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Off the Books: Declared Value · Long Odds

0:14
SPEAKER_01: Long odds off the books declared value.
0:20
SPEAKER_01: Walt Savieski had been a civil servant for forty-one years, and in that time he had learned that there were exactly two kinds of days in government.
0:29
SPEAKER_01: There were the days when nothing happened, which were most of them, and which he had come to love the way a farmer loves rain, and there were the days when everything happened at once, all of it on paper, all of it due by five.
0:44
SPEAKER_01: He knew which kind of day this was going to be at ten after five in the morning, on the beltway, in the dark, when the radio told him the strait was still closed, and the price on the sign at the gas station by his exit had gone up again overnight.
1:02
SPEAKER_01: And then his phone buzzed with a calendar alert he did not remember making.
1:08
SPEAKER_01: 3 30 p.m.
1:10
SPEAKER_01: Neil Ashby.
1:12
SPEAKER_01: Informal walk through just a quick look.
1:17
SPEAKER_01: There was no such thing as a quick look from Neil Ashby.
1:21
SPEAKER_01: Neil Ashby was the staff director of a congressional committee, so small and so closed that most members of Congress did not know it existed, and he controlled every dollar the survey had.
1:34
SPEAKER_01: And he had never once in six years come anywhere just to look.
1:40
SPEAKER_01: Walt turned off the radio and drove the rest of the way in silence.
1:44
SPEAKER_01: Sixty-three years old, grey, comfortable, a man who wore the same brown cardigan to work every Thursday, and had for so long that his staff called it the Thursday Cardigan.
1:57
SPEAKER_01: And who was, at that moment, quietly composing a budget defense in his head?
2:05
SPEAKER_01: At six o'clock, in the converted vault at the bottom of the records annex, Team One stood in the painted circle on the concrete floor.
2:14
SPEAKER_01: Major Inez Carvalho, with case one at her feet, Hanna Whitlock in a wool skirt and a coat with a velvet collar.
2:23
SPEAKER_01: Because Hanna dressed for the world she expected and was usually right.
2:28
SPEAKER_01: Luis Ortega, holding case two in one hand and a paper bag of breakfast tacos in the other, which he had been told twice to leave behind.
2:37
SPEAKER_01: Femi Adayemi stood at the edge of the circle with his chart recorder, bouncing very slightly on his toes.
2:45
SPEAKER_01: The way he did before every crossing, he was not going on.
2:49
SPEAKER_01: Walt stood beside him with his hands in the pockets of the Thursday cardigan.
2:55
SPEAKER_02: Dial 4, a middle world.
2:58
SPEAKER_02: One in a hundred thousand odds of a McDonald's give or take.
3:04
SPEAKER_02: Though give or take is doing a lot of work in that sentence.
3:11
SPEAKER_05: The odds don't sleep, Walt.
3:13
SPEAKER_05: I'm aware they've kept me up for years.
3:16
SPEAKER_01: He went down the line the way he always did, shaking hands.
3:20
SPEAKER_01: Walt believed in shaking hands.
3:24
SPEAKER_01: He had shaken hands with every person who had ever gone through a case on his watch.
3:29
SPEAKER_01: And he intended to keep doing it until somebody made him stop.
3:34
SPEAKER_05: Inez Hannah Luis.
3:36
SPEAKER_05: Noon window routine report.
3:38
SPEAKER_05: By what's useful be home tomorrow by lunch, and please try not to declare war on anybody.
3:42
SPEAKER_05: No promises, boss.
3:44
SPEAKER_05: Leave the tacos, Luis.
3:46
SPEAKER_05: These are from around.
3:48
SPEAKER_05: Whose?
3:48
SPEAKER_05: Mine.
3:49
SPEAKER_01: Inez turned the key.
3:52
SPEAKER_01: The hum came up, low and deep, the sound Walt felt in his fillings.
3:57
SPEAKER_01: The needle swung and hunted.
3:59
SPEAKER_01: Femi's ink pen scratched its line.
4:02
SPEAKER_01: The lamp went green.
4:05
SPEAKER_06: Everybody in.
4:08
SPEAKER_01: And then there was a painted circle on a concrete floor with nobody standing in it, and a faint smell of cold air and tortillas, and Femi staring down at his chart paper with his lips moving.
4:23
SPEAKER_01: Walt had watched people vanish from that circle more than a hundred times.
4:28
SPEAKER_01: It had never once become ordinary.
4:31
SPEAKER_01: He supposed that if it ever did, that would be the day to retire.
4:36
SPEAKER_05: Well, let's go see about the coffee.
4:39
SPEAKER_01: The coffee machine was broken.
4:46
SPEAKER_01: It sat on the counter in the third-floor break room, a large and expensive machine that had been purchased in a burst of optimism in 2019, and it gurgled and sputtered and gave a long, sorrowful beep, and produced nothing.
5:03
SPEAKER_01: Taped to its front was a yellow facilities work order that said, In Gloria Petaway's Firm Block Capitals, out of order, ticket number 4812.
5:15
SPEAKER_01: Do not touch.
5:16
SPEAKER_01: This means you, Femi.
5:20
SPEAKER_01: Gloria herself was at her desk outside Walt's office, where she had been every working day for 19 years.
5:27
SPEAKER_01: She was from Mobile, Alabama, and she had outlasted four directors, three reorganizations, and a man from the Office of Management and Budget who had once tried to move her desk.
5:40
SPEAKER_09: Morning, Walt.
5:41
SPEAKER_09: Coffee's broke.
5:43
SPEAKER_01: I saw.
5:45
SPEAKER_09: There's a thermos on your desk.
5:47
SPEAKER_09: I made it at home.
5:49
SPEAKER_09: Don't tell anybody, or they'll all want some.
5:54
SPEAKER_05: Gloria, you are a national treasure.
5:56
SPEAKER_09: I know it.
