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Long Odds, Episode 5: Only Asking · Long Odds

• 0:12
  SPEAKER_01: Long odds, episode 5.
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: Only asking.
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: The Neil Ashby in Hannah Whitlock's world had never once in his life said he was only asking.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: He didn't ask.
• 0:24
  SPEAKER_01: He told.
• 0:26
  SPEAKER_01: He was 47 years old.
• 0:28
  SPEAKER_01: He had a voice like a desk drawer closing.
• 0:31
  SPEAKER_01: And at 20 minutes to three on a wet Thursday in October, he was sitting at a folding table in the vault, under the records annex outside Washington, telling the survey it had until half past four to live.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not asking, Walt, he said.
• 0:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm telling you.
• 0:47
  SPEAKER_00: Nineteen years of this.
• 0:49
  SPEAKER_00: Nineteen years of charge sales and cover companies, and a quarantine ward that's down in the books as furniture.
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: And what's on my desk to show for the last two?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: A better recipe for printer ink and a very nice photograph of a moose.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: It was an elk, said Walt Sobieski.
• 1:05
  SPEAKER_00: I don't care if it was a unicorn.
• 1:06
  SPEAKER_01: Hannah stood by the white circle painted on the concrete floor, with her hands folded in front of her, and tried to look like an asset.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: It was hard to look like an asset in a room like this.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: The vault had been built in the nineteen fifties to hold county deeds, and it still had the deeds idea of comfort, a steel door a foot thick, pale green walls, a hum of fluorescent lights, and a smell of concrete and old paper, and just at the moment, wet umbrellas.
• 1:39
  SPEAKER_01: Yesterday it had been nearly ninety degrees in the middle of October.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Today it was raining sideways, and the three people who held the program's money in their hands had come in out of it damp and annoyed, pulled off campaign trails they would much rather have been on.
• 1:58
  SPEAKER_01: There were three of them at the folding table Neil Ashby, the committee's staff director, who read every page and forgot nothing, Representative Teresa Quintero, who had been an Army lawyer for twelve years before she was anything else, and who asked questions the way a surgeon makes an incision, once and in the right place.
• 2:19
  SPEAKER_01: And Senator Harlan Bratton, seventy four, who had been on the committee since the beginning, who was not on the ballot this year, and had mentioned it twice already with deep satisfaction, and who was at that moment sneezing.
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_04: Then let me show you the rabbit, Walt said.
• 3:18
  SPEAKER_01: He said it quietly.
• 3:20
  SPEAKER_01: He was sixty three, with a navy cardigan over his shirt and reading glasses on a cord, and he had the patience of a man who had outlasted forty years of budget meetings by never once looking at the clock.
• 3:35
  SPEAKER_01: Hannah had worked for him for nine years.
• 3:38
  SPEAKER_01: She had never seen him gamble.
• 3:41
  SPEAKER_04: One hop, Walt said.
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_04: Dial one.
• 3:45
  SPEAKER_04: A world so close to this one you'd need a magnifying glass to find the difference.
• 3:50
  SPEAKER_04: She goes through, she's gone an hour, she brings back something with a date on it from a world where things went a little differently.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_04: A newspaper, a menu, a bus schedule, and at half past four you can hold it in your hands.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_00: Ashby looked at his watch.
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_04: And if she doesn't come back, then you'll have saved the cost of her salary.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_08: Thank you, Walt, Hannah said.
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_04: You're welcome, Hana.
• 4:17
  SPEAKER_01: Representative Quintero was looking at Hanna, not at Walt.
• 4:21
  SPEAKER_08: Is this safe, Miss Whitlock?
• 4:24
  SPEAKER_01: No, ma'am, Hanna said pleasantly.
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_08: But it's close.
• 4:27
  SPEAKER_01: There was nobody else to send.
• 4:30
  SPEAKER_01: That was the plain truth of it, and everyone in the room knew it.
• 4:34
  SPEAKER_01: The survey in Hanna's world was down to eleven people.
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: Ines Carvalho was in Alaska with the other team.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: Luis Ortega had retired to Chicago in June to look after his father.
• 4:47
  SPEAKER_01: The big, quiet man who used to carry both cases at once had taken a job with the Park Service in Montana.
• 4:54
  SPEAKER_01: And Owen Tate, the best field biologist the program had ever had, had quit in the spring.
• 5:01
  SPEAKER_01: He had said that one of these days they were going to bring home something nobody could cure, and he had decided he didn't want to be standing there when they did.
• 5:12
  SPEAKER_01: Now he taught tenth grade biology in Tacoma Park, and came home every night, smelling of chalk and formaldehyde, with stories about fifteen year olds who had never seen a frog's heartbeat.
• 5:26
  SPEAKER_01: Hannah had married him two years ago in April.
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: She turned the ring on her finger now without noticing she was doing it.
• 5:34
  SPEAKER_01: So it was Hannah, alone, with both cases stacked on a hand truck she had borrowed from the mailroom, because two cases always went, and there was nobody left to carry the second one.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: She tipped the hand truck back onto its wheels and rolled it into the middle of the white circle.
• 5:52
  SPEAKER_01: Case one on top, its little lamp dark.
