March 3. Planning asked whether they could run it in the staff newsletter.
It was the person who copied the lighthouse log into their folder last month. There is a short slot open in the March issue, and half a page on old records found in the company's storage would be fun, they said. They wanted to quote a few lines of the original.
I thought a moment and said please do.
What I thought about was procedure. Whether quoting archive material internally needs separate approval. Checking, material in the company-wide index can be quoted for company purposes. Cite the source and that is it. That was the whole procedure.
I did not think about anything besides procedure.
Before agreeing I did ask one thing. Which passage would they quote? They had not chosen yet. They would read it and pick a good line, they said. I said please do, and hung up.
Thinking about it now, that answer should have struck me as a little odd. Picking a good line means reading a hundred and eighteen pages. I turned them all while scanning but did not read them. The first person in this company to read that material from beginning to end is probably that writer.
The newsletter came out on March 10. Eight hundred copies, distributed to every department. I took one of the copies that reached our floor.
The piece was half a page. The title was A Log from Sixty Years Back, Out of Storage. It introduced old records turning up while transfer material was being sorted, with a short account of a man who wrote down tides at a lighthouse. The writing was light, and instead of a photograph there was a screenshot of the file.
There were two quoted lines.
The first was a sentence I knew. The place where he writes that the water comes in more than expected.
The second was a sentence I did not know.
I read it twice. I could not place where it had come from. I scanned all hundred and eighteen pages of the lighthouse log and my eyes went over them as I did. I cannot remember all of it, but a sentence like this would have caught.
I opened the file and searched. It was there. Page one hundred and twelve, third line from the bottom.
The original is in the box. I took the box out and opened page one hundred and twelve.
In that place there was another sentence. A short tide entry. The sentence from the newsletter was not there.
I counted the pages again. I had to be sure the file's page 112 and the paper's page 112 were the same page. They were. The top five lines matched and everything down to the fourth line from the bottom matched. Only the third from the bottom differed.
I rang planning. The writer answered as though it were nothing. Copied straight out of the file, they said. Not rewritten, not tidied. Old phrasing, and touching it seemed likely to spoil it, so they copied and pasted what was on the screen.
I said I understood. It is not their fault. If you copy what is in the file, what you copied is right.
After hanging up I wrote the sentence out on paper. Written out, there was nothing odd about the sentence itself. It is a sentence that could be in the lighthouse log. It concerns water and an hour, and the phrasing matches what surrounds it.
Only, it is not on the paper.
For a sentence that is not there to look like one that is, there is a condition. It has to be in the same hand as what surrounds it. What ran in the newsletter was typeset, so the hand could not be seen. I opened the file and enlarged the line.
The writing was the lighthouse log's hand. The same slant and the same pressure as the line before and the line after. I cannot read handwriting, but I can tell a different one. It was not different.
Last month I saw one stroke. A short vertical not in the original, present in the file. That was a stroke. This is a sentence. Getting from a stroke to a sentence took a month and a half.
Setting the sequence out that way, what comes next arrived on its own. So I stopped setting it out.
I took the box out again and opened page 112 once more. The sentence was still not on the paper. I turned the pages before and after. Not there.
So there are two lighthouse logs in this company now. The one in the box and the one on the screen. The eight hundred who read the newsletter read the screen one. Asked which is real, I would answer the box. But the person who would answer that way is the only one in this company. The rest have no occasion to ask.
On March 13 I pulled the lookup figures. In the three days after the newsletter, lookups on the archive code ran twelve times normal. Usually about four a day; it was forty-eight. Nineteen departments looked it up. Usually it is two or so.
Downloads passed two hundred. Two hundred means two hundred copies now sitting in individual folders. How many of those were copied again is not captured.
Until last month the only person who had read this material was me. Before that it will have been the predecessor alone. How many over the sixty years before, I do not know. Very few, probably.
One half-page piece sent it to eight hundred people. Eight hundred is what gets distributed by department, and counting one copy passed round several readers it is more.
I wrote the sum out on paper. One person handing it to one person is one copy a day. One person putting it on a board is hundreds a day. The number sending is the same one, and the number receiving is not. Last month I wrote that when a thing gets cheap people do more of it; this time it is not that the price fell but that no price attaches per recipient. Sending once is one send however many it reaches.
On March 15 another department rang. General affairs. They had seen the newsletter, looked the old log up out of curiosity, and wanted to know whether there was anything besides the lighthouse log.
There is, I said. Four more. Survey and telegraph and stacks, and the archive record.
They asked what the archive record is.
I could not answer for a moment. It is the predecessor's notebook. The one who wrote archive record on the list was me. Written that way it is company material; being company material it is in the company-wide index; being in the index it can be looked up right now by someone in general affairs.
The archive's work log, I said. Which was not untrue.
They asked whether it would have company business in it then, and I said yes. That was not untrue either.
They said it sounded interesting and rang off.
After hanging up I checked the lookup count on the archive record file. Before the newsletter it was zero. As of today it was seventeen.
Seventeen people have opened the predecessor's notebook. On its last page a sentence breaks off mid-way, and in the file there is one more stroke after it.