off for one of his spells of
sleep he tried to leave his desk clear of work, and each time that he
crawled back sticky-eyed and aching, it was to find that another shower of
paper cylinders had covered the desk like a snowdrift, halfburying the
speakwrite and overflowing on to the floor, so that the first job was
always to stack them into a neat enough pile to give him room to work. What
was worst of all was that the work was by no means purely mechanical. Often
it was enough merely to substitute one name for another, but any detailed
report of events demanded care and imagination. Even the geographical
knowledge that one needed in transferring the war from one part of the
world to another was considerable.
By the third day his eyes ached unbearably and his spectacles needed
wiping every few minutes. It was like struggling with some crushing
physical task, something which one had the right to refuse and which one
was nevertheless neurotically anxious to accomplish. In so far as he had
time to remember it, he was not troubled by the fact that every word he
murmured into the speakwrite, every stroke of his ink-pencil, was a
deliberate lie. He was as anxious as anyone else in the Department that the
forgery should be perfect. On the morning of the sixth day the dribble of
cylinders slowed down. For as much as half an hour nothing came out of the
tube; then one more cylinder, then nothing. Everywhere at about the same
time the work was easing off. A deep and as it were secret sigh went
through the Department. A mighty deed, which could never be mentioned, had
been achieved. It was now impossible for any human being to prove by
documentary evidence that the war with Eu

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