At the back of the Cradle, past the last of the ten rows and beyond the lamp’s niche, there was a clerk’s alcove. It was a small square room with a plain stone floor and a single high slit of a window that let in no light at all, and it held a table, a stool, a stand for a second lamp, and a bound book lying open on the table as though someone had only just stepped out and would be back directly. Tallow had seen the alcove from the far end of the room. He had looked at it for some time before he went to it, the way a clerk looks at a page he is afraid to turn.
He sat down on the stool, because his legs had decided for him. The stool was the right height. It had been made for a man of his size, and he thought that was either an accident or a kindness, and that he did not know which he would prefer.
The book was the pour-book. He knew it at once, from the title written in the Ink on the first leaf, in a neat round hand that he recognised with a small cold shock as a hand very like his own. Pour-Book of the Cradle, the Foundation Wage-Hall, Tallowmere Vessel-Pit. Begun in the Year of the Foundation’s First Lease. Under the title, in the same hand, was a single line that did not seem to belong to the…
