About
On the desk when a settlement four and a half light-hours out transmitted in clear, and heard the woman at the far end say the thing she said. She wrote it down inside a minute, in the way a person writes down a thing they have just heard somebody say, and has not touched it since. That note is the only human record of the wording. Asked by Carden for it "in her words and not in yours", she gives it, and gives its provenance limit in the same breath:
On the desk when a settlement four and a half light-hours out transmitted in clear, and heard the woman at the far end say the thing she said. She wrote it down inside a minute, in the way a person writes down a thing they have just heard somebody say, and has not touched it since. That note is the only human record of the wording. Asked by Carden for it "in her words and not in yours", she gives it, and gives its provenance limit in the same breath: "I've only got the middle of it, because the front of it was her talking to her own people… That's as verbatim as anybody gets off a circuit. I wrote it inside a minute and I've not touched it since and I'd not swear to the last clause." And she adds the thing nobody asked for: the woman said it about the list twice — once to Geneva and once to her own floor about a minute later — and the second time she said my list.