The run went at 03:40. The board at the control point simply dropped — the whole column, all at once — and the trunk gallery’s own strip went to nothing. Recovery went into the gallery at half past five and came out at seven, and the identifications were read off a slate in the order they were made: a fitter off the Concession’s night crew, on his own crew’s roll; a man out of the upper bloc who had gone back in for a bag; and Rell.
The file, as the investigator wrote it:
Remains recovered from the Ring Six trunk gallery at frame nineteen on the morning of Day 51, when the run was walkable again. Identified from the civil register and formally by two people who had known him since before the rings. Cause of death, hypoxia; circumstances, loss of environmental service in a shed sector during the cut-over. Time of death fixed at 03:40 by the ring’s own metering, which was the last equipment on that side of the station still keeping time properly.
The three things
What he had been doing in the gallery went into the record as three things, because there were three, and no paper joined them.
The two blocs behind the gallery had come out through that run — the only egress there was — and some of them said afterwards that a man in the dark had put them the right way at the branch and gone back the other. The void terminal at the ring end of the run had had its amendment history overwritten at some point that night, cleanly, by somebody who knew the command, and the inspection brokerage had sat in that history. A reclamation shift had been working the voids twenty metres off the terminal and had come out with the rest.
Any of the three put him at frame nineteen. All three did. The investigator had worked it since the morning of Day 51 and got as far as anybody was going to get, which was that far — and wrote the file so that whoever opened it later would arrive at the same place without having to trust her.
The brokerage went the way brokerage goes when the broker is dead. Abated, which is the word the code uses. There was a question standing in his book, four years old — one question, straight answer, whole sentence, no trade — and there was nobody left to put it to. The disposition was keyed, the file sealed, and the investigator carried it across to the closed cabinet herself, which was two minutes’ work and the clerk’s job.