The Trial

They took desk seven out on a Friday.

Desk seven had been Hollis’s for nineteen years and Hollis had gone the previous spring, and the desk had sat there since with the lamp still on it because nobody wanted to be the one to say anything, and on the Friday two men came with a trolley and took it out through the double doors and did not come back.

On the Monday there was a cabinet where it had been.

It was about the size of a filing cabinet on its side and it was the wrong color for the room, a gray with green in it, and it had a fan. The fan was the thing. Forty keyboards made a noise like weather and the fan made a noise like a fan, and by Wednesday everybody in the room could tell you what pitch it was.

On top of it there was a screen, the ordinary kind, on end.

It took them nine days to get it going.

Vaughn ran the first job through it on a Thursday morning with about eleven people standing behind him, which was more people than had stood in one place in that room in Gene’s eleven years.

He picked a services agreement, fourteen pages, that had come in on Tuesday and been done on Tuesday, and he had the finished form in his hand with the answer already written on it, folded over so nobody could see.

“Right,” he said.

He typed the concern line off the form.

Somebody said, “You have to give it the document.”

“It’s got the document. It’s had the document since eight.”

“How.”

“It reads it in,” Vaughn said. “That’s the whole — that’s what the nine days were.”

He looked at the screen for a second and then hit the key.

Nobody had told them how long it would take, so eleven people stood in a reading room and waited for a fan.

It was about four seconds.

    SECTION 9.3 RATE ADJUSTMENT ASSERTS THE
    PROVIDER MAY ADJUST RATES FOUND IN SCHED
    ULE A AFTER A 60 DAY PERIOD THAT MUST BE
     STARTED WITH A WRITTEN NOTICE. THE MAXI
    MUM ALLOWED CHANGE IS 5% FROM THE CURREN
    T RATE; HOWEVER IT IS UNCLEAR IF THIS IS
     ONLY A LIMIT TO UPWARD CHANGES ONLY.

Vaughn unfolded the form.

The form said, in the hand of whoever had done it on Tuesday: Yes — 9.3, sixty days written notice, capped at 5% per adjustment.

He held them side by side.

“Same,” somebody said.

“It’s the same.”

“It’s not the same,” Vaughn said, and put his finger on the last line and a half. “That’s not on the form.”

They all read it again.

It was a small point. It was arguably not a point at all — the clause said no single adjustment shall exceed five percent, and the machine had observed that this cut in both directions, and no client on earth had ever written concern: whether they can lower our rate too much.

But it was there in the document and it was not on the form.

“Whose was it,” somebody said, and then heard themselves and stopped.

Marchetti was standing at the back with her arms folded.

“Mine,” she said.

Nobody said anything.

“It’s worthless,” she said. “That finding is worthless. Nobody has ever been hurt by that in the history of the world.”

“Sure,” said Vaughn.

“It’s worthless.”

“Sure,” said Vaughn again, in the same voice, and turned back to the screen, and that was when Gene understood that the nine days had not been a trial of anything.

The eleven people started to come apart around the desk. Somebody went to get coffee. Somebody said something about the fan.

Gene stayed where he was.

“Can I put one in?”

Vaughn looked up. “It’s not a toy.”

“Same document. One line.”

Vaughn moved sideways about a foot, which was a yes, and Gene leaned in and put his hands on a keyboard that was not his own and typed the thing he had been looking at for four minutes while everybody else was looking at the rate.

    AFTER TWENTY (20) DAYS, THE ISSUED CHANG
    E IS ASSUMED TO BE ACCPETED. YOU MUST RE
    SPOND TO AVOID THE ASSUMPTION OF ACCEPTA
    NCE. IT IS UNCLEAR WHAT HAPPENS IF YOU D
    O NOT ACCEPT, BUT YOU MUST MAKE THAT CLE
    AR IN WRITING. NON WRITTEN REFUSALS OR N
    ON ANSWERS ARE NOT ACCEPTABLE AS A REJEC
    TION OF THE OFFERED CHANGE.

There were four people left at the desk by then and two of them were talking about the fan.

Gene read it twice.

“It eats it,” he said.

“What does.”

“Eight one eats nine three.” He put his finger on the screen, which you did not do, and then took it off. “The cap’s five percent. Fine. But eight one says any notice you don’t answer inside twenty days is accepted in the terms stated. Any notice. It doesn’t say a notice under nine three. It says any notice.”

Vaughn looked at him.

“So they don’t use nine three,” Gene said. “They send you a notice that says the schedule is amended, and it’s forty percent, and if the man who opens your post is on holiday for a month it’s yours. The cap’s still in there. The cap is completely intact. The cap has just got nothing to do with anything.”

Somebody behind them said huh.

Vaughn read the screen again, top to bottom, both answers, and he read them properly — Gene watched him do it, and he did it well, and at the end of it he had it.

“Did it say that?”

“No.”

“Did you ask it to?”

“I asked it two questions,” Gene said. “It answered both of them. Right, both times. It’s not wrong about anything up there.”

“Then it didn’t say it.”

“No.”

Vaughn nodded slowly, and looked at the two answers on the screen for another second, and then he said:

“How long did that take you?”

Gene did not follow at first.

“The —”

“Putting it together. Just now. From reading the two of them to saying it out loud.”

“Four minutes. Maybe five.”

Vaughn took a small notebook out of his inside pocket, opened it against his palm, and wrote something in it that was two characters long.

“Right,” he said.

Gene went back to desk nineteen and sat down and put the lamp on, and pulled a blank form off the stack.

The job had closed on the Tuesday. The client had signed it on the Wednesday. There was no cart to put it on and no file open to put it in and there was nobody at all who had asked.

At the bottom, under the four ruled lines, he wrote:

8.1 is unbounded and 9.3 is therefore decorative. The five percent cap constrains only the mechanism nobody will use. Recommend either bounding 8.1 to notices arising under a named section, or striking 9.3 so that the parties are honest about where the rate is set.

Then he wrote the file number at the top, and the date, and walked it down to the cabinet at the end of the room himself, and put it in.