Perpetual In-Tray

Perpetual In-Tray is the collective designation for a class of non-mechanical conveyance devices installed on the levels between Floor 7,290 and Floor 7,312, the best documented of which sits at the centre of Floor 7,301. Each device employs a localized chrono-dilation field to slow the descent of documents placed within it, so that a single sheet may require between nine days and forty years to travel from the intake lip to the collecting basin below. The class is administered under Perpetual State 2, a Preservational Field category distinct from the perpetual illumination maintained in the Lattice of Perpetual Dawn. A secondary and much later variant, fitted beneath leaking volumes in the scriptoria, catches particulate ideation rather than paper and dilates it for safe re-cataloguing.

The In-Tray has no moving parts. Librarians who have opened the housing describe a shallow brass channel, a pair of iron mounting lugs, and a small ceramic aperture marked delta, through which the field is tuned. Nothing about the object suggests machinery, and the Office of Perpetual Affairs has twice ruled that it must not be described as such in any catalogue entry, on the grounds that a device which merely allows time to pass more slowly has not, in the strict sense, done anything.

Origins and the First Installation

The class descends from a single instrument assembled in the winter of the year the Tower records as 1,140 by the clerk Anselm Vey, then attached to the intake station of the seventh spiral. Vey's grievance is preserved in his own hand in the margin of a routing ledger: documents arriving at his desk were being answered before he had finished reading them, and he considered this a defect of the floor rather than of himself. His petition to the Bureau of Perpetual Revision argued that the difficulty was one of rate, not of substance, and that a document slowed sufficiently would become answerable.

"The query is not hard. It is merely early. Give me the same query at a later hour and I will give you the same answer at a better hour."

— Anselm Vey, petition to the Bureau of Perpetual Revision, appended to the Manual, second recension

The Bureau approved the petition in principle and assigned the practical work to the Department of Perpetual Pending, which has never fully forgiven the transfer of authority. Vey's field was weak by modern standards; his documents arrived nine days late and, by his own account, no easier to answer. He filed a second petition requesting that the interval be extended indefinitely and died before it was heard. The petition remains in the basin.

The Floor 7,301 Installation

The central device is mounted on a plinth of grey basalt and receives roughly four hundred documents a day, of which a little under a third ever arrive. The remainder are held in the field, where they are visible through the aperture and may be read by anyone with patience and a lamp. The intake lip is inscribed with the ruling of Perpetual Provisional Status, namely that a document in transit is neither received nor refused and holds no status whatever until it lands. This ruling settled a dispute of some seventy years' standing with the Registry of Perpetual Debates, whose clerks had been counting in-transit documents as open cases and had accordingly reported the Registry as 11,000 items behind rather than 400.

Documents do not always descend. The field is sensitive to weight and to humidity, and a bundle exceeding eleven sheets tends to stall at the mid-point of the channel, where it remains until a technician removes it by hand. The Standing Note on Clearance issued by the Office in 1,207 requires that stalled bundles be lifted out with wooden tongs and not with the fingers, since contact with the field has on four occasions left a clerk's hand nine days behind the rest of them. The affected clerks were reassigned to the Hall of Unresolved Queries and reported no further difficulty, though two of them continued to sign their names a week late.

Scholarly Disagreement

The Third Concordance holds at Annex 9 that a document within the field is "held in the instant of its arrival, and is therefore already answered, the answer awaiting only its retrieval." The Department of Perpetual Pending rejects this reading outright, and has done since 1,188, when its own annotators observed that retrieval of an answer does not produce one. The Department's position, set out in the Doctrine of Perpetual Pending, is that the field delays the question without touching its difficulty, and that the Annex conflates lateness with resolution.

A second dispute concerns classification. The Office of Perpetual Affairs maintains the In-Tray under Type 2: Perpetual Pending, while the Bureau of Perpetual Revision has argued since its Proclamation of Perpetual Procedure that any device capable of advancing a document's arrival is properly a revision instrument and belongs to its own schedule. The Clerk of Perpetual Pending has declined to rule, noting in a minute of 1,266 that whichever office wins will inherit the maintenance costs. No ruling has been issued and the maintenance is done by neither office.

Usage and Prohibitions

The In-Tray is open to all grades of clerk. It is not open to visitors, who may observe the aperture from the marked line at a distance of two paces. Ash, sealing wax, and candle ends are not to be placed in the channel, a prohibition posted at the lip since the fire of 1,194, which destroyed the intake register and delayed eleven years of correspondence by a further three.

The most enduring practical difficulty is that of removal. A document retrieved from the field emerges at the age it held within it, and correspondence deposited in 1,301 has been known to arrive in 1,344 bearing a date that its recipients had already entered in the ledger. The Office's guidance is that such documents should be answered anyway.

Related Holdings

• Perpetual Pending, the classification under which the class is administered
• Perpetual Echo, a related field phenomenon observed in the intake channel
• Perpetual Atrium and The Perpetual Atrium, where the field is demonstrated to visiting Librarians
• The Office of Perpetual Affairs, custodian of the class
• Perpetual Citizenship, which governs the standing of documents held in transit