5:58
SPEAKER_09: Your 945 is here early.
6:02
SPEAKER_05: My what?
6:03
SPEAKER_09: The energy lady.
6:05
SPEAKER_09: From GSA.
6:07
SPEAKER_09: It's on your calendar.
6:10
SPEAKER_09: I put it there two weeks ago, and you said fine.
6:14
SPEAKER_09: Whatever, Gloria.
6:17
SPEAKER_01: Walt did remember saying that.
6:19
SPEAKER_01: He said it to almost everything.
6:22
SPEAKER_09: She's in the conference room.
6:24
SPEAKER_09: She has a tablet.
6:27
SPEAKER_09: She seems very happy.
6:30
SPEAKER_05: Oh no.
6:31
SPEAKER_01: Mm-hmm.
6:33
SPEAKER_01: The energy lady was named Kelsey Strand, and she was 26, and she was from the Office of Energy Efficiency at the General Services Administration.
6:44
SPEAKER_01: And she was, as advertised, very happy.
6:47
SPEAKER_01: She had a tablet in a pink rubber case and a lanyard covered in little enamel pins shaped like light bulbs.
6:55
SPEAKER_01: And she stood up when Walt came in and shook his hand with tremendous enthusiasm.
7:02
SPEAKER_08: Mr.
7:02
SPEAKER_08: Sobieski, thank you so much for making the time.
7:06
SPEAKER_08: I know a small office like yours doesn't get a lot of visits from us, so I want to say up front, this is not an inspection.
7:12
SPEAKER_08: This is a partnership.
7:14
SPEAKER_05: That's what they always say right before the inspection.
7:17
SPEAKER_08: Ha! No.
7:19
SPEAKER_08: Okay.
7:20
SPEAKER_08: So, here's the fun part.
7:22
SPEAKER_01: She turned the tablet around.
7:24
SPEAKER_01: It showed a graph, a long flat line with a single sharp spike in it, like a heartbeat on a hospital monitor.
7:32
SPEAKER_08: We have a new analytics platform.
7:34
SPEAKER_08: It watches the smart meters on every federal building in the region, and it looks for anything unusual.
7:40
SPEAKER_08: And it flagged you this morning.
7:42
SPEAKER_08: At 6.02 a.m., your building drew 4,812 kilowatt hours in about one second.
7:49
SPEAKER_01: Walt looked at the spike.
7:51
SPEAKER_01: The spike looked back at him.
7:54
SPEAKER_08: Which is honestly a lot for a records annex.
7:59
SPEAKER_01: There was a story Walt told new staff about the year 1989 when he was a junior budget analyst, and a congressman's aide had asked him in a hallway why a particular office needed$40,000 for pencils.
8:14
SPEAKER_01: Walt had answered for 22 minutes.
8:17
SPEAKER_01: He had covered the history of the pencil, the federal supply schedule, graphite procurement during the Cold War, and the difference between a number two and a number two and a half.
8:29
SPEAKER_01: At the end, the aide had thanked him and walked away, and never asked anyone anything again.
8:36
SPEAKER_01: Walt considered this the finest work of his early career.
8:40
SPEAKER_05: That would be the dehumidifiers.
8:43
SPEAKER_08: The dehumidifiers?
8:49
SPEAKER_01: He gave her the tour, all of it.
8:52
SPEAKER_01: He walked her through the stacks on every floor, 10,000 linear feet of geodetic survey records going back to the 1800s.
9:01
SPEAKER_01: He showed her the hygrometers.
9:04
SPEAKER_01: He explained, at length, the difference between relative and absolute humidity.
9:09
SPEAKER_01: He told her about foxing, the brown spots that bloom on old paper like mold on bread, and about the Great Records flood of 1972, which had not been at this building, but which still haunted the profession.
9:24
SPEAKER_01: He showed her a hand-drawn coastal chart of the Chesapeake from 1846, and a field book from a survey party in Oregon, with a pressed flower still inside it.
9:36
SPEAKER_01: He talked about the dehumidifiers in the basement, which were very large, and which came on all at once every morning on a timer, which was true, more or less, if you did not ask what else was on that circuit.
9:51
SPEAKER_01: And the terrible thing, the thing he had not counted on, was that Kelsey Strand loved every minute of it.
10:00
SPEAKER_08: This is the coolest building I have ever audited.
10:03
SPEAKER_08: Do you know that?
10:04
SPEAKER_08: I did the Department of Agriculture last week.
10:06
SPEAKER_08: It was cubicles.
10:08
SPEAKER_08: It was just cubicles, Mr.
10:09
SPEAKER_08: Sabieski.
10:10
SPEAKER_08: You have a field book with a flower in it.
10:13
SPEAKER_05: We do.
10:14
SPEAKER_08: Okay, so real talk.
10:16
SPEAKER_08: Your dehumidifiers are probably from the 90s, and I can get your rebate on replacement units, and you need LEDs on the third floor, desperately.
10:25
SPEAKER_08: But the spike, I'll just annotate it.
10:27
SPEAKER_08: Scheduled equipment load, that's fine.
10:29
SPEAKER_01: She tapped at her tablet.
10:31
SPEAKER_01: Then she frowned at it.
10:33
SPEAKER_01: Just a little.
10:34
SPEAKER_01: And Walt felt the floor tilt a quarter of a degree under him.
10:39
SPEAKER_08: It's funny though, the platform's flagged you before.
10:42
SPEAKER_08: It doesn't usually alert on the same building twice, but it keeps a memory now, so it noticed that you spike at 602 every few weeks, and never on weekends, and never at any other time.
10:53
SPEAKER_01: She smiled up at him.
10:55
SPEAKER_08: It's honestly getting kind of smart.
10:57
SPEAKER_08: They update it every month.
10:59
SPEAKER_08: Someday it's going to do my whole job.
11:01
SPEAKER_05: I hope not, Mrs.
