There was even some fear of the vaults themselves--though every living human had surely seen the Company's indoctrination films that showed how the injected drugs slowed life processes and inhibited the body's own destructive enzymes; how the apparently lifeless body, down to ambient air temperature, would be slipped into its hermetic plastic sack and stacked away, row on row, far underground, to sleep away the months or years or, if necessary, the centuries. Time meant nothing to the suspendees. It was hard to imagine being afraid of as simple and natural a process as that! Although I had to admit that the vaults looked a lot like morgues.... I didn't enjoy it. I kept thinking of Marianna. She had feared the vaults too, in the childish, unreasoning, feminine way that was her characteristic. When the Blue Blanket technicians had turned up the diagnosis of leukemia, they had proposed the sure-thing course of putting her under suspension while the slow-acting drugs--specially treated to operate even under those conditions--worked their cure, but she had refused. There had been, they admitted, a ninety-nine and nine-tenths per cent prospect of a cure without suspension.... It just happened that Marianna was in the forlorn one-tenth that died. I couldn't get her out of my mind. The cases who protested or whined or pleaded or shrieked that they were being tortured and embalmed alive didn't help. I was glad when the afternoon was over and I could get back to the office. * * * * * As I came in the door, Gogarty was coming in, too, from the barbershop downstairs. He was freshly shaved and beaming. "Quitting time, Tom," he said amiably, though his eyes were memorizing the pile of incomplete forms on my desk. "All work and no play, you know." He nudged me. "Not that you need reminding, eh? Still, you ought to tell your girl that she shouldn't call you on office time, Tom." "Call me? Rena called me?" He nodded absently, intent on the desk. "Against Company rules, you know. Say, I don't like to push you, but aren't you running a little behind here?" I said with some irritation, "I don't have much chance to catch up, the way I've been racing around the country, you know. And there's plenty to be done." He said soothingly, "Now, take it easy, Tom. I was only trying to say that there might be some easier way to handle these things." He speared a form, glanced over it casually. He frowned. "Take this, for instance. The claim is for catching cold as a result of exposure during the evacuation of Cerignola. What would you do with that one?" "Why--pay it, I suppose." "And put in the paper work? Suppose it's a phony, Tom? Not one case of coryza in fifty is genuine." "What would you do?" I asked resentfully. He said without hesitation, "Send it back with Form CBB-23A192. Ask for laboratory smear-test reports."