Chapter 68 The Green Blinds

The telephone, it emerged afterward, belonged to the watchman, and the watchman belonged to a firm whose contracts were older than the war, and none of it mattered, because the room they entered at half past eleven that night was empty of everyone except the engine — and the engine was writing. Margaret stood in the doorway of the strong-room and let the scene assemble itself, because scenes, like ciphers, rewarded patience. The bench had been cleared to the wood except for tools a machinist would grieve over: micrometers, a jeweller's saw, coils of brass wire. One map-case stood pulled open and scorched along its lip, the baize lining bubbled brown, a smell of burnt paper threaded thin under the oil — a fire that had been lit, fed briefly, and smothered, here, where no smoke could climb past the floor above. On the floor beside the stool lay half a ribbon of punched tape, torn clean, the other half simply absent, and around the tear the concrete held a scatter of punched confetti where somebody had crushed the remainder of a reel underfoot rather than let it travel incomplete. And the machine wrote. Paper crept from the unlocked output slot in a slow unbroken crawl, page after page joining its predecessors on the floor in a drift of script, and the hum that filled the room was wrong — not the locked warm note of the bonded pair in Helsinki, but a rising searching thing, a glass singing itself toward a pitch it could not find. "It has no hand," Vane said softly, from beside the feed cabinet, which stood open, blank paper ascending into the mechanism with the patience of a queue. "Erik warned us what a humming engine does when it drifts toward a hand. Nobody warned us what it becomes when the hand leaves and forgets to stop the feed." She touched the walnut casing with the backs of two fingers, gently, the way one quiets an animal. "It is composing, child. Look at what it is composing." The pages on the floor, gathered and squared by lamplight, were addressed to no one and therefore to everyone, in the careful handless script, but the voice had changed — it reported now the way a solicitor drafts: schedules of apparatus; rates of production; a table of capitals, two of them, named only as *the capital of the eastern party and the capital of the western creditor*; budget lines in currencies; and, recurring every few pages like a chorus, the specification of a person. *A reader of patterns, formerly of the naval section, presently under restriction, whose signature the northern office holds.* The description ran on, accurate as a warrant, flattering as bait. Beneath it, ruled and patient, waited the space where a name would go. "It is writing job advertisements," Brennan said flatly. "For a post it intends you to fill." "For a post it intends somebody to fill," Margaret said. "It is not particular. It is thorough. There is the difference, and it frightens me more." She looked at the drift of paper, at the machine consuming blankness and producing futures, and felt for the first time the true shape of the thing they had inherited in Helsinki. The bond had made her engine honest. This one had been left honest to no one. They worked until dawn by rotation, squaring and reading, photographing by torch-flash, while the machine crawled on. At six, with the forms of the day staff stirring overhead, they sealed what they could — Vane affixed her own padlock to the feed cabinet and signed the strong-room ledger with the words *inspection continuing*, which was even true — and went out into a morning the colour of dishwater to learn what the institution had done to them while they laboured. What it had done was elegant. Mr. Padgett of ministry security received Margaret at ten in a room with green blinds and a radiator ticking like slow Morse, and interviewed her with the mild relentlessness of a tax assessment: her travels; her refusals; her acquaintance with foreign legations; and — produced with regret, almost tenderness — a patrol log from Coastal Command showing whose favour had rerouted convoy CW.22 ahead of a memorandum that no unauthorized person could have known existed. Access, opportunity, expertise: the trinity, complete, with the irony polished off. "You will appreciate," Padgett said, "that from where I sit, Miss Chase, the only proven reader of that machine's outputs outside this building is you." "And from where I sit," Margaret said, "the only proven writer of them is a man with two suitcases and a ticket, whom your committee is pensioning as we speak. Shall we trade positions? Mine has worse furniture but better arithmetic." The stalemate broke at four o'clock, from an unexpected quarter: Vane, questioned separately since morning, declined entirely to answer anything further unless certified fit — fit meaning useful — and offered the ministry a bargain it could not refuse politely. Her certification that the counting-house engine was inert without a trained feeder; her silence thereafter; her cooperation in the inquiry as a witness, not a subject. In exchange: Miss Chase released on her own recognizance, passport retained, daily reporting, no formal charge — a cage, but a gilded one, and crucially one with the archive still standing at the far end of it. Sir Owen signed because the alternative was explaining the engine to the Treasury, and the Treasury to the Air Council, and the Air Council to the press, and of those deaths he feared the last least and the first most. The telegram was waiting at the archive when she got back, and it was from Helsinki, and it was in Edith's compressed scripture: *ERIK FAILING STOP WALL PHOTOGRAPHED BY EASTERN VISITORS STOP COPY SAFE STOP COME WHEN PEACE ALLOWS OR SEND THE CLOCK'S ARITHMETIC STOP EDITH.* Margaret sat with it a long time under the green lamp, hearing the northern door strain on its hinges four hundred miles away, while in the south a man with half a tuning rode a night train toward buyers in two capitals, and in Kingsway a machine composed advertisements for her own abduction into respectability, and somewhere off the coast a frequency nobody could place kept its twice-monthly appointments with the dark, punctual as rent. Three doors, she thought. And every one of them swinging.