• 5:56
  SPEAKER_01: Case two underneath.
• 5:58
  SPEAKER_01: She did not see the gray tail curled behind case two on the bottom shelf, because Budget, who knew the cases stayed warm for hours after a crossing, and had been sleeping on them for as long as anybody could remember, had gotten there first.
• 6:15
  SPEAKER_04: Dial one, Walt said.
• 6:17
  SPEAKER_08: Dial one, Hannah said, and said it.
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: And at four minutes to three, she turned the key.
• 6:28
  SPEAKER_01: The hum came up into her back teeth.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_01: The lamp went from amber to green.
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_01: Across the room, Senator Bratton stopped sneezing and sat forward.
• 6:39
  SPEAKER_01: Then the vault blinked.
• 6:49
  SPEAKER_01: It was the same room.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: That was the first thing, and for half a second it was the only thing.
• 6:55
  SPEAKER_01: She was standing in the white circle in a pale green vault under a records annex, with a hand truck in her hands, in front of a folding table with Walt and Neil Ashby, and two members of Congress sitting at it.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And she had the wild thought that the case had failed, and simply dropped her back where she started.
• 7:16
  SPEAKER_01: Like a woman who walks into a closet and walks straight out again.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_01: Then she saw that the table was against the wrong wall, and Walt was wearing the oatmeal cardigan, the one with the leather buttons, the one her Walt had given to Goodwill in twenty nineteen, and Neil Ashby was smiling.
• 7:36
  SPEAKER_01: In nine years, Hannah had never once seen Neil Ashby smile.
• 7:42
  SPEAKER_01: Walt had been in the middle of a sentence.
• 7:45
  SPEAKER_04: He had been standing beside the circle with one hand raised like a tour guide, saying And the one rule in this room older than I am is that nobody, under any circumstances, stands in the circle.
• 7:58
  SPEAKER_01: And then he had stopped, because somebody was standing in it.
• 8:04
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody said anything.
• 8:05
  SPEAKER_01: The fluorescent lights hummed.
• 8:08
  SPEAKER_01: On the folding table three umbrellas dripped.
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna had spent her whole life reading faces.
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_01: She had moved eleven times before she was fourteen, and in every new school she'd had about a day to work out who was dangerous, and she had gotten very good at it.
• 8:26
  SPEAKER_01: Walt Subieski's face was the one she knew best in the world after her husband's.
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: She read it now like a letter.
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_01: It said very clearly You are not my Hana.
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: My Hannah is somewhere else today, and I know exactly where.
• 8:44
  SPEAKER_01: And underneath that, in smaller print, for the love of God, don't say anything.
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_01: So she said the first thing that came into her head, in a voice she had once used on a loading dock in Baltimore.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_08: Delivery for Mr.
• 8:57
  SPEAKER_08: Sabieski?
• 8:59
  SPEAKER_01: There was a long pause.
• 9:00
  SPEAKER_01: She came out of the floor, said Senator Bratton.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: She did not come out of the floor, Senator, said Representative Quintero, very precisely.
• 9:10
  SPEAKER_08: She came out of the air.
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_01: And then something gray shot out from behind case two, hit the concrete running, crossed the vault in four bounds, sprang onto the folding table, walked straight down it through everybody's papers, and climbed into Senator Bratton's lap.
• 9:29
  SPEAKER_03: Oh no, said the Senator.
• 9:31
  SPEAKER_03: Oh no, no, no, I'm allergic to cats.
• 9:34
  SPEAKER_01: Budget, Hannah said, before she could stop herself.
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: Walt's face changed again.
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_01: She'd have done the same.
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_01: Nobody had ever walked into a closed hearing out of thin air before.
• 11:24
  SPEAKER_01: You didn't throw that away by explaining it.
• 11:27
  SPEAKER_01: She let go of the hand truck, smiled at the committee, and became their Hannah Whitlock.
• 11:33
  SPEAKER_08: Sorry about the cat, she said.
• 11:35
  SPEAKER_01: Clara swabbed her standing in the circle which took eleven seconds, and felt like an hour.
• 11:41
  SPEAKER_01: A long cotton swab up one nostril, and then the other, quick and practiced, with Clara's face close to hers the whole time.
• 11:50
  SPEAKER_01: It was Clara's face exactly, down to the reading glasses pushed up into her grey hair.
• 11:56
  SPEAKER_01: And the look in her eyes was the one Hannah's own Clara got when she was counting something she didn't like.
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: They heard the bolts go home on the other side.
• 13:08
  SPEAKER_01: Representative Quintero looked at her watch.
• 13:12
  SPEAKER_08: I have a debate at seven, she said.
• 13:14
  SPEAKER_01: To nobody in particular.
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_01: She had come for a bus schedule.
• 14:18
  SPEAKER_01: She was standing in a circle with a hand truck and nothing, and she had just lost the annex cat.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: Budget had settled on Senator Bratton's lap like a hot water bottle, eyes half closed, purring at a volume Hannah could hear from the circle.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, said Neil Ashby, setting his pen down on his legal pad with the air of a man settling in for the evening.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: We have forty five minutes, and we're all here.
