The Cart

Part III

It came through the firm and the firm did not tell him what it was until he had signed the first two things, which is how that works and which he had been told to expect.

There were four of them in the room for the briefing and the man doing it used the word harness eleven times before anybody used the word weapon once, and when somebody finally did he said, “Well — yes,” in the tone of a person confirming a detail about the parking.

What they wanted was a review of the standing instruction.

Not a rewrite. A review. It had not had one, and somebody in an office somewhere had noticed that it had not had one, and there was a line item for it now, and the line item had a number and the number had come to the firm and the firm had sent Gene, because Gene was sixty-one years old and had been writing preamble for nine years and had, in the phrase used twice in the briefing, no known views.

The room was in the basement and the ceiling was low and there were three cabinets in it the size of wardrobes and a lot of cable in trays overhead.

The first thing Gene noticed was the tick.

It was not loud. It was a relay somewhere in the middle cabinet, and it went about once every two seconds, and about a quarter of a second after each tick the fans all changed pitch together and came back.

“That’s the poll,” the airman said.

“It’s asking now?”

“It’s asking now. It asks all the time. That’s —” He made a small gesture that took in the three cabinets and the cable trays and the whole of the room and possibly the building. “That’s the job. Sector comes in, question goes in, answer comes out. Every two seconds. It’s been doing that since before I got here.”

“What’s the answer?”

The airman looked at him.

“Negative,” he said. “It’s negative. It’s always negative.”

He said it the way you would say it’s Tuesday, and he was twenty-four, and he had a folding chair.

Gene asked for the standing instruction on paper.

There was a pause on the other end of that request which he came, later, to think of as the most informative thing that happened to him that week, and then a woman said she would see, and then it was two days.

It came on a cart.

It came on an actual cart, of the kind he had not seen in nine years, and it was three-hole punched and in four binders, and the binders were not the same color as each other and one of them had a label made with a label machine and the other three were written on with a marker.

Gene stood in the basement with the tick going and looked at the cart for a while.

Then he took the first binder off it and sat down.

Eleven thousand four hundred words.

He did the count himself over the first two days, by hand, in blocks of a hundred, and it took him a morning and a half and he did it because he did not believe the number anybody had given him.

Eleven thousand four hundred words, in a block at the head of a window, rewritten in full at the top of every turn, and the turns came every two seconds.

The sector report was thirty-one words.

He wrote that on a card and put it in his shirt pocket:

11,400 / 31.

It had strata.

That was the thing that got him and it got him in the first hour, before the count, before anything.

The oldest part was at the top and it was ninety words long and it was clean. Somebody had written it in one sitting and had known what they were doing. It said what the system was, what it was reading, what it was to determine, and what to do when it could not determine. Gene read it three times and there was not a wasted clause in it and there was one sentence in it he would have been proud of.

Underneath that, a different hand. Longer sentences, more nouns, the vocabulary of an era. Then a block that had plainly been pasted in from a doctrine document because it still had the doctrine document’s numbering in it and the numbering did not match anything else. Then a paragraph in the flat present tense of a compliance office. Then, twice, the same requirement stated in two different ways forty pages apart, in two hands, neither of which had known about the other.

Nothing had ever been taken out.

That was not a policy. Gene went looking for the policy, because there is always a policy, and there was not one. There was no procedure for removing a sentence from a standing instruction. There was a procedure for adding one — it was four pages long and it required two signatures — and there was nothing at all on the other side of the ledger, because in nine years of writing preamble Gene had never once been asked to take something out either, by anybody, anywhere.

You add to a setting. Nobody subtracts from a setting.

At the very back of the fourth binder, on the last page, somebody had written in pen, in the margin, at some point in the previous decade:

is any of this still true?

There was no answer under it and no initial beside it and no date.

Gene looked at that for a long time with the tick going, once every two seconds, all afternoon, on the other side of the room.