The twenty-seventh of November. Eight in the morning. In the sending column stood a roster in my own hand.
The hand had finished it in the night. The second line, begun yesterday at the ninth stroke, had filled its eight digits, and below it the third and fourth followed. Counted out, they came to five. Five employee numbers stood in my handwriting, top to bottom, and in the date cell above them was the twenty-seventh. Today's date. Until yesterday the date in the sending column had always been tomorrow's; today it was today's. The five lines my hand had written were not a forecast due tomorrow but things due today.
A little past nine the first line's matter arrived. At the top of the disposal sheet stood the company those leading digits named. I had known since eight that it would come, so it did not startle me. The startling thing came from elsewhere. At eleven the second line's company came, at one in the afternoon the third. Five lines, each with its own hour, filled the day in the exact order written that morning. A forecast's turning into an event kept a timetable, and I had held that timetable in my hand since morning.
At the fourth line I tried something. As the hand ruled seven of the fourth line's eight digits and came down to the last, I caught it by the wrist. The final stroke went unruled. A number of only seven digits stood in the sending column. I wanted to see what became of an unfinished forecast: if what went unsent did not come, it was a summoning; if it came anyway, a foreseeing. The question five nights had not let me tell apart, I meant to ask with a single unfinished line.
At three in the afternoon the fourth line's company came — but not cleanly. It did not go onto the disposal sheet; it was set aside instead for a review of its disposal term, and put off a day. It neither fully came nor fully stayed away. A forecast written unfinished had come true unfinished. I studied it a long while and could not tell what it meant. If the day's delay came of the last stroke going unruled, then stroke and event were joined. But if the company was to be delayed a day regardless, and the hand had only read that delay in advance, then the stroke had followed the event. The unfinished test pointed both ways at once. Summoning and foreseeing alike could be read out of that one half-measure.
And now I could no longer run a clean test. To break the seal I would have to leave a line entirely unsent and watch whether its matter came. But the hand wrote of its own accord. I could catch the wrist and halt it a moment, yet in the space of opening a single box the hand rose again to the sending column, and every line I did not catch was ruled through. Since I could not produce one unsent line, I could not learn what came when nothing was sent. There was nothing to compare against. The moment sending stopped being mine to will, the last test that had told summoning from foreseeing apart vanished with it. The seal was no longer a thing I could not open, but a door that had ceased to exist.
So what was left was only the knowing. Reading the five lines each morning, I knew the day's five matters before they came — what would arrive at nine, what at eleven, down to the hour. But there was nothing the knowing let me do. I could not stop any of it, and whether I could so much as delay it, the single unfinished line had not settled. I had thought foreknowledge was a power; the foreknowledge of this seat held none. I knew what was coming, and knowing, I waited. Watching the clock climb toward eleven, already knowing which company eleven would take, I thought of the people bound to that company, still laying out lunch with no idea of it. Between the seat that knows and the seat that does not, the knowing seat was the heavier.
Before eleven I looked out the archive window a while. On the second floor of the building across the way was a branch of that company. Through the glass I could see people going back and forth, and one of them stood at the window taking something down with the telephone at their ear. I did not know what they were writing, but I knew which ledger their company would pass into at eleven. They worked with the receiver wedged on one shoulder, taking the day for an ordinary one, while I stood at my window knowing it was that company's last. Over the one eleven o'clock, one person worked not knowing and one watched knowing. When eleven struck, the person across the way set down the receiver and left their seat, and at that same hour the disposal sheet's second line came down. What tied their leaving to the second line's falling, I did not know; only that the two stood at the same hour, that much I knew.
Only the fifth line stayed away. All afternoon its hour never came. I looked again at its leading digits. The first four had been the leading digits of companies; the fifth's were not a company's. Not a figure that pointed to one company, but a higher one that counted several companies as a single bundle. All winter the sending column's unit had narrowed from company to person, yet the fifth line ran the other way, opening wider than a company. What it counted I could not yet read, but that it was no single company's matter, the breadth of its leading digits made plain. The reshuffling was widening past one company, toward a seat where company was traded for company.
By evening the hand had already begun the first line of the twenty-eighth. I did not know when the fifth line would come, nor what its figure counted. I knew only that the hand had already begun laying the next day's line above it. One of today's five had yet to arrive, and the hand was already writing tomorrow's. The forecast not yet come and the forecast just emerging overlapped in the sending column, and I could not judge which would become an event first. Only that the fifth line's wide leading digits, set beside tomorrow's line, looked wider still.