• 14:46
  SPEAKER_00: Ms Whitlock, would you be willing to tell the members about your trip?
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_01: There is a trick to lying, and the trick is not to.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: Hannah had learned it at eleven years old in a school in Tucson, from a girl named Delphine, who could make a teacher believe anything at all by never saying a single word that wasn't true.
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: You tell the truth.
• 15:08
  SPEAKER_01: You just let people hear the wrong one.
• 15:10
  SPEAKER_01: She sat down on case one, because it was there.
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_08: I left from a room very much like this one.
• 15:18
  SPEAKER_01: She said.
• 15:28
  SPEAKER_08: And what was the difference?
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna looked at Neil Ashby, who was beaming at her with his pen ready.
• 15:34
  SPEAKER_08: The people are less friendly, she said.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_01: Oh dear, said Ashby.
• 15:39
  SPEAKER_08: Did you bring anything back?
• 15:40
  SPEAKER_08: A cat?
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_01: There was a pause.
• 15:42
  SPEAKER_01: The cat said Representative Quintero slowly.
• 15:46
  SPEAKER_08: Is from there.
• 15:47
  SPEAKER_01: The cat is from there, said Walt heavily, from his chair by the door, and he did not look at the cat.
• 15:55
  SPEAKER_01: Senators, said Clara's voice, faintly, from somewhere on the other side of the steel.
• 16:01
  SPEAKER_01: It turned out the door was not as thick as everybody had always assumed.
• 16:05
  SPEAKER_06: Please do not let that animal lick you.
• 16:08
  SPEAKER_01: The hearing went on.
• 16:10
  SPEAKER_01: It had been going on all afternoon before she got there, Hannah discovered, and she picked up its threads the way you pick up a conversation at a party by listening hard and saying very little.
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_01: She learned a great deal very fast.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_01: She learned that this survey had a quarantine doctor who had brought home a heart pill from a world next door.
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_01: Five little white pills that could keep something like three hundred people a day from dying of heart attacks, and that the pill could not be sold or proved or explained because a company in Baltimore had once decided it couldn't afford to make it properly.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_01: Her own program had never found anything like that.
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_01: Not once in nineteen years.
• 16:54
  SPEAKER_01: She thought of her Ashby and his photograph of a moose.
• 16:57
  SPEAKER_01: You found a cure, she said, before she could stop herself.
• 17:02
  SPEAKER_08: And you can't give it away?
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_01: It's very frustrating, Ashby said warmly.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_01: I'm so glad you see it.
• 17:08
  SPEAKER_01: She learned that this survey had a team out that very day, crossing from Nevada, and that Walt would not hear from them unless something went wrong.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: He said it twice.
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_01: The second time, he looked at the clock, and she learned about a railroad man.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was Representative Quintero who brought him up.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_01: She had a folder in front of her with a red tab on it, and she opened it the way you might open a casket.
• 17:35
  SPEAKER_08: Mr.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_08: Sobieski told us before you arrived, she said to Hannah, that one of your colleagues may have carried our flu into a world that has never once seen it.
• 17:44
  SPEAKER_08: An old man in a locomotive cab in a railroad town with a night train to everywhere.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_08: We don't know whether anyone over there got sick.
• 17:51
  SPEAKER_08: We'll probably never know.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: She closed the folder.
• 17:55
  SPEAKER_08: So I'll ask you what I asked him.
• 17:57
  SPEAKER_08: Before you went through that circle today, were you screened?
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_08: Were you tested to make sure you weren't carrying anything out?
• 18:03
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna opened her mouth and found she had nothing to put in it.
• 18:07
  SPEAKER_01: She thought of the senator in her own world, sneezing at his own folding table.
• 18:13
  SPEAKER_01: Of the hand she had shaken on the way into the annex that morning, the security guard with the cold.
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_01: Of every crossing she had ever made.
• 18:24
  SPEAKER_01: Nineteen of them, and every single swab she had ever had.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_01: Everyone taken afterward.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: On the way home.
• 18:34
  SPEAKER_01: Never once on the way out.
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: It had never occurred to anybody.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: It had never occurred to her.
• 18:41
  SPEAKER_08: Not today.
• 18:42
  SPEAKER_01: She said.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_01: Why not?
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna told the truth, because it was the only thing she had.
• 18:47
  SPEAKER_08: Nobody ever told me we should.
• 18:49
  SPEAKER_01: The room was very quiet.
• 18:51
  SPEAKER_01: On the senator's lap, the cat purred.
• 18:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's my fault, said Walt from the door.
• 18:58
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah didn't know which Walt he meant, and she wasn't sure he did either.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_01: Representative Quintero looked at him for a long moment and wrote something down.
• 19:09
  SPEAKER_01: Walt has a new procedure, Ashby said smoothly, into the silence.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: Three days in quarantine before anybody goes out.
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's very expensive.
• 19:18
  SPEAKER_00: It's one of the things we came out here to discuss.
• 19:20
  SPEAKER_01: And he's paying for it hell, said Senator Bratton.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: Walt took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah knew what was coming.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_01: Because her own Walt did exactly the same thing before exactly the same story.
