The Law That Grows As It Is Written

My predecessor's last film can sat in the records-room safe, just as it was. Never wound to its end. I did not open it.

First I had to know. What it was that made the numbers grow. To open that can without knowing was to go down into a shaft without knowing its depth — and at that time I had not yet read the surveyor's log.

I resolved to do it the scholar's way. Hold one variable, bind the rest.

From an old, settled ledger I chose three balances — unrelated accounts, dead numbers that would never be written again. I named them A, B, and C.

A: I copied onto an index card and filmed as well. Then I locked the card and the film in the safe. I would look only at that one leaf of the ledger, once a day.

B: I copied onto an index card only, did not film it.

C: I neither copied nor filmed. The mere fact that the balance was there I noted on a separate sheet — a sheet for my eyes only, to be burned when the test was done. The ledger I did not touch.

I left them so for three days.

On the morning of the third day, I opened the three leaves in turn.

A's balance had grown by two figures at the end. The one copied and filmed. B's balance had grown by one figure. The one only copied. C's balance — was unchanged. Not one figure. The one not copied.

The chill at my fingertips was familiar now. That it was familiar made me colder still.

The record makes its object grow. The measuring lengthens the depth. I felt I had read that sentence somewhere. Not read — would read. I went to the box from Pnakotic Press. Of the four bundles, I opened the surveyor's log.

He was a man who, in 1923, sounded the depth of a vertical shaft at a coal mine in Gangwon. He knotted a red thread every fathom along a plumb line, let it down into the shaft, and counted the depth at which the weight touched bottom. I knew my predecessor's charge — not to read his writing to the end. But one line had already entered my eye.

A fathom deeper each time. His shaft deepened though no one dug it, and only the figure of the one who recorded the depth grew, year on year. He laid it to the line stretching, to the damp. As I had. And at the last he set down one line — that a surveyor is not one who measures a shaft's depth, but a single line that records, with his own body, how much the shaft has deepened.

The shaft of seventy years ago and the dead balance on my desk lay under the same law. Sound it and it deepens; copy it and it grows. The observing hand enlarges its object. The surveyor was swallowed by the shaft, and I — still, for now, was sounding a dead number.

A dead number. At that phrase I stopped.

My test had used settled balances. Dead numbers a single hand touched only now and then. So they grew slowly — a figure or two in three days.

I set down the pen and looked at the notice board on the records-room wall. The week's filming assignment sent down by head office was posted there. On the first line of next week's work was a familiar account classification.

It was not a settled ledger. It was a living ledger — our own short-term foreign borrowing register. A number set down at every day's close, entered into every terminal, reported to head office, and reported again somewhere higher up. If a dead balance that one hand touches once in three days grows two figures in three days—

then how fast was that number growing — the one that hundreds of hands copied out, several times a day?

To handle a living ledger, I needed a terminal.

In the records room there was one credit terminal head office had sent down just before scrapping it. A discontinued model, foreign-made. I sat before it to query our own short-term foreign borrowing. It was the first time I had turned it on.

When I gave it power the screen held a beat of darkness, then the maker's boot screen rose. It was the first light the terminal had thrown off in five months buried in the records room. At the center of the screen, beneath the maker's seal, a line of Latin rose — a company motto that would vanish when the boot was done, that no one read.

I know that sentence. I had never read it, yet I know it.

In the surveyor's log. The winding gear at the Gangwon coal mine, 1923; the line engraved on its German iron frame. On the maker's plate of the machine that wound the plumb line. The machine that sounded a shaft's depth seventy years ago, and this terminal throwing off a foreign balance before me now, bore the same motto.

The surveyor too had only polished it for five months and not read it. I too had buried it five months and not turned it on. A measuring machine seldom lets its motto be read. By the time it is read, it is already too late.

In small characters below the screen, a gloss of the same sentence was set — the maker had kindly appended it.

NUMERUS NON MENTITUR — "Number does not lie."

Toward what that unlying number grew, the motto did not say. The surveyor's machine did not say either. The maker, appending the gloss, withheld that one thing alone.

The boot finished. The motto vanished, the query screen came up. I entered the account number of our short-term foreign borrowing. A living number — copied at every day's close, from every terminal, to head office, to somewhere higher — rose onto the screen.

It was larger than my predecessor's July card. Larger even than the number the settled ledger had climbed to this morning. The living ledger was fast. As fast as the hundreds of hands that copied it each day.

I took up the pen to copy that number onto an index card. And stopped. Copy it and it grows. I would be adding a figure to the sum. I did not take up the pen; I memorized the number on the screen with my eyes alone.

It was then that the date stamp in one corner of the screen caught my eye. The terminal stamped the query date automatically. In that place today's date should have stood. November 1st.

The date stamped there was November 2nd.

I doubted the terminal's clock. Off five months, its internal clock might have slipped a day. I looked at the records-room wall clock. November 1st, Friday afternoon. My wristwatch, and the day's report, both said the first. Only the terminal's clock had slipped, I told myself.

But the balance the terminal had thrown onto the screen was not the closing figure of November 1st. It was the figure of November 2nd, not yet closed. Tomorrow's ledger was already written, inside the terminal.