Twenty-Two Pages

By the following autumn the fan was just a fan.

There were two more cabinets by then, at the end where desks four and eleven had been, and the room had gone from forty desks to thirty-one, and nobody had been fired. It had been done the other way — people left and the desk did not come back, which is the cheapest way there is and the only one that never makes a noise.

The work had changed shape. You did not read the whole thing now. You put it in, you asked the concern, you read what came back, and then you read the sections it had named, and then you wrote the form. Two hours became forty minutes. Nobody was unhappy about that. Reading a supply agreement is not a thing anybody was ever glad to be doing.

Marchetti came to desk nineteen on a Wednesday with a form in her hand.

It was blank on the front. On the back there was a column of numbers in pencil, about thirty of them, with dates down the side.

“What’s this.”

“Median page count,” she said. “By month. Started it in February.”

Gene looked at the column.

“Why.”

“Because I felt like it.”

He read down it. February was nineteen. March was nineteen. April was twenty-one, and then there was twenty and then twenty-two, and then it went twenty-two, twenty-three, twenty-three, twenty-five.

“Huh,” he said.

“Keep going.”

Twenty-six. Twenty-six. Twenty-eight.

He put his thumb at February and his finger at the bottom and looked at the two ends of it, which is what you do when you have a column and no picture, and it took him about forty seconds to get the size of it, and when he had it he sat back.

“That’s fifty percent.”

“In nineteen months.”

“Nobody’s writing longer contracts.”

“Somebody is,” Marchetti said. “That’s what the column is.”

“No, I mean nobody decided to. There’s no — there isn’t a meeting where they decide that.”

“I know there isn’t.”

She turned the form round so it was facing her again and looked at her own column.

“It’s twenty-two,” she said.

“What is.”

“What that thing holds. Vaughn told me in February when I asked him, twenty-two pages, that’s the whole of it, that’s what it can have in front of it at once.” She tapped the column at April. “We went past it in the spring.”

They took it to Vaughn together, which was a mistake, because two people is a delegation and one person is a remark.

Gene said it. He had it worked out on the walk down and he said it in about six sentences: the documents are getting longer, they have gone past what the machine holds, and they are getting longer because of what the machine holds — that a thing which is read by an instrument with a limit will, over enough drafts by enough lawyers who have all noticed the same thing, arrive at just past the limit, and stay there.

Vaughn listened to all of it. He was not stupid and he did not interrupt.

At the end of it he said: “Have you got that written up?”

“It’s a column of numbers on the back of a form,” Marchetti said.

“Then write it up.”

“It’s thirty numbers,” she said. “It’s thirty numbers and a date on each one, and if you saw them the right way round you’d have it in a second —”

She stopped, because she had heard where the sentence was going before it got there, and so had both of them.

Nobody said anything for a moment.

“Write it up,” Vaughn said, not unkindly, “and I’ll take it up.”

So she wrote it up. It ran to two and a half pages and it was accurate and it was well made and it said, in prose, in full sentences, with the numbers cited in text, exactly what the column said.

Gene read it before it went. It was good.

He also could not have told you, afterwards, what the shape of it was, and he had read the column himself with his own thumb on February.

The first one that would not fit came in on a Monday in November.

It was thirty-one pages and the concern line said whether the indemnity survives if we terminate for convenience, which was a real question asked by somebody who had been hurt, and Gene put it in the way he put everything in.

The fan changed pitch for about six seconds, which it did when it was full.

    INDEMNITY EXTENDS TWELVE (12) MONTH AFTE
    R ANY GIVEN DELIVERY. TERMINATION FOR CO
    NVENIENCE (WHICH NEEDS A 90 DAY NOTICE P
    ERIOD INITIATED BY WRITING) APPEARS TO E
    XTINGUISH ALL OBLIGATIONS THAT ARE *NOT
    EXPRESSLY PROVIDED*. INDEMNITY IS EXPRES
    SLY PROVIDED; THEREFORE, INDEMNITY IS NO
    T EXPUNGED BY TERMINATION AND EXTENDS TW
    ELVE (12) MONTHS AFTER THE FINAL DELIVER
    Y.

It was a good answer.

That was the thing Gene sat with for a moment before he sat with anything else. It was not a lookup and it was not a quotation. It had gone to 11.4 and got the tail, and gone to 14.2 and got the save as expressly provided, and then it had put the one against the other and drawn a conclusion, and the conclusion was reasoned and it was clean and any of the thirty-one people in that room would have written it.

He read it twice and then he read the header.

:: LOADED: PAGES 1–22 · WINDOW FULL
:: USED 8,930 / FREE 70

Seventy.

Gene sat back in the chair at the end of the room with his hands on his knees.

For a year and a half that thing had told him, every time, at the bottom, in a line and a half, which pages it had and which it did not, and he had read that line and a half so many hundreds of times that he had stopped reading it, and it had never once failed to be there.

Seventy left.

There had not been room.

It had spent everything it had on the answer, and the answer was excellent, and the part where it said this is only the front two thirds of the thing and I do not know what is in the rest had come to about a hundred and ten tokens and had not fit.

Down the room somebody’s lamp clicked off and somebody said something to somebody about a car.

Gene got up and went to the intake window and asked for pages twenty-three to thirty-one on paper.