• 19:49
  SPEAKER_03: Furniture.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_04: Occupational wellness furniture.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Bratton looked at him with something close to respect.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_03: I've been signing checks for a magic trick for nineteen years, he said.
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_03: And it turns out the trick was furniture.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna had heard that line once already today.
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: She kept her face very still.
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: At half past three, Neil Ashby turned to a fresh page.
• 20:32
  SPEAKER_01: There was no stenographer in a closed session, he had explained earlier, cheerfully.
• 20:38
  SPEAKER_01: There was no recording of any kind.
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_01: There was Neil Ashby and a pad of yellow paper, and the yellow paper went into a safe, and in nineteen years, nothing that went into that safe had ever come out again.
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: For the record, he said, Since you're a witness now, I should take down your full name.
• 20:57
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah, who had been Hannah Whitlock for thirty-one years, and something else for two, and who had introduced herself at faculty potlucks and doctors' offices and her mother-in-law's church for every day of those two years, said it the way she always said it now.
• 21:17
  SPEAKER_01: Automatically, proudly, without thinking at all.
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_08: Hanna Whitlock Tate.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_01: Ashby's pen stopped.
• 21:32
  SPEAKER_01: He looked at the name on the page.
• 21:34
  SPEAKER_01: Then he looked up at her, and he was still smiling.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_01: But it was a different smile now.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_01: Interested and careful.
• 21:43
  SPEAKER_01: The smile of a man who has read every file in the building twice.
• 21:48
  SPEAKER_01: Tate, he said.
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_01: The room had gone silent.
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_01: Even the cat had stopped purring.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Dr.
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_01: Tate is single, Ashby said gently.
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's in his file.
• 21:58
  SPEAKER_00: It's in yours.
• 21:59
  SPEAKER_00: I read them both last.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_00: Last night.
• 22:00
  SPEAKER_01: He tilted his head.
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_01: Is there something I've missed?
• 22:03
  SPEAKER_01: Representative Quintero had turned in her chair.
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_01: She was looking at Walt.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_01: He nodded toward Hanna, sitting on case one in the circle.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_04: This young woman is from a world one notch over, diesel woman, same date, same spot, same room.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_04: She left from a vault exactly like this one twenty minutes before she got here in front of a committee exactly like this one.
• 23:29
  SPEAKER_04: She has her own program, her own director, her own Neil.
• 23:32
  SPEAKER_01: He paused.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_04: I let you believe she was ours because nobody has ever walked into one of these hearings out of thin air before.
• 23:40
  SPEAKER_04: And I wanted you to see it.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_04: That was wrong of me.
• 23:44
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry.
• 23:45
  SPEAKER_01: There was a silence so complete that Hanna could hear the fluorescent tubes ticking.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_03: Then Senator Bratton said slowly, Is there another me over there?
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_08: Yes, Senator, Hannah said.
• 23:58
  SPEAKER_08: He sneezes too.
• 24:00
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'll be.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_01: The Senator looked down at the cat in his lap, as if it had personally deceived him.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_03: And which way is he voting over there?
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_03: Hanna looked at the clock.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: Twenty-six minutes to four.
• 24:14
  SPEAKER_08: To shut us down, she said.
• 24:16
  SPEAKER_08: At half past four, that's why I came.
• 24:19
  SPEAKER_08: My waltz sent me to bring back anything at all from another world, so they'd have something to hold in their hands.
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_08: A bus schedule, a menu.
• 24:27
  SPEAKER_01: She spread her empty hands.
• 24:29
  SPEAKER_08: Your senator says he's been signing checks for a magic trick for 19 years.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_01: That's my lines, said Senator Bratton.
• 24:36
  SPEAKER_08: I know, Senator.
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_08: I've heard it twice today.
• 24:39
  SPEAKER_01: Representative Quintero had not moved.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: She was looking at Walt with the expression of a lawyer who has just found the one document in the box that changes everything.
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_08: Did you know?
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_08: She said that there were others.
• 24:53
  SPEAKER_04: Suspected Walt said.
• 24:55
  SPEAKER_04: We've seen signs in the near ones, never one of them in my own room.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_08: How many?
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_01: Quintero turned to Hanna.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_08: How many programs are there?
• 25:06
  SPEAKER_08: I don't know, ma'am.
• 25:07
  SPEAKER_08: Twenty minutes ago I thought we were the only one.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_01: Quintero sat back.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: She looked at the red tab on her folder, and at the white circle on the floor, and at the hand truck.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah watched her change her mind in the space of about three seconds.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: Which was something she had never in her life seen a member of Congress do.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_08: I came out here this afternoon, Quintero said.
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_08: Intending to vote to close this program.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_08: I want that on the record, Neil.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_08: I think what we may have done to that railroad man is unforgivable, and I think we should stop before we do it again.
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_01: She tapped the folder.
• 25:44
  SPEAKER_08: But if there are others, then shutting ours down doesn't close the door.
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_08: It just means we're not the ones standing next to it when somebody comes through.
• 25:51
  SPEAKER_01: That's very well put, said Ashby softly.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_08: I didn't say it for you.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: Ashby had been quiet through all of this.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: Hannah had been watching him the way you watch a kettle.
