Forty Lines

He did not tell anybody for sixteen days.

That was not a plan. He would have said, if anybody had asked him, that he was making sure of it — that he wanted a month of it before he put it in front of Vaughn, because a thing that works on a Tuesday is not a thing that works.

What he was actually doing was sitting at desk nineteen going through the cart at about a third of the time it had ever taken him, and then holding the forms.

He would finish one in four minutes and put it face down under the lamp and do the next one, and at the end of the morning he would walk five of them to the cabinet at intervals that came out at about nine minutes each, and go home.

He did that for sixteen days. He has never come up with a defense of it. The nearest he ever got was that the number in the right-hand column of Vaughn’s notebook was ten, and he had gone to four, and a man who turns in four when the number is ten is not a man who has found something, he is a man who has stopped doing the work, and it takes a while to be sure which one you are.

Marchetti got it on the seventeenth day.

She came and stood at the end of his desk with a job in her hand and did not put it down.

“You did nineteen on Thursday.”

“There weren’t that many long ones.”

“You did nineteen on Thursday and you did twenty-one on the Monday before and I did fourteen on both of those days and I am faster than you.” She put the job down. “I’ve been faster than you for eleven years, Gene, and neither of us has ever said it out loud, and I’d like to keep it that way, so what have you got.”

He showed her.

It took about six minutes to show her, and she stood behind the chair with one hand on the back of it and watched a thirty-four page agreement come back with the right answer off page thirty-one, and did not say anything at all until the end.

Then she said: “How long have you had this.”

“Since the Tuesday after Labor Day.”

“Gene.”

“I know.”

“There’s twenty-six of us.”

“I know.”

She took her hand off the back of the chair.

“Write it down,” she said. “Not for Vaughn. Write down what you type and where it goes so I can do it, and then I’m going to give it to Ferris and to Doak, because Doak’s got a kid and he’s on the list and everybody knows he’s on the list.”

So Gene wrote it down.

It came to a page and a half and most of it was where the facility lived in the supply room manual, and by the following Friday there were nine people in that room running it, and none of them had told anybody either.

Vaughn found out in the ordinary way, which was that the numbers moved.

He came down the room on a Tuesday morning with the notebook already out and open in his hand and stopped at desk nineteen and said, “It’s you.”

“It’s me.”

“Show me.”

Gene showed him.

Vaughn watched the whole thing, and then had Gene run it again on a different job, and then a third time on a job that he chose himself off the cart, and then stood there and looked at the cabinet for a while.

“You wrote this at home.”

“On the Sunday.”

“On our facility, on our terminal, off the manual in our supply room.”

“Yes.”

“Right,” Vaughn said. It was not a threat. He was working out whose it was, out loud, in front of the man, which was the decent version of that conversation and Gene knew it.

Then he said: “Who else has got it?”

“Nine of us.”

Vaughn wrote something in the notebook.

“You should have brought it to me in September,” he said.

“Yes.”

“You know why you didn’t.”

“Yes,” Gene said.

The technician came on the Thursday.

He was a different one — younger, and he had a case with a strap instead of a handle — and he sat at desk nineteen for about twenty minutes with Gene beside him, and read the forty lines, and said huh twice and that’s nice once, at the part where the reserved block got rewritten at the head of every turn.

“Whose idea was the pin?”

“Mine.”

“That’s the good bit,” the technician said. “The fetching’s obvious. Anybody’d do the fetching. The pin’s the good bit.”

He copied it onto something and put the something in the case and closed the strap.

“Can I keep the —” Gene said, and then did not finish the sentence, because there was nothing at the end of it. It was forty lines. He had it. It was still on the terminal and it would be on the terminal in the morning. Nothing whatsoever was being taken away from him and he stood there in his own room at his own desk with his mouth open on half a question about a thing he still had.

“Sure,” the technician said, not unkindly, and went.

It came back three weeks later, in the cabinets, properly, and it was better.

It fetched in parallel. It did not walk sections in order, it read the cross-references and went straight for what it wanted, and it stopped when it had enough instead of when it ran out of room. It had a name — it had a version number, which meant somebody expected there to be another one — and it came with a manual that ran to sixty-one pages.

Gene read all sixty-one, which by then was down to about a four-hour job for him and would have been a fortnight for anybody else.

Section 9 of the manual was called STANDING INSTRUCTIONS: DRAFTING GUIDANCE.

It was eleven pages long. It described, carefully and well, how to write the block that goes at the head of the window and never comes out — what to put in it, how to phrase a condition so that the machine could tell when it applied, why an instruction that permits a behavior will not produce it, and why a sentence in that block is worth more than any sentence anywhere else in the system.

It cited no author.

Gene sat at desk nineteen with the manual open at page forty and read the eleven pages twice, and every single thing in them was true, and he had found out all of it in one evening in September at his own kitchen table, four sentences at a time, by getting it wrong.