"Who Needs Insurance by Robin Scott" - читать интересную книгу автора (Nebula Award Stories 2)

Insurance is of course a form of gambling, with the odds
carefully calculated so that the house always wins since the
insurance companies always make a profit no matter how
much they pay out during the year. If we could read the
future and discover when we were going to die or when our
homes might burn down the insurance companies would be
out of business within a day. Another thing that might cause
the companies trouble would be a safety-prone, a man who
would be the opposite of an accident-prone, an individual
who never got into trouble. With realistic appraisal Mr. Scott
examines just this interesting problem.

WHO NEEDS INSURANCE?

Robin S. Scott
I've always been a pretty lucky guy. I don't mean at cards or
even before Marty with women. Just lucky in the sense
that my ration of ill fortune has always been slight. All my
life I seem to have walked dry through the shower of
vicissitude which seems to be the normal human lot. I never
broke a bone as a kid or had more than the usual run of
childhood diseases. I never piled up a car, or had appendicitis,
or suffered food poisoning, or got cleated by that vicious
fullback who played for Carroisville before they threw him
out in 1941, the year I graduated from Mumford Junction.
And because there are lots of others I've known who
seemed lucky in this way, I never suspected my luck was any
different more than just plain "luck" even after the Ploesti
raid. It wasn't until Vietnam that I became convinced that my
luck was really out of the ordinary, and even then I didn't
really understand it. I never would have known what it really
amounted to if it weren't for Marty. But I'm getting ahead of
myself.
Ploesti was a simple enough thing. That I survived the raid
was good luck indeed, but not unusual good luck. Lots of
others survived, too. The unusual part was the way I survived.
I was copilot of a pretty rickety B-24 attached to the 389th
Bomber Group, which, we discovered later, had somehow
slipped through its last maintenance check without being
checked. Anyway, we'd come in from the southwest, over the
rolling foothills of the Transylvanian Alps, made our bomb-
run on "White One" without taking many hits, and slid
weaving out through smokestacks of the refineries at about
sixty feet. We were just beginning to congratulate ourselves
on getting through what was obviously one of the hairiest
raids of the war. I had just turned a little in my seat to see if
George wanted me to take it when an 88 mm shell popped in
through the nose canopy, through the bombardier, and ex-
ploded somewhere above and behind us, knocking out both