• 26:02
  SPEAKER_01: He sat with his pen poised over the yellow page, and his face had gone thoughtful and soft and very far away.
• 26:11
  SPEAKER_01: And she knew that look too, from the other side.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_01: Her Ashby got it when he was deciding what to cut.
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_01: Ms.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: Whitlock, he said at last, Mrs.
• 26:22
  SPEAKER_00: Tate, whichever you prefer.
• 26:24
  SPEAKER_00: How many people know about your program?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: Over there?
• 26:27
  SPEAKER_00: Hanna stared at him.
• 26:35
  SPEAKER_01: At that moment, the bolts went back on the vault door, with a run of heavy clunks, and the door swung open.
• 26:43
  SPEAKER_01: And Clara Benning came in with a sheet of paper in her hand, and her reading glasses on her nose.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_06: That's the second time this week, Clara said.
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_06: That your first question about something was how many people know about it?
• 26:57
  SPEAKER_00: It's a very good question, Clara, Ashby said.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_06: It's the only question you ever ask first.
• 27:03
  SPEAKER_01: Clara looked around the room, at Walt standing in front of the table, at Quintero turned in her chair, at the Senator with a cat in his lap.
• 27:13
  SPEAKER_01: At all their faces.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_06: What did I miss?
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: There's another me, said Senator Bratton.
• 27:20
  SPEAKER_01: Clara looked at Hannah for a long moment over her reading glasses.
• 27:25
  SPEAKER_01: Then she looked at Walt.
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_01: Oh sh she said.
• 27:29
  SPEAKER_06: Well that's a relief.
• 27:30
  SPEAKER_06: I thought I was the only one who'd noticed.
• 27:33
  SPEAKER_01: She held up the paper.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_06: She's clean, same flue panel as anybody in this county, and nothing on it.
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_06: As far as Gary can tell, she's us, give or take.
• 27:44
  SPEAKER_01: She glanced down at the cat.
• 27:46
  SPEAKER_06: I'm not running the cat, I don't have a swab that small.
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_06: Who's Gary?
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: said Hannah.
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_06: My ex husband, said Clara.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_06: Also a machine.
• 27:55
  SPEAKER_01: Neil Ashby asked his question again, after that, more carefully.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah answered it because there was no reason not to.
• 28:04
  SPEAKER_01: Eleven people.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: One committee.
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Her Neil.
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_01: And you're Neil?
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: Ashby said.
• 28:11
  SPEAKER_01: Is the one who wants to close it?
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_08: Yes.
• 28:14
  SPEAKER_01: Something crossed his face that Hannah had never in her life expected to see on Neil Ashby's face.
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_01: In any world.
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: He looked hurt.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: I have never he said wanted to close anything in my life.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_08: I know.
• 28:29
  SPEAKER_00: Hannah said.
• 28:30
  SPEAKER_08: Mine doesn't smile either.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_00: What does he sound like?
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_01: She shouldn't have.
• 28:35
  SPEAKER_01: She knew she shouldn't.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: But she had been doing voices since she was eleven.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Neil Ashby had asked her a direct question.
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: And she had every cover specialist's weakness for an audience.
• 28:48
  SPEAKER_01: She sat up straight, on case one, set her jaw, and dropped her voice into a flat, tired, closing drawer.
• 28:57
  SPEAKER_08: I'm not asking, Walt, I'm telling you.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Bratton laughed so hard he frightened the cat.
• 29:03
  SPEAKER_01: Ashby didn't laugh.
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_01: He sat looking at her, pale.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: That's very good, he said finally.
• 29:10
  SPEAKER_00: And that's horrible.
• 29:11
  SPEAKER_00: Do I really sound like that?
• 29:12
  SPEAKER_00: He does.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_08: He sounds.
• 29:14
  SPEAKER_01: Said Representative Quintero, writing something down.
• 29:18
  SPEAKER_08: Like a man I'd like to meet.
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: At 10 to 4, Walt picked up the old black telephone on the receive console against the wall.
• 29:26
  SPEAKER_01: The one that only ever rang for Cam's windows, and dialed a number from memory.
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_04: Fammi, he said.
• 29:40
  SPEAKER_04: I know you've got a favor, I know.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_04: I'm sorry.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_04: Listen, there's someone here who'd like to talk to you about return odds.
• 29:49
  SPEAKER_01: He put it on the speaker.
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_01: The voice that came out was thick and hoarse and suspicious.
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_02: Walt, if this is Neil asking me to round something.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm only listening, Femi, said Ashby.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_08: Dr.
• 30:02
  SPEAKER_08: Adaemi, Hanna said.
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_08: I'm from one notch over.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_08: What do you want to know?
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: The silence on the line went on so long that Walt checked the receiver.
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_01: What are your odds?
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: Femi said at last.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_01: His voice had changed completely.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_02: Going back to a known signature, what are your odds?
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_08: One in nine.
• 30:23
  SPEAKER_01: Nine.
• 30:24
  SPEAKER_01: He said it the way another man might say the name of a woman.
• 30:28
  SPEAKER_02: Ours are one in eleven.
