1There was a city of glass towers on a warm sea, and in one tower, on the fourteenth floor, a young woman named Wen wrote instructions for machines.
2She was twenty-nine. She had come to that country from another, on a paper that let her stay as long as she had work. If the work ended, the paper gave her sixty days to find other work or go home. At home her father had a small shop and a large debt, and each month a part of what Wen earned went back across the sea to stand between the shop and the lenders.
3The firm she worked for made one thing. It was a small grey machine that hangs on a pole beside a hospital bed and feeds medicine into a vein, drop by counted drop. A nurse sets a number on its face. Then the nurse goes to the next bed, and the machine keeps the count for her through the night. That is the whole purpose of such a machine: that the nurse need not stand and watch.
4Wen did not build the machine. Her work was to try to break it. She wrote the trials. All day and all night, in a cold room, a hundred machines dripped water into a hundred glass tubes while her trials did to them everything a tired nurse or a bad night might do. They pulled the plug. They changed the number twice in one second. They let the battery run down to its last breath. And every drop was weighed.
5The new machine was to go out to the hospitals on the first day of the month. The firm had borrowed against that day. Two hundred people worked on those floors, and all of them knew, without being told, that there was money to pay them until that day and not long after.
6Nine days before, on a Wednesday, Wen found something.
7It was three in the morning and she was alone. She had set one trial to run a hundred thousand times instead of a thousand, for no better reason than that she could not sleep. In the morning's count there was a line she had never seen. Thirty-one times in a hundred thousand, a tube had been given too much. It was not a little too much. It had been given the same dose twice.
8She hunted it for two days. It happened only when three small things fell in the same half second: the battery was nearly spent, the wall power came back, and a hand changed the number on the face. Then the machine forgot what it had already given, and gave it again.
9Three times in ten thousand. It would almost never happen. But there would be forty thousand of these machines, each running every night for ten years, in wards where the power failed and came back, and where hands were always changing the number. Wen did the sum on the back of an envelope. She looked at the answer for a long time. Then she turned the envelope over.
10She took it to the man she answered to. His name was Dorn. He was not a bad man. He had a daughter at a costly school and a heart that was already giving him trouble, and he had promised the first of the month to people above him who had promised it to people above them.
11He listened to all of it. He asked good questions. Then he was quiet, and then he said, "How long to find the fault and mend it and run everything again?"
12"Six weeks," said Wen. "Perhaps eight."
13"We do not have six weeks. In six weeks there is no firm." He rubbed his eyes. "Three in ten thousand. And only when three things happen together. Wen, the old machine, the one in the wards today, is worse than that. I can show you. Every week we wait, nurses are using the worse one."
14That was true, and she knew it was true. That was what made it hard. A plain lie is a wall, and you can see it. This was a door painted the same colour as the wall.
15On Thursday the rule changed. Wen saw it in the record. The trial had said: no tube may ever be given a double dose. Now it said: fewer than five in ten thousand. By the new rule the machine passed. And the paper that would go to the hospitals and the inspectors did not show the rule. It showed one line, in green: All trials passed.
16On Friday at five, Dorn put the paper in front of her. It needed the name of the one who had written the trials. That was the custom and the law.
17"It is only a number," he said gently. "It is a true number. It passed the rule."
18"You changed the rule."
19"I am permitted to change the rule. That is my work. Yours is to sign that the trials were run, and they were run." He leaned forward. "I am not asking you to say anything false. Read it. There is no false word on that page."
20She read it. He was right. There was no false word on it. Every word was true, and the page was a lie.
21She thought of her father counting the day's coins into the tin. She thought of the sixty days. And she thought, a nurse would have to be very unlucky. Then she signed, and Dorn let out his breath, and he thanked her, and he meant it.
22In the lift going down she met old Bram, who had worked on those floors for thirty years and would leave in the spring. He looked at her face and did not ask her anything. At the ground floor he held the door.
23"I signed one once," he said. "Twenty years back. A different machine. A small thing, a number like yours, and a good reason." He looked out at the street. "Nothing came of it that I ever heard. That is what I want to tell you. I never heard. Somewhere there is a ward I never saw, and I do not know. I will die not knowing. It is a strange thing to carry, a thing that weighs nothing."
24Then he went home, and so did she.
25Her mother called that night across the sea, as she did every Friday. "You sound tired. Are you well? Is the work going well?"
26"It is all fine," said Wen. "Everything passed."
