May 11. Again more came in than went out.
At ten past nine I opened the register of items sent and received.
The register has two columns. Sent on the left, received on the right.
Over the ten days of May, sixteen sent. Thirty-two received.
I counted April again. Twenty-nine sent against fifty-four received.
The places I sent requests to are four.
The register has a remarks column. It is not a column for entering the sending that a receipt answers.
There is no place in the register for which sending a received item is the answer to.
Whether something that is not an answer is mixed into April's fifty-four cannot be counted from the register.
At half past nine I sorted the received items by the place that sent them.
They do not sort into four.
The number on the top line is of five kinds.
To the fifth number I have never sent anything.
I went back through the register as far as January. That number is not once in the sent column.
At ten I gathered what had come from the fifth number. Eleven pages.
All eleven pages are transcripts. Not taken off the original but copied out by hand.
At the top is the date of the copying. March of seventy-eight.
There is no field for the one who copied it.
There is one more line in the header. It says that what follows is copied from a field book that was recovered.
The word for recovered is the same as in three of the forewords.
A field for the one who recovered it is likewise absent, as in three of the forewords.
At twenty past ten I read the eleven pages.
A survey field book. Entries from a day when the same place was measured again.
The first page is dated the twenty-third. Measurements of the same place in the morning, at midday and in the evening are on the one page.
The three values differ. The morning is smallest and the evening largest.
The second page is dated the twenty-fourth. The previous evening's value stands as that morning's value.
Whether it grew between the measurings or between the writings is not in the field book.
On the third page I stopped at the second line.
It is a sentence that is in this room.
It says that the place which grows moves about each time it is copied.
It is the sentence the one before me wrote in their own log in the twelfth month, the year before last.
At twenty to eleven I took out the sixth sub-number and set them side by side.
Twelve characters agree. The ending agrees too.
The transcript was written first. The log of the one before me was written after.
By the dates, that is so.
Nowhere is it written which was copied from which.
I looked for a field to enter it in. There is none.
At eleven I looked at the writing on the eleven pages.
As far as the sixth page it is one hand.
From the seventh page the writing changes. The strokes are heavy and the final consonants are joined on.
On the eleventh page it returns to the earlier hand.
The date of copying on all eleven pages is March of seventy-eight.
I looked a long while at the strokes of the second hand.
It is a hand that joins the final consonants on. The stroke breaks once and is drawn again, and in the redrawing the final consonant fastens onto the letter before. There is paper in this room written that way.
The notebook of the one before me.
Where the one before me was in March of seventy-eight is not known from this room's records. The register of serving staff has no entry for that person.
At one I counted the page numbers.
There are two eighths.
Two sheets carry the same page number. The same page of the same field book.
One sheet is hand A and one is hand B.
I laid the two side by side and matched them character by character.
One character differs.
At two I wrote down the one character that differs.
A has the depth as fourteen. B has it as fifteen.
The original field book is not in this room. That page of the survey field book is not among the four in the box.
There is nothing to look at for which of them agrees with the original.
At twenty past two I opened the box.
Seven articles. Seven marks. Day four hundred and forty-two.
The sixth field is eight thousand nine hundred and three. The set's row was opened a hundred and twenty-eight times yesterday and the imprint route eighty-eight.
The right-hand material is seven hundred and fourteen pages. The date of the added page is the ninth of the sixth month of ninety-nine. The third line of page five hundred and thirty-nine has been blank a hundred and thirty-four days. The original of the fifth bundle is a hundred and seventy-seven pages and has not grown for five hundred and twelve days.
At twenty to three I opened the registration procedure.
Registration is done, it says, on receipt of material that was requested.
There is no procedure for registering material that came without a request.
The registered materials are seven. The eleven pages are not among the seven.
They are in this room and not in this room's list.
At three I opened the reply form for confirmation of whereabouts.
The term falls at the beginning of next month.
What is to be confirmed is the whereabouts of the imprint.
Not one of the things received gives a whereabouts.
The reply form has no field for entering that confirmation is not possible. What I counted in April stands.
There is only a field for the result of the confirmation and a field for the date of it.
To enter what could not be confirmed, it must go in the margin.
At twenty past three I looked for the fifth number in the telephone directory.
It is not there.
I rang directory enquiries. They said it was a number with no registered subscriber.
Eleven pages came from a number that does not exist.
At half past three I opened the query record for the set's row and sorted yesterday's arrivals by route.
The imprint route is eighty-eight. One of those eighty-eight opened the sixth sub-number at twenty to twelve yesterday.
Twenty to twelve is the time I had finished the morning search and was away from the desk.
At twenty to four I counted the eleven pages again.
Eleven pages. By page number, ten.
Because there are two eighths.
Whether one more came or one came twice, the register has it as eleven items received.
At four I picked up the next page.
At the foot of the eleventh page there is notice of the page to follow.
The same form as the four afterwords. It says the next page continues, dated such a day.
The date given is today.
The next page is the twelfth. The twelfth has not come.
At twenty past four I went and stood at the fax. There is no paper.
Eleven pages came as the answer to what I did not send. The page that was given notice did not come.
More comes in than goes out, and one is missing.