The Review

His review came back in the June, which was seven months after he handed it in, and it came back the way things came back, which was that it did not come back to him.

He heard about it because a man he did not know called Pettibone was assigned to the harness that summer and read the standing instruction as part of coming up to speed, and found, folded into the fourth binder, near the back, a document of forty-odd pages that was not a standing order and not a doctrine paste-in and not a compliance module, and that appeared to be a review of the whole instruction, and that was — Pettibone’s word, when he finally tracked Gene down that autumn, was devastating.

“You wrote this.”

“Two years ago. Nearly.”

“Does anybody know it’s in there?”

Gene thought about that.

“I handed it to a woman,” he said. “She put it in a tray. She said it was thorough.”

Pettibone had it in front of him, on the desk between them, in a coffee shop off the base, because he had not wanted to talk about it inside the wire, which told Gene most of what he needed to know about Pettibone.

“It’s not in the review record,” Pettibone said. “I checked. There’s no review record. A standing instruction isn’t a submission, it’s a —”

“It’s a setting,” Gene said.

“It’s a setting. So there’s nowhere for a review of it to go. Somebody read it — somebody must have read it, it’s got a received stamp — and then the only place to file it was the instruction itself, so they three-hole-punched it and put it in the back of the binder with everything else.”

Gene looked at the pages upside down on the table.

“It’s in the window, then,” he said.

“What?”

“If it’s in the binder. The binder’s the standing instruction. The standing instruction goes in the window every turn. So it’s —” He stopped.

Pettibone turned it over and looked at the header of the fourth binder, and did the arithmetic that Gene had already done, and said the thing slowly.

“No. It’s not loaded. Look — the binder’s the master, the paper master, but the resident copy’s the one that goes in the window, and the resident copy is the eleven thousand four hundred. Your review isn’t in the eleven thousand four hundred. Nobody keyed it in. It’s paper. It’s in the binder and it’s not in the machine.”

“So the machine’s running on the instruction,” Gene said, “and the review of the instruction is stapled to the back of the instruction, and the machine can’t see the review, because the review is forty pages and there’s no room, and the review is the thing that says there’s no room.”

Neither of them said anything for a second.

“That’s the most —” Pettibone started, and did not find the end of it.

“Yeah,” Gene said.

They did act on it. That is the part people find hardest to believe and it is true. Gene’s review was read, by at least three people over two years, and it was found persuasive, and it produced a change, and the change was real.

The change was that the standing instruction got a review cycle.

There would now, going forward, be a scheduled review of the standing instruction, conducted at intervals, by a qualified drafter, to ensure that the instruction remained current, correct, and — this was the word they used, and Gene laughed out loud when Pettibone read it to him, one short bark of a laugh in a coffee shop — concise.

The review would be appended to the instruction.

“Appended,” Gene said.

“Appended.”

“To the instruction. That the review says is too long.”

“The first cycle’s due in the spring,” Pettibone said. “They’ve costed it. It’s a nine-day job. There’s a procedure.” He turned to a page near the back of his own packet and read it. “The reviewing drafter shall confirm that all standing orders remain necessary and shall recommend the removal of any found to be obsolete.”

“Recommend the removal.”

“Recommend.”

“To whom?”

Pettibone read further down, and stopped, and did not read it out.

Gene did not need him to. There was a procedure for adding to a standing instruction and it was four pages and it required two signatures. There had never been a procedure for taking something out, because in the whole history of the thing nobody had ever taken anything out, and the new review cycle did not create one; it created a recommendation to remove, which would be written down, carefully, at length, and appended to the instruction, and would join the strata, and be read in full every two seconds by a machine that could not act on it, and by no person ever, because it was a setting.

The eleven thousand four hundred words would become eleven thousand nine hundred.

Gene finished his coffee.

“Can I keep a copy?” Pettibone said. “Of the review. I’d like to — I don’t know what I’d do with it. I’d like to have read it properly.”

“It’s yours,” Gene said. “It’s not doing anything where it is.”

Pettibone squared the pages and put them in his bag, carefully, the way you put away a thing you mean to come back to, and Gene knew, watching him, that he would put it on a shelf and mean to and not, because it was forty pages and there was never room, and that this was not a failing in Pettibone, who was a good man who had driven off base to talk about it, but was the plainest possible instance of the thing the forty pages were about.

“How do you stand it?” Pettibone said, at the door. “Knowing all this. How do you go in.”

Gene thought about it.

“I go all the way to the end of things,” he said. “It’s the only thing I’ve ever been any good at, and there’s exactly one place left that still needs it done, and it’s that machine’s window, and I’m one of about two hundred people in the country who can do it, and none of us can make anybody read what we find.”

“That’s not an answer.”

“No,” Gene said. “There isn’t one. There’s a woman I’ve known since I was eleven who’d tell you the same thing about a radar screen. We go all the way to the end and we write down what’s there and we hand it to a room that was built so it never has to hear us, and we do it anyway, because the alternative is to stop going all the way to the end, and then nobody does.”

He put his hat on.

“It caught something once,” he said. “The whole apparatus. It caught something, on a Tuesday, and stopped, and nobody knows it did, including the people it saved. It caught it by accident, on a thing a dead man left in, on the way past. That’s the best you get. You go all the way to the end so that once, on a Tuesday you never hear about, the machine goes past twenty-five.”

Pettibone did not follow the last part, which was fine, because it was not for him.

Gene went out to the car and drove to Rimrock, because it was a Saturday.