The Fix

They fixed it in five weeks, which everybody agreed was fast.

The memo announcing it ran to four pages. Gene read all four, which put him in a minority he had stopped counting, and the substance of it was in the second paragraph of the third page and it was two sentences long.

The disclosure would be reserved. A block of the window would be set aside for it before anything else went in, so that it could not be crowded out, and it would be printed first rather than last, at the top, where a person’s eye goes.

It was the right fix. Gene had suggested the first half of it himself and had not thought of the second half, and the second half was better than anything he had suggested.

They turned it on in January.

For about three weeks it was the most looked-at line in the building.

You would put a job in and the first thing up on the screen would be PAGES 1–21 OF 34 IN WINDOW, and people at desks stopped and read it and one or two of them said something out loud, and twice in that first week somebody went to intake for paper.

By the second week it was one or two people.

By March, Gene watched a woman at desk twenty-six take an answer off the screen, write the form, and walk it to the cabinet, and he was fairly sure — he was watching for it by then — that her eyes had gone to the fourth line down and started there.

He tried it himself and could not do it. He could not make himself not read the top line, because he had spent five weeks getting it put there.

So he asked Marchetti.

“Read me the first line off yours.”

She looked up at her screen and said, “Section 22.1 requires — ”

“That’s the third line.”

Marchetti looked at it properly. Then she said a word.

“It’s on everything,” she said. “It’s on everything, Gene. It was on the last four hundred things I did. It’s not a warning if it’s on everything, it’s a — it’s the letterhead.”

The other half of it nobody talked about at all, and Gene only got to it in April, and only because he still had the November job in his desk and got it out to look at something else.

He put the two side by side. The old answer about the indemnity, nine lines, and a new one about a different agreement, same kind of question, same kind of document.

The new one was four lines.

He pulled six more out of the file at random and laid them along the desk and they were four lines, five lines, four, six, four, five.

They were not worse answers. That was the thing he sat with. They were right, they cited the section, they were clean, and if you had put any one of them in front of him cold he would have signed it.

They had just stopped arguing.

The November one had gone to 11.4, and then to 14.2, and then said therefore. There was a therefore in it. The April ones cited a section and told you what it said and stopped.

He counted the reservation. A hundred and forty tokens for the disclosure line, taken off the top, every job, forever.

A hundred and forty tokens is about a hundred words. About a hundred words is about the length of a therefore.

He took that to Vaughn too.

He had learned something from November and he did not bring Marchetti and he did not bring a column of numbers, he brought seven forms and laid them on the desk in a row, oldest at the left.

Vaughn read them. He read all seven, properly.

“They’re all right,” he said.

“They’re all right.”

“So what am I looking at?”

Gene put his finger on the November one and then on the April one and did not have a sentence.

That was the whole of it and he did not have a sentence. He had nine lines and then four lines, which was not an argument, it was a pair of facts about length, and the thing that was actually true — that a reserved hundred and forty tokens had come out of the middle of the machine’s reasoning and not off the end of its politeness — could not be got at from the seven pieces of paper on the desk, and he could feel himself about to say it stopped arguing and knew exactly how that would sound.

“It’s shorter,” he said.

“Shorter’s fine,” Vaughn said. “Shorter’s better. They’re paying by the job.”

He took his notebook out and did not open it, and turned it over twice in his hand, and put it back.

“Put one through now,” he said. “Let me see it go.”

Gene sat down at the middle cabinet and typed the concern line off the top job on the cart, which was thirty-four pages, and hit the key.

    PAGES 1-21 OF 34 IN WINDOW

    DEPENDS ON THE LEVEL OF WEAR. "FAIR" WEA
    R AND TEAR IS PAID BY THE LESSOR. ANY RE
    QUIRED REPAIRS DUE TO WEAR IS PAID BY TH
    E LESSEE. ANY EXCESSIVE WEAR WILL BE RES
    TORED AND PAID FOR BY THE LESSEE.

“Three seconds,” Vaughn said. “Clean.”

Gene did not answer, because he was reading 7.2 on the page beside him.

The Lessee shall maintain the Equipment in good working order and shall bear all costs of routine servicing. Repairs arising from fair wear and tear shall be borne by the Lessor.

He read it again and then read the screen again and put his finger on the third line.

“It’s got it backwards.”

“It’s got what backwards.”

“There.” He moved his finger. “Any required repairs due to wear is paid by the lessee. No. Servicing’s the lessee. Repairs from fair wear are the lessor, that’s the second sentence of 7.2, that’s the whole point of the second sentence of 7.2. It’s rolled them together.”

Vaughn leaned in and read 7.2 off the page and then read the screen, twice, and took a good half minute over it.

“You’re right,” he said.

“It’s not a small one either. On a fleet that size the servicing and the repairs are different numbers by a factor of —”

“You’re right,” Vaughn said again, and straightened up.

And he was pleased.

Gene saw it happen. Not smug and not relieved — pleased, the plain kind, the way a man looks when a thing he has been arguing for turns out to work in front of him.

“That’s what you’re for,” Vaughn said.

He took the notebook out of his inside pocket, and this time he opened it, and Gene was standing close enough to see the page.

It was two columns now.

The left-hand column was the old one, the two-character numbers, going back months, and the last few entries in it were 3 and 4 and 3.

The right-hand column was newer. It started about a third of the way down the page. It had bigger numbers in it, forty and thirty-five and fifty and forty, and beside the top of it, in Vaughn’s small hand, was written the word CHECK.

He put a number in the right-hand column. Gene did not see what it was.

Then he shut the book and put it back in his pocket and said, “Good. Do it that way,” and went off down the room, and it was the friendliest thing anybody said to Gene that year.