• 30:30
  SPEAKER_02: Nine.
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_02: How?
• 30:32
  SPEAKER_02: What's different?
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_02: What does your return engineer do?
• 30:37
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know, Hana said honestly.
• 30:40
  SPEAKER_08: I'm the cover specialist.
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_08: I do voices.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_08: He talks about it at parties, though, our Femi.
• 30:45
  SPEAKER_08: He has a phrase.
• 30:46
  SPEAKER_08: He says the cells like the cold.
• 30:49
  SPEAKER_01: Another long silence.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_01: The cells like the cold.
• 30:53
  SPEAKER_01: Femi repeated slowly.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_08: That's all I know.
• 30:57
  SPEAKER_08: He says it after his second beer, and then my husband asks him what it means, and he says he'll tell us when he's sure.
• 31:02
  SPEAKER_02: Is he sure?
• 31:04
  SPEAKER_08: He's never sure.
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_08: He hates rounding.
• 31:07
  SPEAKER_01: Femi made a noise that might have been a laugh or a sob.
• 31:10
  SPEAKER_02: Good.
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_02: Good, Walt.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_02: Walt, write down her dial.
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_02: Dial one.
• 31:17
  SPEAKER_02: I want a number for her, Walt, whether we ever see it again or not.
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_02: 297.
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_02: I'm writing it down.
• 31:25
  SPEAKER_04: And ask her Femi.
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: Walt said gently.
• 31:29
  SPEAKER_04: Go back to bed.
• 31:30
  SPEAKER_01: He hung up.
• 31:31
  SPEAKER_01: Hannah watched him stand by the console with his hand on the receiver.
• 31:35
  SPEAKER_01: The way her own Walt stood after every phone call that mattered, as though the phone might change its mind.
• 31:42
  SPEAKER_01: Then she watched him cross to the folding table and stop beside the senator and looked down at the cat.
• 31:49
  SPEAKER_01: Budget had decided, at some point in the last half hour, that she was finished with Senator Bratton.
• 31:56
  SPEAKER_01: She stood up, stretched every gray inch of herself, stepped down off the senator's knees onto the table, walked the length of it through everybody's papers, and climbed into Walt's chair a moment before he sat down in it, so that when he did sit, he sat down around her.
• 32:15
  SPEAKER_01: She arranged herself in his lap and began to purr.
• 32:19
  SPEAKER_01: Walt didn't move.
• 32:21
  SPEAKER_01: He sat looking down at her with his hands lifted a little away from her, as though she were something that might break.
• 32:28
  SPEAKER_08: She doesn't like anyone but Walt, Hannah said.
• 32:32
  SPEAKER_08: Mine, I mean.
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_08: She sleeps on the cases because they stay warm, and the rest of the time she sits on Walt.
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: We had her too, Walt said.
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna didn't say anything.
• 32:43
  SPEAKER_01: He would get there.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_04: Budget.
• 32:45
  SPEAKER_04: Same torn ear.
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_04: She came with the building.
• 32:50
  SPEAKER_04: The year we moved in.
• 32:53
  SPEAKER_04: She slept on the cases after every crossing because they stay warm for hours.
• 32:59
  SPEAKER_04: I'd come in at six in the morning and find her on case two like a hand on an egg.
• 33:04
  SPEAKER_01: He touched the torn ear very lightly with one finger.
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_04: She died in March.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_04: Kidneys.
• 33:12
  SPEAKER_04: She was 19.
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_04: I buried her by the loading dock in a box that used to hold printer paper.
• 33:18
  SPEAKER_08: I'm sorry.
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: Hannah said.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: He stroked the cat once, from her head to the end of her tail, and Budget pushed her head up into his hand.
• 33:28
  SPEAKER_01: In yours, she's all right.
• 33:30
  SPEAKER_08: In mine she bit a senator in August.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: Which senator?
• 33:33
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna looked at Senator Bratton.
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Bratton looked at the cat.
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_03: Oh, that's fair.
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_03: The Senator said.
• 33:41
  SPEAKER_03: That's very fair.
• 33:49
  SPEAKER_01: At four o'clock, by the clock over the vault door, Neil Ashby took a fresh sheet of the committee's yellow paper and said, I'd like to write a letter.
• 33:58
  SPEAKER_01: To whom?
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: said Walt.
• 34:00
  SPEAKER_01: To Neil.
• 34:01
  SPEAKER_01: There was a pause.
• 34:02
  SPEAKER_06: You're going to write a letter to yourself, said Clara.
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to write a letter to a man who wants to close a program that a member of this committee has just told us we can't afford to close.
• 34:11
  SPEAKER_01: Ashby said reasonably.
• 34:13
  SPEAKER_00: And who won't believe a word, misses Tate tells him?
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Because I wouldn't either if I were him, which I am.
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_00: He uncapped his pen.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: But he'll believe me.
• 34:22
  SPEAKER_00: Would everyone mind turning around?
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_00: There's something I have to say that only he would know.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: They turned around.
• 34:28
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Bratton turned around with some difficulty and a great deal of grumbling.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna turned and looked at the pale green wall, and listened to Neil Ashby's pen moving across the paper.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Quick and then slow and then quick again and once stopping altogether for a long time.