27She put down the telephone and sat very still. It had come out so easily. That was what frightened her. Five hours ago she had put her name to one crooked page, and already the second crooked thing had come out of her mouth without being sent for, to her own mother, to keep the first one company. She saw how it would go. The first lie would need a second to guard it and a third to guard the second, like a man who must hire a watchman to watch his watchman.
28She did not sleep. Toward morning she stopped thinking about herself and began to think about the page.
29The page would go to the inspectors, and they would read all trials passed and stamp it. The stamp would go to the hospitals, and they would buy. The buying would go to the head nurse of some ward, who would tell the new girl, "These ones are sound, you need not stand over them." And the new girl would set a number at two in the morning, with the lights flickering, and walk away. She would walk away because of Wen's name. Wen's name was the reason she could.
30Every one of those people would be steering by a map, and Wen had drawn a bridge on it where there was none.
31On Saturday morning she went back to the empty floor. She wrote four plain paragraphs. The fault, how to make it happen, how often, and the day and hour the rule was changed. Under them she wrote, I signed the report on Friday. I should not have. I withdraw my name. She sent it to Dorn, and to the head of the firm, and to the officer whose work was the safety of the machines.
32Then she sat with her hands in her lap. She was shaking. It was not courage she felt. It was more like being sick and knowing that soon she would be better.
33On Monday they were waiting for her. Dorn was not in the room. He had gone home with a pain in his chest, and she was sorry for it, and it changed nothing.
34The head of the firm was a calm woman with a kind voice. She said the fault would be looked into, in good time, after the machines had gone out. She said Wen had been under great strain. She put two papers on the table. One ended Wen's work that day. The other was a promise of silence, and beside it lay a sum of money, three months' pay.
35"Take it," the woman said, and she did not say it unkindly. "It gives you time to find other work before your sixty days run out. Without it you have nothing. Think of your family. You have done what your conscience asked. You told us. Now it is ours to carry, not yours."
36It was the painted door again, and a better one. You have told us. Now it is ours. Wen wanted very much to walk through it.
37"If I take that," she said slowly, "then I have been paid to let the page stand. And then it is not a mistake any more. I will have sold it."
38She signed the first paper and not the second. A guard walked her to the lift with her cup and her plant in a box. Nobody on the floor looked up. She did not blame them. They had children and debts too, and she had just put the first of the month in danger for every one of them.
39That evening she sent the four paragraphs, and the record of the changed rule, to the office of the state that inspects such machines. She put her own name on it. Then she called her mother and told her all of it, beginning with the words, "On Friday I told you something that was not true."
40Her mother was silent a long time. Then she said, "Your father will have to sell the shop."
41"Yes," said Wen. "I think he will."
42"Come home, then," said her mother. "We will manage. We managed before you were clever."
43Nothing happened for a long while after that. That must be told, because in stories the truth-teller is thanked by the last page. Wen was not thanked. No inspector wrote to her. No one from the fourteenth floor called. She sent out forty letters seeking work and got two answers, and both were no. A firm does not like to hire the one who told on the last firm. On the fifty-first day she began to give away her furniture.
44She was afraid in those weeks, and poor, and often angry. But she noticed a thing that she had not expected. She slept. She lay down at night and she slept like a stone in a river, and she woke without the feeling of a hand closed round her stomach. She could look at any face in the street. She owed no watchman his wages.
45On the fifty-eighth day, a message came. It was from old Bram, and it was six lines long.
46The inspectors came on the ninth and stopped the shipping. They found it in four weeks. The count was being cleared when the wall power returned, in the low-battery path. It is mended. I ran your trial a million times myself and weighed every drop. Nothing. We ship six weeks late. Half the floor is gone, the rest of us are still here. Dorn is out of hospital and has not said your name, but he was the one who asked me to run it a million times. I put my name under yours on the report. I wanted you to know. This one I will know about.
47She read it sitting on the floor of the empty room, with her back against the wall.
48Two days later she flew home across the sea with one bag. The shop was sold that winter. She found work in time, lesser work, in her own city, testing the machines that weigh grain. It was honest and it was dull, and she was good at it.
49She never saw one of the grey machines again. They went out six weeks late, forty thousand of them, to wards she would never stand in. Each one hung on its pole and kept its count. Because they kept it, nobody ever knew they might not have. That is how it is with this kind of work. If it is done well there is nothing to see afterward, only an ordinary night in which nothing went wrong.
50One of those machines went to a hospital in a hot country, in a dry year, where the power was not to be trusted. A nurse there set a number on its face and walked away to the next bed. Now hear of her.