11:02
SPEAKER_05: Strand.
11:03
SPEAKER_05: I'd miss the visit.
11:04
SPEAKER_01: He walked her to the door and shook her hand and watched her bounce off across the parking lot with her pins catching the sun.
11:13
SPEAKER_01: Then he went back upstairs and sat at his desk for a while and looked at nothing in particular.
11:20
SPEAKER_01: The number had stuck in his head.
11:23
SPEAKER_01: 4,812.
11:26
SPEAKER_01: He noticed it the way you notice a pebble in your shoe, and then he put it away.
11:32
SPEAKER_01: Because he had a noon window and a budget memo, and an appointment at 330 with the most dangerous man in Washington.
11:49
SPEAKER_01: The radio room was in the basement, down a long concrete corridor, behind a steel door with a sign that said, Electrical No Admittance.
12:00
SPEAKER_01: Inside were two chairs, a desk, a coffee can full of pencils, and a gray receiver the size of a refrigerator that had been built in 1979 and had never once been allowed near the Internet.
12:15
SPEAKER_01: Every six hours it opened a window.
12:18
SPEAKER_01: For 90 seconds, a voice could come home from anywhere on the dial.
12:23
SPEAKER_01: Then the window closed, like a door.
12:27
SPEAKER_01: Femi sat at the receiver with his headphones around his neck and a stopwatch in his hand.
12:32
SPEAKER_01: Walt sat in the other chair.
12:35
SPEAKER_01: At 11:59 and 45 seconds, Femi said 10 seconds.
12:40
SPEAKER_01: And at noon, exactly, the speaker hissed.
12:47
SPEAKER_06: All three of us fine, both cases fine.
12:49
SPEAKER_06: No trouble.
12:51
SPEAKER_06: Dial four, and it is a strange one.
12:53
SPEAKER_06: We landed in a market square in a county town, right about where the annex sits.
13:03
SPEAKER_06: The town is called upper mobile.
14:01
SPEAKER_06: Then we buy almanacs and seeds and come home tomorrow.
14:05
SPEAKER_06: That's all.
14:08
SPEAKER_01: The speaker went to his Femi clicked his stopwatch and wrote 71 seconds in the log in his small neat hand.
14:18
SPEAKER_01: Walt sat very still.
14:21
SPEAKER_05: No Washington.
14:22
SPEAKER_05: That's what she said.
14:24
SPEAKER_05: Femi.
14:26
SPEAKER_05: I have worked in this town since 1985.
14:29
SPEAKER_05: I have given my entire life to the federal government, and somewhere out there there's a version of this exact spot where the federal government never happened.
14:38
SPEAKER_01: How does that feel?
14:40
SPEAKER_01: Walt thought about it honestly.
14:42
SPEAKER_01: Restful.
14:45
SPEAKER_01: At 1.30, he sat down to write the budget memo.
14:49
SPEAKER_01: It was due to Ashby's committee on Monday, and it was the same memo he wrote every year, which explained why the survey needed the money it needed and why it could not possibly make do with less.
15:02
SPEAKER_01: He had a spreadsheet the committee staff had sent over, a long grid of line items with the survey's appropriation buried somewhere in the middle, under a heading that said, Geodetic Reference, miscellaneous.
15:16
SPEAKER_01: He scrolled to find it.
15:18
SPEAKER_01: Line 48, road 12.
15:21
SPEAKER_01: He looked at it for a long time.
15:24
SPEAKER_01: Then he leaned back in his chair and called out through the open door.
15:29
SPEAKER_05: Gloria, have you seen the number 4812 anywhere today?
15:33
SPEAKER_09: On the coffee machine.
15:36
SPEAKER_09: The coffee machine work order 4812.
15:40
SPEAKER_09: I wrote it myself, why?
15:43
SPEAKER_01: No reason.
15:45
SPEAKER_01: Gloria appeared in his doorway with her reading glasses pushed up on her head, which meant she was about to tell him something for his own good.
16:00
SPEAKER_05: I've been seeing a number.
16:02
SPEAKER_09: My mama used to say, when a number follows you, you play it.
16:09
SPEAKER_09: Lottery.
16:11
SPEAKER_09: Bingo.
16:12
SPEAKER_09: She hit for$200 on her birthday one time and bought a deep freezer.
16:19
SPEAKER_05: I don't play the lottery, Gloria.
16:21
SPEAKER_09: You run a program that sends people into the great unknown on a 1 in 11 chance of ever finding the same place twice.
16:33
SPEAKER_09: Don't tell me you don't play the lottery.
16:37
SPEAKER_01: She went back to her desk.
16:39
SPEAKER_01: Walt went back to his memo.
16:41
SPEAKER_01: He wrote three sentences.
16:43
SPEAKER_01: Then he deleted all three of them and stared at line 48, row 12, until it stopped looking like a number and started looking like a face.
16:55
SPEAKER_01: Neil Ashby arrived at 322, eight minutes early, which was a tactic.
17:01
SPEAKER_01: He was 47 years old and handsome in a way that photographed well at hearings, with very white teeth and a navy suit, and a habit of touching people lightly on the elbow when he agreed with them, which he did often, right up to the moment he didn't.
17:19
SPEAKER_03: Walt, there he is.
17:22
SPEAKER_03: Don't get up.
17:23
SPEAKER_03: I was in the neighborhood.
17:25
SPEAKER_05: Nobody is ever in this neighborhood, Neil.
17:27
SPEAKER_03: Well, I am today.
17:30
SPEAKER_01: He sat down across the desk without being asked, and admired the photographs on the wall, and asked about Walt's grandchildren by name, all three of them, which he had never once gotten wrong, and which Walt found more alarming every year.
17:46
SPEAKER_03: Look, I'll be honest with you, because I'm always honest with you.
17:51
SPEAKER_03: The markup is in two weeks, before everybody goes home to campaign.