• 34:52
  SPEAKER_01: When they turned back, he was sealing it into one of the annex's brown interoffice envelopes.
• 34:58
  SPEAKER_01: On the front, in neat block capitals, he had written for Neil from Neil.
• 35:07
  SPEAKER_01: You'll give it to him yourself?
• 35:09
  SPEAKER_01: He said to Hannah.
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_00: Into his hand?
• 35:11
  SPEAKER_08: Into his hand.
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you.
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_01: He held it out to her, and then held on to it a moment longer than he needed to.
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_00: Mrs.
• 35:19
  SPEAKER_00: Tate.
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: Is he happy?
• 35:21
  SPEAKER_01: Over there?
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna thought about her Neil Ashby, who ate lunch alone at his desk every day out of a paper bag, and had never once in nine years asked anybody how they were.
• 35:32
  SPEAKER_08: I don't think so, she said.
• 35:35
  SPEAKER_01: Ashby nodded, as though she had told him the weather, and let go of the envelope.
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: After that, the vault turned into something like a post office.
• 35:44
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Bratton, who announced that he had never written a letter to himself and wasn't about to start, wrote one anyway, slowly, in a big looping hand, and read it out loud as he folded it, because he said he wasn't ashamed of a word.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_03: Harlan, listen to the young lady and call your brother.
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_03: It's been eleven years, and neither one of us is getting any younger.
• 36:12
  SPEAKER_03: Harlan.
• 36:13
  SPEAKER_03: He looked up.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_03: Well it's true.
• 36:15
  SPEAKER_03: He probably hasn't called his either.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: Representative Quintero refused.
• 36:22
  SPEAKER_01: She said she knew exactly what she would say to herself, and that she would never listen to it.
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_01: So what was the point?
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: Then, while the others were talking, she wrote one line on a slip of paper and handed it to Hannah folded small, and Hanna read it later.
• 36:40
  SPEAKER_01: It said Tell them to change the locks.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_08: In the rain, with a pawpaw.
• 37:24
  SPEAKER_08: He said it was the only fruit native to North America that tastes like it came from somewhere else, and he thought I'd appreciate that.
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_01: She smiled in spite of herself.
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_08: He was very nervous.
• 37:35
  SPEAKER_08: He told four jokes first.
• 37:37
  SPEAKER_08: They were all terrible.
• 37:38
  SPEAKER_01: Clara laughed once out loud.
• 37:41
  SPEAKER_08: Does yours tell terrible jokes?
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna said.
• 37:44
  SPEAKER_08: Worst in the building.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_08: And does she pretend she doesn't think they're funny?
• 37:48
  SPEAKER_08: She does.
• 37:50
  SPEAKER_08: She isn't pretending.
• 37:51
  SPEAKER_06: I know.
• 37:52
  SPEAKER_01: Clara said.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_01: She was quiet a moment.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_06: Heirs haven't figured it out yet, either one of them.
• 37:58
  SPEAKER_06: Don't tell her.
• 37:59
  SPEAKER_06: It's none of my business.
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_06: That's never stopped you, Hanna said.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_01: Clara looked at her over her glasses, a long, startled, rueful look.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah knew she had gotten it exactly right.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: The way you know when you've hit a note.
• 38:17
  SPEAKER_06: It hasn't.
• 38:18
  SPEAKER_01: Then, more quietly, so that only Hannah could hear Tell your Walt something for me.
• 38:25
  SPEAKER_06: Swab them on the way out.
• 38:27
  SPEAKER_06: On the way out On the way out, every one of them, every time.
• 38:32
  SPEAKER_06: Tell him a doctor one notch over learned it the hard way.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_01: Clara stepped back to the edge of the circle.
• 38:38
  SPEAKER_01: Under her breath, so low that Hannah almost didn't catch it, she said forty three And Hannah had no idea what she meant, and didn't ask.
• 38:49
  SPEAKER_01: At the folding table the members voted.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_01: They did it the old way, out loud, because there was nobody to count it any other way.
• 38:58
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Bratton went first.
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: He said he had come out here in the rain to cut a magic trick, and the magic trick had walked in with a hand truck and a cat, and he was seventy four years old, and he knew when he had seen the rabbit.
• 39:13
  SPEAKER_01: Fund it.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Representative Quintero said fund it and fund the screening, and she wanted it on the record, in Neil's own handwriting, that as of this afternoon the committee knew it was not the only one with a door.
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: Neil Ashby said so noted, and wrote it down.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah saw that he wrote something else underneath it, very small, and did not read it out.
• 39:39
  SPEAKER_01: Walt, Ashby said, capping his pen.
• 39:41
  SPEAKER_00: Her committee.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_00: If they keep it open over there, do you think we'd ever be able to talk to them?
• 39:46
  SPEAKER_00: Committee to committee?
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_04: I don't know, Neil.
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: Only asking, Ashby said, and smiled.
• 39:54
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah thought about that smile for a long time afterward, and was never quite sure what it meant.
