_He_ had no hangover, it was clear. I said apologetically, "Sorry, I'm--" "Never mind. Just don't let it happen again." It was clear that, in the office, business was business; the fact that we had been drinking together the night before would not condone liberties the morning after. Gogarty said, "Your desk is over there, Wills. Better get started." I felt considerably deflated as I sat down at my desk and stared unhappily at the piles of blue and yellow manifolds before me. The Company had trained me well. I didn't need to be coached in order to get through the work; it was all a matter of following established techniques and precedents. I checked the coverage, reduced the claim to tape-code, fed the tapes into a machine. If the claim was legitimate, the machine computed the amounts due and issued a punch-card check. If there was anything wrong, the machine flashed a red light and spat the faulty claim out into a hopper. And there were plenty of claims. Every adult in Naples, of course, carried the conventional War-and-Disaster policy--the so-called Blue Bolt coverage. Since few of them had actually been injured in the war, the claims were small--mostly for cost of premiums on other policies, under the disability clauses. (For if war prevented a policyholder from meeting his Blue Plate premiums, for instance, the Company itself under Blue Bolt would keep his policies paid--and the policyholder fed.) But there were some big claims, too. The Neapolitan government had carried the conventional Blue Bolt policies and, though the policy had been canceled by the Company before hostilities broke out--thus relieving the Company of the necessity of paying damages to the principality of Naples itself--still there were all the subsidiary loss and damage claims of the Neapolitan government's bureaus and departments, almost every one of them non-canceling. It amounted to billions and billions of lire. Just looking at the amounts on some of the vouchers before me made my head swim. And the same, of course, would be true in Sicily. Though that would naturally be handled by the Sicilian office, not by us. However, the cost of this one brief, meager little war between Naples and Sicily, with less than ten thousand casualties, lasting hardly more than a week, must have set the Company's reserves back hundreds of millions of dollars. And to think that some people didn't like the Company! Why, without it, the whole peninsula of Italy would have been in financial ruin, the solvent areas dragged down with the combatants! Naturally, the Regional Office was understaffed for this volume of work--which is why they had flown in new Adjusters like myself. * * * * * I looked up from my desk, surprised. Susan was standing next to me, an aspirin and a paper cup of water in her hand. "You look like you might need this," she whispered. She winked and was gone.