Ten Minutes

The number came down in the spring and it came down the way numbers come down, which is that it was already decided and the meeting was about how everyone felt.

Ten minutes.

That was the check. From the answer appearing on the screen to the form going on the cart, ten minutes, and the room was twenty-six desks by then and the fan was three fans and nobody had been fired yet, ever, which people still said out loud as though it were the point.

“It’s an average,” the man from the parent company said. “It’s not a stopwatch.”

“It’s a stopwatch in about nine months,” Marchetti said, and there was a small noise around the room, and the man smiled at her in a way that was not unkind and did not answer her.

Gene put his hand up.

“How was ten arrived at?”

The man looked at his folder.

“It’s the median at four other sites.”

“Median check time, or median time between the answer and the form?”

“I’d have to get that for you.”

“They’re different numbers,” Gene said. “One of them’s how long people take to check. The other one’s how long they take to check plus how long they take to walk to the cabinet, and if you’ve got a site where the cabinet’s by the door —”

“I’d have to get that for you,” the man said again, pleasantly, and moved on, and did not get it for him, then or later.

At the end of it Vaughn said the sentence. He did not write it and he was not the author of it and Gene watched him say it with the expression of a man saying somebody else’s line, which he was.

“A good reader knows inside ten minutes whether an answer is sound.”

Nobody said anything to that, because there is nothing to say to that.

Gene took it seriously for three weeks, which was longer than anybody.

He did it properly. He kept a card in his pocket and timed himself and did not stop the clock for the walk.

Here is what ten minutes gets you.

You read the answer. Twenty seconds. It cites two sections. You go to the two sections and read them and check that the answer says what the sections say — call it three minutes if they are ordinary, five if one of them is a bad one with a notwithstanding in it. You have now confirmed that the machine has not misquoted the document, which it does not do, and has never done, in four years, once.

Then you have four minutes.

And in four minutes you cannot go and find section 16.

That is the whole of it. That is the entire mathematics of the profession, and Gene had it written on a card in his shirt pocket by the end of the second week:

The check confirms the citation. The check cannot find the contradiction. The contradiction is the job.

Because the errors were never misquotations. Nobody was ever hurt by a machine getting a section number wrong. They were hurt by a survival clause on page twenty-five that the answer had no reason to mention and the checker had no reason to look for, and finding it took him fifty minutes in November and there had been no way to shorten that then and there was no way to shorten it now.

Ten minutes buys you the citation. It does not buy you the contradiction. And the citation was never in doubt.

He wrote that up, of course. Everybody knew he would.

It went in as one page — he had learned that much — and it said the thing in six sentences and the last sentence was the checking interval is sufficient to verify what the machine is reliable about and insufficient to verify what it is not.

Vaughn read it standing up, at Gene’s desk, in about ninety seconds.

“This is right,” he said.

“I know it’s right.”

“It’s also not going to change the number.”

“I know that too.”

Vaughn put it down on the desk and stood there a second longer than he needed to.

“You want to know what happens if I send this up,” he said. “Somebody reads it and agrees with it and asks me what the correct interval is. And I say fifty minutes, because that’s your November number. And they say, so what were the twenty-six people doing before we bought the cabinets, when they had two hours and there was no machine at all — did they find those contradictions then?”

Gene did not answer.

“Did they?” Vaughn said.

“Some of them.”

“Some of them.”

“We were slower and we were reading the whole thing,” Gene said, “so we came past twenty-five on our way to the end. Nobody found it because they went looking. We found it because we were passing.”

Vaughn nodded slowly.

“That’s worse,” he said.

“I know.”

“That’s much worse, Gene, because it means it was never a skill, it was a side effect, and side effects don’t survive an efficiency.”

He picked the page up off the desk and folded it once and put it in his inside pocket, which was where the notebook lived, and Gene never found out whether it went up or not.

He did not stop timing himself. He stopped writing the times down.

By June he was doing the check in eleven minutes and calling it ten, like everybody else, and the eleven was a lie he told to a stopwatch nobody was holding, and there was a whole room of people telling it, and the room got the number down to a median of ten and four tenths by the end of the quarter, which was reported upward as a success and which was, as a matter of arithmetic, entirely true.

What he wanted was not more time.

He knew that by August and it took him until August to get it clean in his head, sitting at desk nineteen with a thirty-eight-page lease and a four-line answer and nine minutes left on the card in his pocket.

He did not need to read faster. He read fine.

He needed page twenty-five to come to him.