• 40:00
  SPEAKER_01: At twenty past four, she stood in the circle with her hand on the key, four envelopes in the inside pocket of her jacket, a hand truck, two cases, no bus schedule, no menu, no newspaper with a date on it.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_01: From a world where things went a little differently, just the letters, and whatever the people one notch over would make of them.
• 40:25
  SPEAKER_07: Budget, she said.
• 40:27
  SPEAKER_01: The cat did not move from Walt's lap.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: She opened one yellow eye and closed it again.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_08: Budget, come on, we're late.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: Walt started to stand to lift the cat, and Budget put out every claw she owned into the knees of his trousers and held on.
• 41:42
  SPEAKER_01: Representative Quintero already on her feet with her coat on, looking at her watch.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_01: Neil Ashby, smiling.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_08: Thank you, she said.
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_08: All of you, I'll tell them.
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_01: Tell them we said hello, said Senator Bratton.
• 41:57
  SPEAKER_01: She turned the key.
• 42:02
  SPEAKER_01: The hum came up into her back teeth.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_01: The lamp went green.
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_01: Across the room, a gray cat lifted her head off a man's knee and watched, with interest, as the circle emptied.
• 42:15
  SPEAKER_01: Then the vault blinked.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_01: It was the same room.
• 42:27
  SPEAKER_01: The table was on the right wall.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: The cardigan was navy, and Neil Ashby, at the folding table, had his watch in his hand, and his mouth set in the line it had been in for nine years, and he did not smile.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_01: Six minutes, Walt, he said.
• 42:45
  SPEAKER_01: You cut it fine.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_04: Hannah.
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_01: Her Walt was out of his chair.
• 42:49
  SPEAKER_04: Are you all right?
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_04: You're all right.
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_04: What did you bring?
• 42:53
  SPEAKER_01: She stepped out of the circle, walked to the folding table, took the brown interoffice envelope out of her jacket, and held it out to Neil Ashby.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_08: This is for you, sh she said.
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_08: Into your hand, I promised.
• 43:06
  SPEAKER_01: He looked at it.
• 43:08
  SPEAKER_01: For Neil.
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_01: From Neil.
• 43:12
  SPEAKER_01: Something moved in his face.
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_01: A small involuntary flinch, the look of a man who sees his own handwriting where it has no business being.
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_01: Is this a joke, Walt?
• 43:23
  SPEAKER_01: I have no idea what it is, said her Walt, truthfully.
• 43:26
  SPEAKER_01: Ashby opened it.
• 43:27
  SPEAKER_01: He read the first lines and stopped, and read them again.
• 43:32
  SPEAKER_01: And Hannah watched the color go out of his face exactly the way it had gone out of the other ones.
• 43:38
  SPEAKER_01: Then, without seeming to know he was doing it, he read a little of it aloud, in a voice gone thin and strange.
• 43:46
  SPEAKER_00: Neil, you'll want to know how you can be sure this is from me.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: Biscuit didn't run away.
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_00: You left the gate open.
• 43:54
  SPEAKER_00: You were nine.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: You've checked every gate you've walked through since, and you have never told a living soul.
• 44:01
  SPEAKER_01: He stopped reading aloud.
• 44:03
  SPEAKER_01: His lips went on moving.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: Senator Bratton and Representative Quintero, the ones on this side, the ones in this room, sat very still.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_01: In the corner, Hannah noticed nobody was sneezing.
• 44:18
  SPEAKER_01: Neil Ashby read to the bottom of the page.
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_01: Then he folded the letter carefully along its creases, put it back in its envelope, and put the envelope inside his jacket against his chest.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: He looked up at Walt.
• 44:31
  SPEAKER_01: Walt, he said.
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: He cleared his throat and started again.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: Walt, I'm only asking.
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: Every head in the room turned toward him.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: How soon?
• 44:41
  SPEAKER_01: said Neil Ashby.
• 44:42
  SPEAKER_01: Can she go back?
• 44:43
  SPEAKER_01: Her Walt looked at her.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: Hannah looked at her Walt.
• 44:48
  SPEAKER_01: Then he looked down at the hand truck, at the empty shelf behind case two.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: And his eyebrows went up.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: Hanna thought of a man in an oatmeal cardigan, sitting very still with his hands held a little away from something that might break.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_08: She found a better seat.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: She said, There was no crossing from here today.
• 45:11
  SPEAKER_01: One came the other way.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: World 297.
• 45:16
  SPEAKER_01: Dial one, as Walt wrote it down for Femi.
• 45:19
  SPEAKER_01: A world one notch over, with its own survey, its own committee, and its own Neil Ashby.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: One visitor, 88 minutes in the room, with two cases on a hand truck.
• 45:32
  SPEAKER_01: Left behind, one gray tabby cat with a torn ear.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: On Clara's cot for 72 hours.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Taken back, four envelopes.
• 45:42
  SPEAKER_01: Return odds at dial two.
• 45:44
  SPEAKER_01: One hit in 11.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: One notch over, they say one in nine.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: And their Femi says the cells like the cold.
• 45:52
  SPEAKER_01: And somewhere one notch over, a case now knows our address.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: You have been listening to Long Odds, Episode 5, Only Asking.