17:56
SPEAKER_03: And there are members of the committee, not me, but members who have been asking what exactly they're getting for the money.
18:03
SPEAKER_03: Something they can point to, something they can hold.
18:07
SPEAKER_05: Neil, did I ever tell you about Ferdinand Hassler's several times.
18:12
SPEAKER_05: Then you'll enjoy it more knowing how it ends.
18:14
SPEAKER_01: Ferdinand Hassler was a Swiss surveyor whom Thomas Jefferson had put in charge of mapping the coast of the United States, back when the coast of the United States was mostly rumor.
18:26
SPEAKER_01: In 1811, Congress sent him to London to buy instruments.
18:30
SPEAKER_01: The autolites, chronometers, standard measures, the best in the world.
18:36
SPEAKER_01: And while he was in London, the War of 1812 broke out, and Hassler simply stayed for four years buying instruments with American money in the enemy's capital.
18:50
SPEAKER_05: When he finally came home, he had the finest set of survey instruments in the Western Hemisphere, and a bill that made grown congressmen weep.
18:58
SPEAKER_05: So Congress took the survey away from him for 14 years, and then they had to give it back because nobody else knew how to use the instruments.
19:06
SPEAKER_03: And the moral of the story, Walt?
19:09
SPEAKER_05: The moral is that the very first thing this office ever did was spend four years buying equipment in a foreign country.
19:14
SPEAKER_05: And we've been explaining the invoice to Congress ever since.
19:18
SPEAKER_01: Ashby laughed.
19:20
SPEAKER_01: A real laugh.
19:21
SPEAKER_01: The first one Walt had gotten out of him in a year.
19:25
SPEAKER_01: Then he leaned forward and touched Walt lightly on the elbow.
19:29
SPEAKER_01: And Walt knew the laugh was over.
19:32
SPEAKER_03: We had a good year.
19:34
SPEAKER_03: You had a fine year.
19:36
SPEAKER_03: Fine isn't a word I can take into a closed session.
19:39
SPEAKER_03: And the other thing, Walt, and I'm just asking, I'm just floating it.
19:44
SPEAKER_03: There's interest.
19:45
SPEAKER_03: Real interest.
19:46
SPEAKER_03: In the empty worlds, you know there's interest.
19:50
SPEAKER_05: I know there's interest.
19:52
SPEAKER_03: A world nobody lives in, whole continents.
19:54
SPEAKER_03: If we could ever find one twice.
19:57
SPEAKER_03: Femi is working on that.
19:59
SPEAKER_03: I'd love to talk to Femi.
20:01
SPEAKER_01: Is Femi here?
20:03
SPEAKER_01: Walt considered lying and decided that if there was one man in the world it was unwise to lie to on a Thursday afternoon, it was Neil Ashby.
20:14
SPEAKER_05: Femi is here and I'm sure he would love to explain the return odds to you, Neil, in as much detail as you want.
20:20
SPEAKER_01: It took Femi a little under 40 minutes.
20:23
SPEAKER_01: Walt sat in the corner of the conference room and listened to it with the deep, quiet satisfaction of a man watching an artillery barrage he has personally called in.
20:34
SPEAKER_01: Femi explained the radio dial.
20:37
SPEAKER_01: He explained why close worlds were crowded and far worlds were lonely.
20:42
SPEAKER_01: He explained the chart recorder and the thin line and the fat line and the difference between a probability and a frequency and why you should never, ever round.
20:55
SPEAKER_01: He drew on the whiteboard.
20:57
SPEAKER_01: He drew on a second whiteboard.
20:59
SPEAKER_01: At one point, he drew on a napkin.
21:02
SPEAKER_01: Ashby kept smiling and nodding and touching nobody's elbow.
21:07
SPEAKER_01: And somewhere around minute 30, Walt saw him glance at his watch.
21:12
SPEAKER_03: That's fascinating, Femi.
21:15
SPEAKER_03: Truly.
21:16
SPEAKER_03: So roughly the odds of finding a world again are one hit in 11 tries at tile two as of this morning.
21:26
SPEAKER_03: And rounding that, it's about 10%.
21:29
SPEAKER_03: I'd really prefer you didn't.
21:32
SPEAKER_01: At 5 40, Ashby announced that he would love to see the transit bay before he left.
21:38
SPEAKER_01: The real thing.
21:39
SPEAKER_01: He'd never actually seen it.
21:41
SPEAKER_01: He thought it would help him tell the story.
21:45
SPEAKER_01: Walt looked at the clock on the conference room wall.
21:48
SPEAKER_01: The 6 o'clock window was in 20 minutes.
21:52
SPEAKER_01: And Clara Benning, who had wandered in with a cup of tea at some point during the second whiteboard, set down her tea.
22:00
SPEAKER_01: And smiled at Neil Ashby the way a wolf smiles at a lamb that has wandered into the clinic.
22:07
SPEAKER_09: Mr.
22:08
SPEAKER_09: Ashby, I'd be delighted to take you down, but you'll need to stop by occupational health first.
22:15
SPEAKER_09: Visitors to the lower levels require a tuberculosis screening.
22:19
SPEAKER_09: It's federal policy.
22:21
SPEAKER_03: Is it?
22:23
SPEAKER_09: Oh yes, it's a little skin test on the forearm.
22:26
SPEAKER_09: Takes two minutes, then you come back in 48 to 72 hours, so I can look at it.
22:32
SPEAKER_09: Then I'll take you anywhere you like.
22:35
SPEAKER_01: Ashby looked at Clara.
22:37
SPEAKER_01: Clara looked at Ashby.
22:39
SPEAKER_01: Clara had been a quarantine doctor for 25 years, and she had a face that could make a grown man roll up his sleeve from across a parking lot.
22:49
SPEAKER_03: You know, I just remembered.
