I nodded, looking for the gimmick that made this a paying proposition for good old Tangiers Mutual.
“The Double R-P — that’s what we call it around the office here — assures the client that he won’t be reduced to panhandling in his old age, should his other retirement plans fall through. For Belt prospectors, of course, 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 to fall back on. He can come home to Earth and retire, with a guaranteed income for the rest of his life.”
I nodded again, like a good company man.
“Of course,” said Henderson, emphasizing this point with an upraised chubby finger, “these men are still uninsurables. This is a retirement plan only, not an insurance policy. There is no beneficiary other than the client himself.”
And there was the gimmick. I knew a little something of the actuarial statistics concerning uninsurables, particularly Belt prospectors. Not many of them lived to be forty-five, and the few who would survive the Belt and come home to collect the retirement wouldn’t last more than a year or two. A man who’s spent the last twenty or thirty years on low-gee asteroids just shrivels up after a while when he tries to live on Earth.
It needed a company like Tangiers Mutual to dream up a racket like that. The term “uninsurables” to most insurance companies means those people whose jobs or habitats make them too likely as prospects for obituaries. To Tangiers Mutual, uninsurables are people who have money the company can’t get at.
“Now,” said Henderson importantly, “we come to the problem at hand.” He ruffled his up-to-now-neat In basket and finally found the folder he wanted. 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 Double R-P was a man named Jafe McCann.”
“Was?” I echoed.
He squinted at me, then nodded at my sharpness. “That’s right, he’s dead.” He sighed heavily and tapped the folder with all those pudgy fingers. “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. But Henderson couldn’t be rushed, and I knew it. I kept the alert look on my face and thought of other things, while waiting for him to get to the point.
“Two weeks after Jafe McCann’s death,” Henderson said, “we received a cash-return form on his policy.”
“A cash-return form?” I’d never heard of such a thing. It didn’t sound like anything Tangiers Mutual would have anything to do with. We never return cash.
“It’s something special in this case,” he explained. “You see, this isn’t an insurance policy, it’s a retirement plan, and the client can withdraw from the retirement plan at any time, and have seventy-five per cent of his paid-up premiums returned to him. It’s, uh, the law in plans such as this.”
“Oh,” I said. That explained it. A law that had snuck through the World Finance Code Commission while the insurance lobby wasn’t looking.
“But you see the point,” said Henderson. “This cash-return form arrived two 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 Ab Karpin. McCann left a hand-written will bequeathing all his possessions to Karpin. Since, according to Karpin, this was done before McCann’s death, the premium money cannot be considered part of the policy, but as part of McCann’s cash-on-hand. And Karpin wants it.”
“It can’t be that much, can it?” Not enough, I was hoping, to make it worth the company’s while to send me to the asteroids.
“McCann died,” Henderson said ponderously, “at the age of fifty-six. He had set his retirement age at sixty. He took out the policy at the age of thirty-four, with monthly payments of fifty credits. Figure it out for yourself.”
I did, and came up with a figure of thirteen thousand and two hundred credits. Seventy-five per cent of that would be nine thousand 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’s death 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 worn themselves out with that form, comparing it with every other single scrap of McCann’s writing they can find. And their conclusion is that not only is it genuinely McCann’s handwriting, but it is McCann’s handwriting 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’re supposed to find out. Oh, there’s just one thing more.”
I did my best to make my ears perk.
“I told you that McCann’s death occurred under somewhat suspicious circumstances.”
“Yes,” I agreed, “you did.”
“McCann and Karpin,” he said, “have been partners — unincorporated, of course — for the last fifteen years. They had found small rare-metal deposits now and again, but they had never found that one big strike all the Belt prospectors waste their lives looking for. Not until the day before 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 that far out.”
“So all we’ve got is this guy Karpin’s word for how McCann died, is that it?”
“That’s all we have. So far.”
“And now you want me to go on out there and find out what’s cooking, and see if I can maybe save the company ten C’s.”
“Exactly,” said Henderson.
The copter took me to the spaceport west of Cairo, and there I boarded the good ship Demeter for Luna City and points Out. I loaded up on g-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 to their fate. As long as I didn’t try to eat, my stomach would leave me alone.
Atronics City was about as depressing as a Turkish bath with all the lights on. It stood on a chunk of rock a couple of miles thick, and it looked like nothing more in this world than a welder’s practice range.
At any rate, this was as far as Demeter would take me. Now, while the ship went on to Ludlum City and Chemisant City and the other asteroid business towns, my two suitcases and I dribbled down by elevator to my hostelry on level four. And I do mean dribbled. An elevator ride on a low-gravity planetoid is well worth avoiding, if you ask me. The elevator manages to sink faster than you do because rather than being lowered down it’s being pulled down. Which means the suitcases have to be lashed down and the passengers have to hold tight to the hand-grips and in all it’s a bad experience.
But we did get down to level four, and off I went with my suitcases and the operator’s directions. The suitcases weighed about half an ounce each out here, and I felt as though I weighed the same. Every time I raised a foot, I was sure I was about to go sailing into a wall. Local citizens eased by me, their feet occasionally touching the iron pavement as they soared along, and I gave them all dirty looks.
Level four was nothing but walls and windows. The iron floor went among these walls and windows in a straight straight line, bisecting other “streets” at perfect right angles, and the iron ceiling sixteen feet up was lined with a double row of fluorescent tubes. I was beginning to feel claustrophobic already.