The Office With No Windows

If the works order was copied, then the office that issued the works order was copied too.

That was Kappa’s idea, at supper, with a mouth full of bread, and it was the last piece.

“Scope,” Kappa said. “Read the scope again.”

“Structure, services, fittings, standing orders, personnel register,” said Frau Vesper.

“Standing orders. So the orders got copied. But orders come from somewhere. Did they copy the somewhere?”

Mirell put down her cup.

“Find me a room,” she said, “in Section Nine, that is on the drawings and that nobody has been into since year eleven.”

It took Frau Vesper forty minutes, because she was good, and because the room was not hidden. It was listed. It was listed as 9/K — Administration (Protective) and it had no door entry recorded against it in seventy-one years, which the system did not consider remarkable, because the system was not built to be surprised.

They went down on the morning of day seven: Mirell, Kappa, the supervisor, Frau Vesper, two from the fire team, Brummel, and Dobbel, who had been formally forbidden to touch anything and who kept both hands in his pockets the entire time like a man under suspicion.

The door was not locked. That was almost the worst part.

Inside was an office. A small, tidy, ordinary office with no windows, because it was three decks down inside a station, and nothing in it was dusty, because the air handling in Section Nine had been copied along with everything else and had been doing its job perfectly for seventy-one years.

There was a desk. There was a chair, pushed in. There was a coat hook with nothing on it.

On the desk, squared to the edge, there was a tray of blank flimsies, the same grey- printed flimsies that had been going under mouse collars for four and a half thousand issues, and beside the tray a brass stamp, and beside the stamp a pen, dried out.

And on the wall behind the desk, a board with a single sheet pinned to it, and on the sheet, in handwriting — actual handwriting, the only handwriting in the whole case:

TEMPORARY — SECTION NINE Until reconciliation is complete: fit protective issue to any unlisted creature approaching a gate, and to those nearest, so that no one is lost again. This is a protection, not a punishment. Review on reconciliation. — awaiting countersignature Nobody spoke for a while. Brummel sniffed the chair and lay down under the desk, which is where dogs go.

“They knew,” Kappa said at last. “Whoever wrote that. They knew the mice had been lost.

So that no one is lost again. They knew.”

“Yes,” said Mirell.

“They were trying to help.”

“Yes.”

“And then they just — left?”

“Look at the bottom line,” said Mirell.

Awaiting countersignature.

“They wrote an emergency instruction,” she said, “the way you are supposed to:

temporary, with a review, needing a second signature to become real. And then they put it on the board, and they went to get the signature, and — ” “And nobody ever came,” said Frau Vesper.

“And nobody ever came. So it never became real. And it never stopped being in force either, because nothing in the rules says a temporary order expires. It just sat on this board, in an office nobody entered, being carried out by the station’s own systems, for seventy-one years. No villain. No plan. One good person in a hurry, one missing signature, and seventy-one years.”

Dobbel, with his hands still in his pockets, said the thing that children on Nebula Station still quote at each other:

“So the monster is a to-do list.”

“The monster,” said Mirell Kawa, “is an unfinished kindness. They are the worst kind. A cruelty gets stopped, because somebody fights it. A kindness that was never finished just runs, and runs, and everybody who walks past it thinks somebody else is handling it.”

Kappa was looking at the empty chair, and at the pen that had dried out mid-case seventy- one years ago, and thinking about the empty box on Tilk’s paper, and feeling something that was not fear and was not anger and that took about four years to find the word for.

The word was responsibility, and it arrived with a soft, deep, unhurried clack, somewhere behind the wall, as another mouse three decks down was fitted with steel.