Floor 7,412

Floor 7,412 is a storage and adjudication floor administered jointly by the Bureau of Unfinished Stairwells and the Office of Vertical Records, and is chiefly known as the seat of the Registry of Missing Landings. It is situated between Floor 1117 and the unnumbered service interval known as the Landing That Was Withdrawn, a relationship that has generated more correspondence than any other fact about the floor. Its ceiling height is recorded at 11 cubits in the northern gallery and 4 cubits in the southern, a discrepancy the Office of Vertical Records attributes to settling and the Bureau of Unfinished Stairwells attributes to the ceiling.

Layout

The floor consists of a central corridor, two galleries, and a shallow recess at the eastern end where the staircase from below arrives. The corridor is lined with shelving on which are kept the landing-plates, rubble, and orphaned handrails catalogued by the Registry of Missing Landings. Nothing on the shelving is to be moved after the sixteenth bell, a rule established by Concordance 2,204, Clause 9, following the Incident of the Ninth Winter.

The eastern recess is the only part of the floor visible from the stairwell, and visitors frequently mistake it for the whole of Floor 7,412. A notice bolted to the recess wall states: This is the recess. The floor continues. Please continue. The notice is signed by the Office of Wayfinding and dated to the year 3,188, though the bolts are later.

The Registry of Missing Landings

The Registry of Missing Landings was established on Floor 7,412 by Concordance 1,806, Annex 11, to record landings that had been built, used, and subsequently found to be absent. It is the only registry in the Tower whose holdings are catalogued by the sound a landing makes when struck: a dull landing, a ringing landing, a landing that returns no sound at all and is therefore recorded as either hollow or disputed.

As of the Census of Sounding Surfaces (year 4,401), the Registry holds 2,388 entries. Of these, 61 have been formally reclassified as walls, 14 as ceilings, and one — Entry 1,117-B — as "a landing of considerable length, unlikely." Entry 1,117-B was filed by Clerk Amsel Vourne, who spent eleven years arguing that the landing between Floor 1117 and Floor 7,412 was not a landing but the underside of a larger landing on a floor that had not yet been built. Vourne's grievance against the Bureau of Unfinished Stairwells is preserved in the Registry's margins in his own hand and is not considered part of the record.

Jurisdictional dispute

Floor 7,412 is jointly administered, and the two administering offices disagree about nearly everything. Concordance 2,204, Clause 9 assigns the floor's shelving to the Bureau of Unfinished Stairwells, while Concordance 2,204, Annex 6 — added in the same session, by the same hand, and ratified the same afternoon — assigns the same shelving to the Office of Vertical Records. Concordance 3,177 later attempted to settle the matter by assigning the shelving to whichever office had most recently counted it. This produced the Second Counting Crisis, in which both offices counted the shelving 41 times in a single month and arrived at three totals, none of which agreed.

"The question of the shelving is not a question of ownership. It is a question of who is to be blamed when the shelving is found to be shorter than it was."

— Concordance 3,177, Preamble

The dispute is generally regarded as settled in practice, if not in writing. The Office of Vertical Records maintains the northern gallery; the Bureau of Unfinished Stairwells maintains the southern, which is shorter. Neither office will say why.

The Incident of the Ninth Winter

In the ninth winter of the current recension — dated variously as year 3,940 or 3,941, depending on which Concordance is consulted — the landing-plates on Floor 7,412 were rearranged overnight by parties unknown. The rearrangement was discovered at the seventeenth bell by Clerk Amsel Vourne, who reported that the plates had been sorted by weight, and that one of them, Entry 604, was warm.

The resulting inquiry, the Inquiry into Warmth, ran for six years and produced a 900-page report concluding that Entry 604 had been resting against a pipe. The report is held on the floor it concerns, in the recess, where it is not to be moved after the sixteenth bell. Vourne was reassigned to the Registry of Unclaimed Descending Feet shortly afterwards and is recorded as having taken the transfer well.

Access

Floor 7,412 is reachable from Floor 1117 by the reversal stair, and from the Landing That Was Withdrawn only by appointment, the Landing having been withdrawn. Visitors are requested to sign the register in the recess and to state whether they are arriving or leaving. Both answers are accepted; the register has no other use, but it is checked nightly, and the checking is recorded, and the record of the checking is kept on the floor above.