Jim Harmon

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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!" ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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'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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”

“ 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. ”