Field B

Field B is a Status Field of the second designation, registered with the Directorate of Field Verification as Holding 40-B and entered on the Field Ledgers under the same seal as its neighbours Field A and Field E. It occupies the whole of Floor 203, a circular chamber whose perimeter instruments return two different figures depending on whether the survey is taken at knee height or at the height of a standing clerk. The Directorate has not resolved which figure is correct and, per Ninth Concordance, Annex 2, is not obliged to.

Field B is the smallest of the Status Fields and the only one whose boundary has never been walked end to end, on the grounds that the walk has been completed twice and returned two incompatible lengths.

Registration and early survey

The field was opened for survey in the winter of the year recorded in the Directorate's day-book as 14 after the renumbering, when a party of six under the clerk Ottiline Marrow was sent to establish whether Floor 203 held anything worth a holding number. Marrow's report of the third day is the earliest document in the field's file and remains the most cited:

"The field admits the party without resistance and returns them at a point thirteen paces from where they entered. I do not say thirteen paces from the entrance. I say from where they entered, which on the third attempt was not the entrance."

— Marrow Report on Floor 203, folio 6 recto

Marrow recommended immediate registration, noting that an unregistered field of indeterminate perimeter is a liability to the Ledgers and an embarrassment to the Directorate. The recommendation was granted in the same year, and the holding was numbered 40-B — the "40" inherited from a block of holdings whose first thirty-nine entries were later found to describe the same room.

Behaviour under assessment

Field B undergoes Field Assessment on a nine-year cycle, a schedule set by the Directorate in preference to the four-year cycle used for Central Field, because Field B's properties degrade after prolonged instrument contact and require a full recovery interval before readings can be trusted again. During assessment the party works with Field Markers in custodial units and records strength at no fewer than forty stations, of which three are conventionally reported as "unstable" without further comment.

The field's rated depth in the Field Ledgers is 4 CU, its retention is recorded as "good, with allowances," and its boundary concessiveness is listed as high — meaning that the field will permit a survey party to cross its boundary at almost any point, provided they do not attempt to cross it twice in the same day. The Containment Field Calibration standing orders require any party working Field B to leave one marker planted at the entry point and to retrieve it on exit; a marker left overnight is recorded as forfeit and is not to be recovered, as the field does not return objects that have spent a night within it.

The January discrepancy

In the January of the year 61, two assessment parties working Field B on consecutive days returned depths of 4 CU and 6 CU respectively. The discrepancy was not unusual in itself, but the second party's figures had been countersigned by the same clerk who had countersigned the first, and the clerk in question — Terenz Halloway of the Directorate's third scriptorium — insisted he had signed only one return. A dispute was entered before the Concordance of Records, which sat for eleven weeks and produced a ruling of unusual length and no practical effect: the two returns were to be held as a single return "in two aspects," and neither depth was to be preferred.

The ruling has been cited in every subsequent discrepancy and has made Field B the standard example in Directorate training of a field that cannot be measured twice. Halloway's grievance against the Concordance of Records, recorded in a private memorandum now held with the field's file, is that his memorandum was entered into the file without his consent and has been read more often than his findings. He requested its return in the year 64 and again in the year 71. Neither request was answered.

Scholarly disagreement

The principal dispute concerning Field B is whether it is a field at all in the sense used of Field A. The Directorate of Field Verification maintains that it is, and points to the registration, the Ledger entry, and the consistent 4 CU reading taken at knee height by independent parties over four decades. The opposing view, argued at length by the surveyor Pel Ashgrove in a paper read to the Assemblage of Field Clerks in the year 88, holds that Field B is a threshold rather than a field: that what the Directorate measures is not a property of Floor 203 but the difficulty of leaving it, which is a different thing and has no depth.

Ashgrove's paper was received courteously and not answered. The Eleventh Concordance had already settled, in Annex 9, that "a threshold measured is a field, however measured," and the Directorate has treated the question as closed since. Ashgrove continued to press the matter until his retirement and is remembered chiefly for the observation, recorded in the Assemblage minutes, that "the field is not on the floor; the floor is in the field, and the floor has a ceiling, and the ceiling has never been surveyed."

Access

Field B is open to assessment parties by written application to the Directorate, countersigned by a Librarian of the fourth grade or above. Visitors are reminded that Floor 203 has no fixed entrance and that the staircase serving it terminates at whichever landing the visitor most recently departed from. Instruments are permitted. Food is not.