22:50
SPEAKER_03: I have a 630.
22:52
SPEAKER_03: On the hill.
22:53
SPEAKER_03: Next time, Walt.
22:55
SPEAKER_03: Next time, Neil.
22:57
SPEAKER_01: When he was gone, Walt turned to Clara.
23:00
SPEAKER_05: Is that federal policy?
23:02
SPEAKER_09: It is now?
23:03
SPEAKER_09: I'll write it up in the morning.
23:13
SPEAKER_01: He made the radio room with a minute to spare.
23:16
SPEAKER_01: Femi was already in the chair with the stopwatch.
23:20
SPEAKER_01: At six exactly, the speaker hissed.
23:23
SPEAKER_01: And Walt knew from the first word that something had gone wrong, because it was Hannah's voice and not Inez's, and Hanna was talking very fast.
23:35
SPEAKER_07: Everybody's fine, everybody's safe.
23:37
SPEAKER_07: But the contact went sideways, and we've lost case one.
23:41
SPEAKER_07: Not lost.
23:42
SPEAKER_07: Impounded.
23:43
SPEAKER_07: The money changer took one look at our silver and called the revenue.
23:46
SPEAKER_07: Our dimes say United States of America.
23:50
SPEAKER_07: And there's no such country here.
23:51
SPEAKER_07: So as far as the state of Maryland is concerned, from a nation that doesn't exist.
24:33
SPEAKER_07: Pennsylvania goods pay 11% duty here at valorum, which means he has to value the box before he can tax it, which means he wants to open it.
24:41
SPEAKER_07: And while he has a crowbar and a very strong sense of Fame clicked the stopwatch.
25:03
SPEAKER_01: He thought about case one, in a locked room in a brick building, in a county town in a country called Maryland, with a seal on the door, and a man outside it with a crowbar.
25:14
SPEAKER_01: He thought about what a case was, what it cost, which was more than this building, what was inside it, which almost nobody understood, including, if he was honest, Femi what it would mean to leave one behind in another world for someone to take apart.
25:34
SPEAKER_01: He thought about case two, hidden somewhere near a market square, which could bring three people home tonight if it came to that, and he thought about how he would explain to Neil Ashby in a closed session two weeks before the markup that the survey had left one of its two most valuable possessions in a government warehouse in a world without a federal government because of a customs dispute.
26:00
SPEAKER_05: Femi, if he opens it, what happens?
26:03
SPEAKER_02: Nothing explodes that's good.
26:06
SPEAKER_02: Femi, I'd rather not round Walt.
26:11
SPEAKER_01: Walt did not go home.
26:13
SPEAKER_01: He called his wife, Patty, and told her it was a budget night, which she accepted the way she had accepted budget nights for 38 years, with a long sigh and an instruction to eat something green.
26:27
SPEAKER_01: Gloria left at seven after putting a turkey sandwich on his desk and a sticky note on it that said, Eat this.
26:36
SPEAKER_01: Kelsey Strand sent an email with the subject line, Thank you so much, and a link to the rebate program for dehumidifiers.
26:45
SPEAKER_01: The building went quiet, the way old buildings do, all at once.
26:50
SPEAKER_01: The ventilation ticking down to a murmur.
26:54
SPEAKER_01: At nine, Emmy came up from the basement with a legal pad and sat down across the desk.
27:01
SPEAKER_02: I did the math on your number.
27:04
SPEAKER_02: Which number?
27:05
SPEAKER_02: Gloria told me.
27:06
SPEAKER_02: 4812.
27:08
SPEAKER_02: The work order, the meter spike, the spreadsheet.
27:13
SPEAKER_05: Gloria should mind her own business.
27:15
SPEAKER_02: Gloria said you'd say that.
27:18
SPEAKER_02: So the odds of one particular four-digit number turning up three times in one day by pure chance are very small.
27:28
SPEAKER_02: One in a trillion, give or take.
27:32
SPEAKER_05: There it is again, give or take.
27:34
SPEAKER_02: But that's the wrong question.
27:36
SPEAKER_02: The right question is, how many numbers did you see today?
27:42
SPEAKER_02: Thousands.
27:43
SPEAKER_02: Room numbers, prices, times, license plates.
27:47
SPEAKER_02: You didn't notice any of them.
27:49
SPEAKER_02: Then you saw one twice, and after that you were looking for it.
27:54
SPEAKER_02: Once you're looking, you'll find it everywhere.
27:58
SPEAKER_02: On cereal boxes, on buses.
28:02
SPEAKER_02: It's a well-known thing.
28:04
SPEAKER_02: Your brain is a pattern machine.
28:07
SPEAKER_02: It goes looking for a story, whether there is one or not.
28:12
SPEAKER_02: Walt considered this.
28:14
SPEAKER_02: So it means nothing.
28:16
SPEAKER_02: It means you're tired and you're worried, and you're a very good civil servant who has us spent 41 years reading line items.
28:27
SPEAKER_05: That sounds like nothing with extra steps.
28:30
SPEAKER_02: Most of Saiyanse is.
28:33
SPEAKER_01: Clara came at 10 with two containers of soup from the Vietnamese place on the corner.
28:39
SPEAKER_01: And the three of them sat in Walt's office eating faux out of plastic tubs with their coats on, because the heat in the building went down at 8.
28:49
SPEAKER_09: I keep a list, you know, of close calls, 22 years of them.
28:54
SPEAKER_05: I know you do.
28:57
SPEAKER_09: I've never had one where the danger was a tax assessor.
29:01
SPEAKER_05: You've never had one where the danger was a man who reads the manual.
29:04
SPEAKER_05: Those are the dangerous ones, Clara, the ones who've actually read it.
29:08
SPEAKER_01: He set down his soup.
29:11
SPEAKER_05: When I was 29 years old, I had a supervisor named Hal Brandt, who'd been at the Commerce Department since Truman.
