The Chamber had to decide where the disc would go, and Tallow had written the question three times before he was allowed to ask it.
The first version was too long. It had clauses in it, and a reference to the Foundation’s own counting-board, and a parenthesis that said (see also the Chest-book, page four, where the figure is given as nine hundred and ninety-nine by Ysra’s count and by the wheel). He struck it out. The second version was too kind. It began with the word perhaps, and Tallow had never once in his life let a question begin with a word that did not know what it wanted. He struck that out too. The third version was short, and he read it aloud to the Chamber in the Great Hall at the evening candle-clock, with the lamps lit along the walls and the nine seats filled and Jory Fenn sitting at the back of the room on a lodger’s stool with his hat on his knee.
“Does the thousandth token go into the Chest now,” said Tallow, “with the nine hundred and ninety-nine, or does it wait?”
Gaunt objected at once. It was the first word he had spoken since the Chamber opened, and it was the word he always spoke first, which Tallow had long ago decided was a kind of prayer.
