaters and bars--and level four is housing, two rooms andkitchen for the unmarried, four rooms and kitchen plus one room for eachchild for the married.

  All of these levels have one thing in common. Square corners, paintedolive drab. The total effect of the place is suffocating. You feel likeyou're stuck in the middle of a stack of packing crates.

  Most of the people living in Atronics City work, of course, forInternational Atronics, Incorporated. The rest of them work in theservice occupations--running the bars and grocery stores and so on--thatkeep the company employees alive and relatively happy.

  Wages come high in the places like Atronics City. Why not, the rawmaterials come practically for free. And as for working conditions,well, take a for instance. How do you make a vacuum tube? You fiddlewith the innards and surround it all with glass. And how do you get theair out? No problem, boy, there wasn't any air in there to begin with.

  At any rate, there I was at Atronics City. That was as far as _Demeter_would take me. Now, while the ship went on to Ludlum City and ChemisantCity and the other asteroid business towns, my two suitcases and Idribbled down the elevator to my hostelry on level four.

  * * *

  Have you ever taken an elevator ride when the gravity is practicallynon-existent? Well, don't. You see, the elevator manages to sink fasterthan you do. It isn't being _lowered_ down to level four, it's being_pulled_ down.

  What this means is that the suitcases have to be lashed down with thestraps provided, and you and the operator have to hold on tight to thehand-grips placed here and there around the wall. Otherwise, you'd clonkyour head on the ceiling.

  But we got to level four at last, and off I went with my suitcases andthe operator's directions. The suitcases weighed about half an ounceeach out here, and I felt as though I weighed the same. Every time Iraised a foot, I was sure I was about to go sailing into a wall. Localcitizens eased by me, their feet occasionally touching the iron pavementas they soared along, and I gave them all dirty looks.

  Level four was nothing but walls and windows. The iron floor went amongthese walls and windows in a straight straight line, bisecting other"streets" at perfect right angles, and the iron ceiling sixteen feet upwas lined with a double row of fluorescent tubes. I was beginning tofeel claustrophobic already.

  The Chalmers Hotel--named for an Atronics vice-president--had receivedmy advance registration, which was nice. I was shown to a second-floorroom--nothing on level four had more than two stories--and was left tounpack my suitcases as best I may.

  I had decided to spend a day or two at Atronics City before taking ascooter out to Ab Karpin's claim. Atronics City had been Karpin's andMcCann's home base. All of McCann's premium payments had been mailedfrom here, and the normal mailing address for both of them was GPOAtronics City.

  I wanted to know as much as possible about Ab Karpin before I went outto see him. And Atronics City seemed like the best place to get myinformation.

  But not today. Today, my stomach was very unhappy, and my head was onsympathy strike. Today, I was going to spend my time exclusively in bed,trying not to float up to the ceiling.

  * * * * *

  The Mapping & Registry Office, it seemed to me the next day, was thebest place to start. This was where prospectors filed their claims, butit was a lot more than that. The waiting room of M&R was the unofficialclub of the asteroid prospectors. This is where they met with oneanother, talked together about the things that prospectors discuss, andmade and dissolved their transient partnerships.

  In this way, Karpin and McCann were unusual. They had maintained theirpartnership for fifteen years. That was about sixty times longer thanmost such arrangements lasted.

  Searching the asteroid chunks for rare and valuable metals is basicallypretty lonely work, and it's inevitable that the prospectors will everyonce in a while get hungry for human company and decide to try a teamoperation. But, at the same time, work like this attracts people whodon't get along very well with human company. So the partnerships comeand go, and the hatreds flare and are forgotten, and the normalprospecting team lasts an average of three months.

  At any rate, it was to the Mapping & Registry Office that I went first.And, since that office was up on the first level, I went by elevator.

  Riding _up_ in that elevator was a heck of a lot more fun than ridingdown. The elevator whipped up like mad, the floor pressed against thesoles of my feet, and it felt almost like good old Earth for a second ortwo there. But then the elevator stopped, and I held on tight to thehand-grips to keep from shooting through the top of the blasted thing.

  The operator--a phlegmatic sort--gave me directions to the M&R, and offI went, still trying to figure out how to sail along as gracefully asthe locals.

  The Mapping & Registry Office occupied a good-sized shack over near thedome wall, next to the entry lock. I pushed open the door and went onin.

  The waiting room was cozy and surprisingly large, large enough tocomfortably hold the six maroon leather sofas scattered here and thereon the pale green carpet, flanked by bronze ashtray stands. There wereonly six prospectors here at the moment, chatting together in two groupsof three, and they all looked alike. Grizzled, ageless, watery-eyed,their clothi
ng clean but baggy. I passed them and went on to the desk atthe far end, behind which sat a young man in official gray, slowlyturning the crank of a microfilm reader.

  He looked up at my approach. I flashed my company identification andasked to speak to the manager. He went away, came back, and ushered meinto an office which managed to be Spartan and sumptuous at the sametime. The walls had been plastic-painted in textured brown, the ironfloor had been lushly carpeted in gray, and the desk had been coveredwith a simulated wood coating.

  The manager--a man named Teaking--went well with the office. His faceand hands were spare and lean, but his uniform was immaculate, coveredwith every curlicue the regulations allowed. He welcomed me politely,but curiously, and I said, "I wonder if you know a prospector named AbKarpin?"

  "Karpin? Of course. He and old Jafe McCann--pity about McCann. I hear hegot killed."

  "Yes, he did."

  "And that's what you're here for, eh?" He nodded sagely. "I didn't knowthe Belt boys could get insurance," he said.

  "It isn't exactly that," I said. "This concerns a retirement plan,and--well, the details don't matter." Which, I hoped, would end hiscuriosity in that line. "I was hoping you could give me some backgroundon Karpin. And on McCann, too, for that matter."

  He grinned a bit. "You saw the men sitting