29:17
SPEAKER_05: And Hal used to say, Walter, every bureaucrat in the world wants exactly the same thing.
29:22
SPEAKER_05: He wants to say yes.
29:23
SPEAKER_05: Saying no is work.
29:25
SPEAKER_05: Saying no means mamos and meetings and people yelling at you.
29:27
SPEAKER_05: Saying yes means you go home on time.
29:30
SPEAKER_05: The trick is never to argue with a man like that.
29:32
SPEAKER_05: The trick is to give him a way to say yes that he can defend to his boss.
29:36
SPEAKER_09: And what's the way to say yes?
29:39
SPEAKER_01: Walt looked out the dark window for a long time.
29:43
SPEAKER_05: I don't know yet, but I know where to look.
29:56
SPEAKER_01: Somewhere far away.
29:58
SPEAKER_01: Falling on a roof Walt would never see.
30:05
SPEAKER_07: Quick, it's worse.
30:07
SPEAKER_07: I tried to fix it.
30:08
SPEAKER_07: I told Mr.
30:08
SPEAKER_07: Pennington I'd made a mistake that we were actually from Virginia, not Pennsylvania.
30:13
SPEAKER_07: Which it turns out is the worst thing you can say in Maryland right now.
30:17
SPEAKER_07: There's an oyster war.
30:18
SPEAKER_07: An actual oyster war on the Potomac.
30:21
SPEAKER_07: There were shots in August in Virginia.
30:34
SPEAKER_07: Mr.
30:34
SPEAKER_07: Pennington gave me the book.
30:40
SPEAKER_07: Anyone wanted to read it?
30:47
SPEAKER_05: Every old parapact has a free list.
30:49
SPEAKER_05: Things that come in without you.
30:51
SPEAKER_05: Look for instruments.
30:52
SPEAKER_05: Look for the word philosophical apparatus.
30:55
SPEAKER_07: Philosophical what?
30:57
SPEAKER_05: Apparatus.
30:59
SPEAKER_05: What they used to call scientific instruments.
31:01
SPEAKER_05: Old federal parapacts all have a line for it.
31:04
SPEAKER_05: Philosophical apparatus.
31:05
SPEAKER_05: Imported for the use of any society incorporated for philosophical purposes.
31:11
SPEAKER_05: Look.
31:12
SPEAKER_01: For 11 seconds, there was nothing on the speaker but the soft rain and the sound of pages turning.
31:20
SPEAKER_01: Walt sat forward in his chair with his elbows on his knees and did not breathe.
31:28
SPEAKER_07: Philosophical apparatus, instruments, and books imported by a learned society incorporated for the advancement of useful knowledge, duty-free, upon a form declaration by the head of the society.
31:40
SPEAKER_07: It's section 48, subsection 12.
31:43
SPEAKER_01: Walt closed his eyes.
31:56
SPEAKER_05: Tell Mr.
31:56
SPEAKER_05: Pennington, the head of the learned society, will make the declaration himself.
32:00
SPEAKER_05: In person at 6 tomorrow morning, before the hearing.
32:16
SPEAKER_01: Fanny looked at him.
32:17
SPEAKER_01: Fammi looked at the legal pad in his lap with his neat column of numbers, the one in a trillion, and the cereal boxes, and the pattern machine.
32:28
SPEAKER_01: Then he tore off the top page, folded it in half, and put it in his pocket.
32:35
SPEAKER_02: I want to be clear that this does not change my position.
32:41
SPEAKER_02: Of course not.
32:42
SPEAKER_02: It's still almost certainly a coincidence.
32:46
SPEAKER_02: Almost certainly.
32:50
SPEAKER_02: Later, when nobody's looking.
32:54
SPEAKER_01: Walt slept for three hours on the couch in his office, under his overcoat, with his reading glasses still on.
33:02
SPEAKER_01: At five, he got up and washed his face in the men's room and put on a clean tie he kept in his desk for emergencies, the dark blue one with the small gold anchors that Patty had given him for their 25th anniversary.
33:16
SPEAKER_01: Then he sat at his desk and wrote out, by hand, on a yellow legal pad, a declaration.
33:25
SPEAKER_01: He wrote it four times.
33:27
SPEAKER_01: The first three were too long.
33:29
SPEAKER_01: He had been writing government documents for 41 years, and the hardest thing in the world he had learned was to say a true thing in a short space without lying and without telling the truth either.
33:43
SPEAKER_01: At 20 to 6, Gloria came in early, which she never did, with a thermos from home and her coat still buttoned.
33:52
SPEAKER_01: She stopped in his doorway and looked at him for a long moment over her glasses.
33:59
SPEAKER_09: That's your anniversary tie.
34:03
SPEAKER_05: I have an important meeting.
34:05
SPEAKER_09: At six in the morning?
34:07
SPEAKER_09: With who?
34:09
SPEAKER_05: A man from the revenue service.
34:11
SPEAKER_09: Lord help us here.
34:14
SPEAKER_09: Drink this.
34:16
SPEAKER_09: And Walt?
34:18
SPEAKER_09: Whatever it is, you be nice to him.
34:21
SPEAKER_09: People in the revenue get yelled at all day long.
34:25
SPEAKER_09: Nobody ever says thank you to the tax man.
34:29
SPEAKER_01: She set the thermos down on his yellow pad and went back out to her desk.
34:34
SPEAKER_01: And Walt sat looking at the thermos for a while.
34:38
SPEAKER_01: Then he picked up his pen and added one more line to the top of his declaration.
34:52
SPEAKER_01: At six o'clock, Walt Sobieski sat down at the gray receiver in the basement of the records annex in his anniversary tie with his yellow pad on his knee, and Femi opened the window.
35:10
SPEAKER_06: We are in the Revenue House.
35:12
SPEAKER_06: Deputy Collector Pennington is here with us, and he has agreed to a demonstration of the apparatus.
