"Find that out," he said. "I trust the machine. There have been cases of mass collusion before. Until you get back, we are making no more settlements with that settlement."
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.
Four hours of flipping switches and looking at microfilm projections while a tawny redhead in a triangular fronted uniform carried me reels to order gave me only two ideas. Neither was very original. The one that concerned business was that the whole village of Granite City must be accident-prone.
I rejected that one almost immediately. While an accident-prone was in himself a statistical anomaly, the idea of a whole town of them gathered together stretched the fabric of reality to the point where even an invisible re-weaver couldn't help it.
There was an explanation for the recent rise in the accident rate down there. The rock quarry there had gone into high-level operation. I knew why from the floor, walls, ceiling border, table trimmings in the records room. They were all granite. The boom in granite for interior and exterior decoration eclipsed earlier periods of oak, plastics, wrought iron and baked clay completely. The distinctive grade of granite from Granite City was being put into use all over the planet and in the Officer's Clubs on the Moon and Mars.
Yet the rise in accident, compared to the rise in production, was out of all proportion.
Furthermore, the work at the quarry could hardly explain the excessive accident reports we had had from the village as far back as our records went.
We had paid off on most of the claims since they seemed irrefutably genuine. All were complete with eye-witness reports and authenticated circumstances.