Three rounds a day, and the hours of them on the board at the stair head. A copy of the hours went to the works side, because the works side booked its own jobs against them, and a copy went to the checkers, because the trolleys came through — and that was how it had been done since the plant went in. Between rounds nobody stood the plant. There was nothing in there for a person to stand at.
The sheet lived at the desk, and the rounds went onto it in the keeper’s hand: the bays, the hours, the dressings and gauges, a column for what came off load and when. A dressing polishing on one face and not the other is a pin going over, and the sheet is where a hand’s thumb-reading becomes a line another hand can work from.
The third door
Also on the sheet, in three places, in the hand of the man who kept it before Ishk: the door of bay three was on local operation, and had been since the winter, and showed shut on the panel whatever it actually was.
Every hand on that side knew it and had known it for months — the plant’s own supervisor put that on the record within hours of the attack, in his own words, so that nobody could stand in a room in a fortnight and call it a secret: I’ve got a bay door that’s been on local operation since the winter and shows shut on the panel whatever it is. It’s written on the round sheet in three places. One of the fitters had said the quiet version of the same thing at the door itself, months earlier, turning the key: somebody was going to walk past one day and read that panel. The answer was that they would walk past it and read the door.
The works office made a copy off the face of the sheet whenever somebody booked work against the rounds, and wrote down who it made the copy for. There were four such copies in the book since the winter. Three of them were stood up afterwards, one by one — a works-side foreman on the trolley bays, the checkers’ post, and a Warden’s office party — and every one of those was where it should be, and the paper still where it should be. The line about the third door was on the sheet, on the copies, and on nothing else on the station.