35:19
SPEAKER_06: Mr.
35:20
SPEAKER_06: Pennington, you may speak.
35:22
SPEAKER_06: Just talk toward the box.
35:25
SPEAKER_01: There was a pause.
35:26
SPEAKER_01: Then a man's voice came out of the speaker, slow and courteous, and very slightly suspicious.
35:33
SPEAKER_01: A soft old Maryland voice with the vowels of the tidewater in it.
35:38
SPEAKER_01: The voice of a man who had read every page of the manual and liked it.
35:44
SPEAKER_00: Good morning.
35:45
SPEAKER_00: This is Ezra Pennington, deputy collector of the revenue for the county of Prince George's in the state of Maryland.
35:54
SPEAKER_00: I'm informed that I am addressing the head of a learned society.
36:00
SPEAKER_00: Morning, Mr.
36:01
SPEAKER_00: Pennington.
36:02
SPEAKER_05: Walter Sobieski, Director of the Survey.
36:04
SPEAKER_05: I want to begin by thanking you for your patience with my people.
36:07
SPEAKER_05: And I want to say, as one public servant to another, that I respect your work.
36:11
SPEAKER_05: I've been filling up for them for 41 years.
36:14
SPEAKER_05: I know what it is to do a job right when nobody's watching.
36:18
SPEAKER_01: There was a pause on the line.
36:21
SPEAKER_00: As Stanley said, Mr.
36:22
SPEAKER_00: Sobieski, most people I deal with are trying to cheat me.
36:27
SPEAKER_00: I'm sure they aren't.
36:29
SPEAKER_00: This is a remarkable machine.
36:32
SPEAKER_00: You're a long way off, I take it.
36:35
SPEAKER_00: Other than I can easily explain.
36:37
SPEAKER_00: I won't ask you to.
36:39
SPEAKER_00: It is not my department.
36:42
SPEAKER_00: Your declaration, sir.
36:45
SPEAKER_01: Wolf looked down at his yellow pad and read.
36:48
SPEAKER_05: I Walter Sobieski, Director of the Survey, a Learned Society Incorporated for the Advancement of Useful Knowledge.
36:55
SPEAKER_05: Declare that the article now held by the revenue is a philosophical apparatus.
36:59
SPEAKER_05: Property of the survey imported for the purpose of survey only, and that it will be carried out of the state of Maryland again within one day.
37:06
SPEAKER_05: I so declared.
37:15
SPEAKER_00: It is since 1807.
37:18
SPEAKER_00: By act of Congress.
37:19
SPEAKER_00: Of Congress?
37:21
SPEAKER_00: A small one.
37:23
SPEAKER_00: Uh, yes, we still send them a man for the post office.
37:27
SPEAKER_01: Walt heard faintly, somewhere behind Pennington, the sound of Luis trying very hard not to laugh.
37:36
SPEAKER_00: And the declared value of the apparatus for my record.
37:40
SPEAKER_01: Walt looked at the gray receiver.
37:43
SPEAKER_01: He thought about the cost of the case, which was more than the building he was sitting in.
37:48
SPEAKER_01: He thought about what was inside it, and the 20 years of secrets that had gone into it, and the people who had gone through it and come home, and the ones who hadn't.
38:02
SPEAKER_05: Purposes of duty, Mr.
38:03
SPEAKER_05: Pennington Neil.
38:04
SPEAKER_05: For every other purpose, more than you or I will earn in our lives.
38:08
SPEAKER_01: There was a long silence on the line.
38:11
SPEAKER_01: Fammi looked at the stopwatch and held up ten fingers.
38:15
SPEAKER_00: I believe I understand you entirely, Mr.
38:19
SPEAKER_00: Sobieski.
38:20
SPEAKER_00: Section 48, subsection 12.
38:24
SPEAKER_00: Philosophical apparatus, free of duty.
38:28
SPEAKER_01: And then, across whatever lay between them, across the whole impossible distance from one world to another, Walt heard the most beautiful sound he had heard in 41 years of public service.
38:46
SPEAKER_00: It has been an honor, sir.
38:48
SPEAKER_00: My compliments to your The window closed.
38:53
SPEAKER_01: Walt sat back in the chair.
38:55
SPEAKER_01: Femi clicked the stopwatch and looked at it, and wrote ninety seconds in the log and underlined it twice, and then put down his pen and began to laugh helplessly, with his face in his hands.
39:12
SPEAKER_01: At noon the lamp on the receiver lit, and the hum came up in the vault, and three people and two gray cases appeared in the painted circle on the concrete floor, along with a strong smell of wet tobacco warehouses and wood smoke, and a paper bag that Luis was holding over his head like a trophy.
39:34
SPEAKER_01: Crab cakes from Maryland.
39:37
SPEAKER_05: The other Maryland.
39:39
SPEAKER_05: Luis, those have to go to quarantine.
39:42
SPEAKER_05: I know.
39:42
SPEAKER_05: I just wanted you to see them.
39:45
SPEAKER_01: In S set case one down on the concrete, there was a strip of red wax on its lid, broken, and pressed into the wax was a seal, with a little sheaf of tobacco leaves, and the words Revenue of Maryland around the edge.
40:00
SPEAKER_01: Hannah held out a sheet of heavy cream-colored paper in a clear plastic sample sleeve, because Clara had been very firm about sample sleeves.
40:11
SPEAKER_07: For you, he insisted.
40:14
SPEAKER_01: It was a printed form, filled in by hand in brown ink, in a beautiful old-fashioned script, certificate of exemption, one philosophical apparatus, the property of the survey, a learned society.
40:28
SPEAKER_01: Declared value for purposes of duty, nil, exempt under section 48, subsection twelve, and at the bottom the signature of Ezra Pennington, deputy collector, and under it, in the same brown ink, a single line, with the compliments of one public servant to another.
