Read the following passage and questions, then choose the right answer from options, the answer should be one of A, B, C, D.

<passage>:
the sprawling automatic brain's silver gauges and plastic toggles as 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. "You want me to project it in a movie theater and see how it stands it all alone in the dark?" I asked. 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 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 Furthermore, the work at the quarry could hardly explain the excessive circumstances. There was one odd note in the melodic scheme: We had never had a claim for any kind of automobile accident from Granite City. I shut off the projector. 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. I used my pocket innercom and had my secretary get me a plane reservation and a gun. After so many profitable decades, Granite City wasn't going to take kindly to my spoil-sport interference. a landing at the Greater Ozarks. It took me a full five minutes to find out that I couldn't take a copter to Granite City. Something about downdrafts in the mountains. 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 flipping into second for the hills. The whole trip hardly seemed worth it when I saw the cluster of painted frame buildings that was Granite City. They looked like a tumble of dingy building blocks tossed in front of a rolled-up indigo sports shirt. That was Granite Mountain in the near foreground. But I remembered that over the course of some forty years the people in these where I can find Marshal Thompson?" "I can," he said. "But you will have to walk there." "Okay. 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 baseball-size hunk of bluish rock from the road and slipped it into my small change pocket. I have made smarter moves in my time. Granite City than anywhere else in the country, per capita." I shook my head at Thompson. "That's not probability. Theoretically, anything can happen but I don't—I can't—believe that in this town "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 would be suicide for anybody to drive a car, same as it would be to have a gas or oil stove, instead of coal, or to own a bathtub." The quarry was a mess. I couldn't see any in the way they sliced the granite out of the mountain. The idea of a four-year-old—a four-year-old moron—going after a mound of raspberry ice cream kept turning up in my mind as I walked around. "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." "It's too bad." "What's too bad?" Madison, we have been working this quarry for generations, sometimes 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, ignoring me. The clerk dialed his hamburger and served it. I stayed with my beer and my thoughts. More and more, I was coming to believe that Granite City wasn't a job for an investigative adjuster like myself but a psychological adjuster. Crime is a structural flaw in a community, yes. But when the whole village was meat for a sociologist let him figure out why otherwise decent citizens felt secure in conspiracy to defraud an honored corporation. minuscule contrivance less than the size of a passenger car. He makes about one trip a week down into the city for supplies and package mail. He's been the only one in or out of Granite City for five months." It seemed incredible—more than that, unlikely, to me. "How about the granite itself? How do they ship it out?" "It's an artificial demand product, like diamonds," Professor Parnell said. "They stockpile it and once a year the executive offices for the walking out?" "Fifty miles down a steep mountain road? I'm an old man, Mr. Madison, and I've gotten even older since I came to Granite City." I nodded. "You have any papers, any identification, to back this up?" Wordlessly, he handed over his billfold, letters, enough identification to have satisfied Allen Pinkerton or John Edgar Hoover. "Okay," I drawled. "I'll accept your story for the moment. Now answer me the big query: Why are the good people of Granite City doing this to you? By any chance, you wouldn't happen to know of a mass fraud they are perpetrating on Manhattan-Universal?" 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. Their psionic 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 granite ! I don't understand why myself. I'm not a physicist or a biologist. But for some reason the "We haven't the time for all that. But think about it. What else could it be? It's that granite that they are shipping all over the world, spreading the contamination. I want to stop that contamination. To the people of Granite City that means ruining their only industry, putting them all out of work. They are used to this psionic sterility they don't see anything so bad about it. Besides, like everybody else,

<question>:
Why did Madison investigate the manual record files prior to visiting Granite City?

<options>:
A In order to hopefully discover some red-flag indicators of insurance fraud.
B To learn more about the Ozark Mountains.
C To gather the necessary paperwork for his investigation.
D To educate himself on the history of Granite City.

<answer>:

A