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............