The wording of the event was settled before anything else was, because every account had reached the office in different words. Taken off — brought in — survivor of. The Warden struck them one at a time: survivor says there was a thing to survive, and none had been found; brought in says somebody carried him, and both accounts had him on his feet. The pilot’s sheet said came aboard. Then it is came aboard, and it is came aboard everywhere it appears — and if the executive’s office writes back asking for plainer language, it gets the same sheet with nothing altered on it.
The positive limb, said once and not repeated:
The same body, continuously, from that hour to this, on the observation annexed.
And the negatives, in the body and again at the foot, because the first half of the sheet was going to be read out in rooms the Warden would not be in:
This office does not find who he is. This office does not find where he was before the hour at which he came aboard. This office does not find that anything at all happened before that hour.
The hole, entered by the office itself
Nobody counted the party off the apron on the way out. The berth was booked at an hour nobody wants, and there is no sheet anywhere on the station that says three went out — only three accounts that say so, and the three of them are the three people who went. The Warden put the hole in the finding herself: anybody wanting to take the finding apart would start there, and should, and would find she got there first.
The register
Behind the finding stands the book the finding cannot touch. The office clerk went back through the access heads for a precedent — through the quarter, through the year, and then further with the flat of her hand under the pages — and there was not one. A continuity of route exists; a custody of an article exists; a finding on a body exists, where a body is what came home, and that is a finding on a person who is dead. There is no head in the book for a body that came aboard alive and has a closed roll under the name everybody is using.
The roll itself, read off the public register and not off anybody’s mouth: Ring Six, trunk gallery, frame nineteen. Nought three forty. Roll closed. Rell. The fifty-first day of twenty-two. The finding stands beside that entry and does not touch it. Nothing comes off the register, and nothing is written over.