[Captain Infinity]

the
figure down to fifty-seven millions, so as to allow for the usual claim
that the quota had been overfulfilled. In any case, sixty-two millions was
no nearer the truth than fifty-seven millions, or than 145 millions. Very
likely no boots had been produced at all. Likelier still, nobody knew how
many had been produced, much less cared. All one knew was that every
quarter astronomical numbers of boots were produced on paper, while perhaps
half the population of Oceania went barefoot. And so it was with every
class of recorded fact, great or small. Everything faded away into a
shadow-world in which, finally, even the date of the year had become
uncertain.
Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the
other side a small, precise-looking, dark-chinned man named Tillotson was
working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth
very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of trying to
keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He
looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston's
direction.
Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was
employed on. People in the Records Department did not readily talk about
their jobs. In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles
and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into
speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know
by name, though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or
gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to
him the little woman with sandy hair toiled day in day out, simply at
tracking down and deleting from the Press the nam