40:49
SPEAKER_01: Walt read it twice.
40:51
SPEAKER_01: Then he held it a moment longer than he needed to.
40:55
SPEAKER_01: What did you lose?
40:57
SPEAKER_06: The silver.
40:58
SPEAKER_06: Forty-one dimes, forfeited to the State of Maryland as counterfeit coin of a nation that does not exist.
41:06
SPEAKER_06: Mr.
41:07
SPEAKER_06: Pennington was very apologetic.
41:09
SPEAKER_06: He said it was out of his hands.
41:11
SPEAKER_06: It was a different section.
41:14
SPEAKER_05: And what did we get?
41:15
SPEAKER_07: The revenue schedule.
41:16
SPEAKER_07: All seven hundred pages.
41:18
SPEAKER_07: Two almanacs, seeds, four kinds of tobacco, and a wheat I've never heard of.
41:23
SPEAKER_07: A copy of the Maryland Gazette and the crab cakes, which Clara is going to take away from Luis in about 90 seconds.
41:30
SPEAKER_05: Over my dead body.
41:32
SPEAKER_09: That can be arranged.
41:34
SPEAKER_01: Clara had come in behind them in her plastic hood, holding out a sealed bin.
41:40
SPEAKER_01: Luis put the crab cakes in it with the air of a man burying a pet.
41:49
SPEAKER_01: The phone on Walt's desk rang at a quarter past twelve.
41:52
SPEAKER_01: It was Neil Ashby.
41:55
SPEAKER_03: Walt.
41:56
SPEAKER_03: I'm sorry I had to run last night.
41:59
SPEAKER_03: Look, I've been thinking about the markup, and I want to help you.
42:03
SPEAKER_03: I really do.
42:04
SPEAKER_03: But I need something.
42:05
SPEAKER_03: Anything, something the members can hold in their hands.
42:09
SPEAKER_01: Walt looked down at the certificate in its plastic sleeve on the blotter in front of him.
42:16
SPEAKER_05: Neil, as of this morning, I have an official document from a foreign government certifying that our most important piece of equipment is worth nothing at all.
42:24
SPEAKER_01: There was a long pause on the line.
42:27
SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry.
42:29
SPEAKER_03: What?
42:30
SPEAKER_05: I'll walk you through it.
42:31
SPEAKER_05: Do you have about 40 minutes?
42:32
SPEAKER_05: I'd like to start with the history of the tariff.
42:35
SPEAKER_01: Ashby, it turned out, had a one o'clock.
42:39
SPEAKER_01: When Walt hung up, Gloria was standing in his doorway with a pink invoice in her hand and a peculiar expression on her face.
42:49
SPEAKER_09: The coffee machine's fixed.
42:52
SPEAKER_09: The repairmen came while you were in the basement.
42:55
SPEAKER_09: It was a clog in the waterline.
42:59
SPEAKER_09: He said it's a common problem.
43:02
SPEAKER_05: Wonderful.
43:03
SPEAKER_05: Thank you, Gloria.
43:04
SPEAKER_09: I thought you'd want to see the bill.
43:08
SPEAKER_01: She laid it on the desk next to the certificate.
43:11
SPEAKER_01: Walt looked at it.
43:12
SPEAKER_01: At the bottom, under parts and labor, in blue ballpoint, was the total$48.12.
43:23
SPEAKER_01: Walt looked at the invoice for a long time.
43:26
SPEAKER_01: Then he picked up the phone and dialed the basement.
43:30
SPEAKER_04: Radio Room.
43:31
SPEAKER_04: Fanny, come up here.
43:32
SPEAKER_04: I need you to look at something.
43:34
SPEAKER_04: Is it a number?
43:36
SPEAKER_04: It's a number.
43:38
SPEAKER_04: There was a long silence on the line.
43:41
SPEAKER_02: I'm not coming up.
43:44
SPEAKER_02: Femi.
43:45
SPEAKER_02: I've decided I'm happier not knowing.
43:49
SPEAKER_01: Walt laughed.
43:50
SPEAKER_01: It started small and got bigger, and Gloria started laughing too, without knowing why.
43:56
SPEAKER_01: And down the hall, somebody poked their head out of an office to see what was going on in the director's office, which was a thing that had not happened in years.
44:06
SPEAKER_01: That afternoon, Walt took the certificate of exemption out of its sample sleeve, which Clara permitted after 72 hours and a good deal of argument, and had it framed at the frame shop on Route 4.
44:20
SPEAKER_01: He hung it on the wall behind his desk, next to his photograph with three presidents and his 25-year PIN.
44:27
SPEAKER_01: And for the rest of his career, whenever anyone asked about it, and people often did, Walt Sobieski would lean back in his chair and fold his hands over the Thursday cardigan and say only that it was the most valuable piece of paper the survey owned.
44:44
SPEAKER_01: Which was true, more or less, if you did not ask what else was on that circuit.
45:10
SPEAKER_01: Off the books.
45:11
SPEAKER_01: Dial setting 4.
45:13
SPEAKER_01: 30 hours on the ground.
45:16
SPEAKER_01: Brought home.
45:17
SPEAKER_01: One revenue schedule of the state of Maryland in 700 pages.
45:21
SPEAKER_01: Two almanacs, five packets of seed, one copy of the Maryland Gazette, and one certificate of exemption under section 48, subsection 12.
45:33
SPEAKER_01: Lost 41 silver dimes, forfeit as counterfeit coin of a nation that does not exist.
45:41
SPEAKER_01: Contact one money changer, one deputy collector, and one learned society.
45:48
SPEAKER_01: Seen, yes, officially, in triplicate.
45:52
SPEAKER_01: Disc, none set.
45:54
SPEAKER_01: Return odds as of this writing.
45:58
SPEAKER_01: One hit in eleven tries.
46:01
SPEAKER_01: Femi says, don't round it.