Twenty-three.
It ran down the page by door and not by name, because the roll was kept by door and the clerk was copying the roll — the frame number first, and then whatever the ward or the walk had given her. About a third of it was households. Two of the lines were the same household twice.
One line:
Tuazon, Wen. Bloc-door warden, Seven-B line. Seven-C on the roll.
The line above it was a woman off the plant face. The line under it was a household of two at a door number four along from his, and neither of them had anything else against them either. He had held the bloc door on the Seven-C side for six years, could do the doors in the dark, and knew every household from the landing down to the plant face by which side they came home on.
The investigator who took the sheet had the clerk put the hour she finished it on the bottom, and her name under that — it’ll be read by people who want to know which sheet they’ve got. The clerk did it, and did not ask why, and went back to the copying.
The arithmetic, given once
The reconciliation, as it was said at a counter when the counting was done:
The roll for Seven-C at the twenty-eighth was one thousand six hundred and eighty. The sheet for the sector closed on the forty-fourth at twenty-three. That leaves one thousand six hundred and fifty-seven, and every one of them is on a landing or a hall or a floor in somebody else’s sector this morning, and there is no volume behind that door that a person is going to sleep in again.
The sector’s own memory kept a different record in parallel: door numbers chalked on a landing wall from hand height to head height, Seven-C’s numbering, the frame first and then the door, with names against maybe a third of them in as many hands as there were names — and after most of the names, a second word, and the second word was mostly a landing or a ring. In the corner nearest the store, in a hand that had pressed hard enough to break the chalk, somebody had written RING ELEVEN, and it had been rubbed at and written again over the rubbing.