Count to Zero
"As long as it can do a word count, I'll be happy" said Mulder. He had been persuaded, against years of elusive practice, to prepare a report on government-accepted UFO sightings. Stuck in the back of a small field office in Denver, he tapped away enthusiastically at a keyboard.
He was assisted, or hindered, depending on how you viewed it, by an intern called Archie. On the first day, Archie leaned over the desk every few minutes to ask if he wanted for anything.
"Hey, Fox? Need a coffee?" Archie looked hopeful, like a fluffy pup eager to retrieve a stick.
"No thanks, Archie. I brought my own." Mulder raised his enamel cup, a navy surplus item, sloshing a tiny amount of the oily content. His thermal flask stood innocent and grey at a precarious lip of the generous desk.
"That looks fancy," Archie leered. "Where'd you buy that?"
"I didn't buy it. I brought the beans back myself from South America. A little trip I did a few months ago."
"Hey cool. Not many of us Feds get to do that sort of travel though. Eh, Fox?"
"Sure. If you're an extra-special Special Agent, you might get sent anywhere. Why don't you go ahead and call me 'Mulder'. Alright, Archie?"
"Sure, Fox. 'Mulder' it is. You can just call me 'Archie'."
"That's fine with me. What are you going to specialize in when you become a full-time Federal Agent? Eh, Archie?"
"Well… Mulder, I rather like those cold case files. You know? The ones where the forensics just didn't exist. Everything was about old-fashioned investigation. Foot-fall. Door-knocks. Hunches. Clues. Gut instinct. Judgments from the heart."
"Oh, yeah. Those days." Fox wrinkled his top lip. "Yes, Archie, those days must have been hard."
For all his intentional interference, Archie was the go-to guy for the office automation. Mulder was naturally suspicious of all technology, except perhaps his cellphone, and had spent most of his career with 'dirty boots', what proper investigators liked to call the result of proper searching in the undergrowth and proper finding in the mud. But when it came to the arch-nemesis of the paper-jam or the dread toner refill, Archie was the ultimate fixer, efficient, quick and self-rewarding. Archie even fixed up his new best-buddy with some time on the dedicated word-processor.
"Do you want me to show you all the features?" Archie quizzed, lclearly relishing an opportunity to show his indispensable knowledge. "You can get bold type, make a table of authorities…"
"No thanks," said mulder. "I'm sure that will come in handy one day, but this week is about getting thee words on the paper." He added "As long as it can do a word count, I'll be happy."
Archie nodded sagely and gradually bothered Mulder less as the week progressed, trading this lower face-count for most valuable office-player points.
"What were your conclusions, Mulder?" Archie requested on the final day of the placement.
Mulder had hoped to sneak briefly into the field office; pick up the giant bound report from his desk in-tray, walk up one flight of stairs, and drop it into the in-tray of the Section Chief on the floor above. He planned for this all to be completed surgically, in and out in less than thirty minutes. Then he planned to fade away from Denver without telling anyone, maybe a quick train trip up to a ski resort in the mountains and some drinking in the quieter taverns.
Mulder had checked out of the motel with little fuss and parked the rental in the dusty lot behind the small Federal office building. A quick nod to the shift-change security had allowed him swift ingress to his office and sight of the prize. The printed-out document had, like a dozen other reports sent to the secretarial pool, been bound with glue and covered firmly with a heavy card paper which approximated ancient vellum or leather. There was a nicely weighty eagle seal press-stamped into the otherwise blank cover. Mulder lifted the report with satisfaction and felt the weight. He did not have any sense of caring for the contents which he knew were light-weight, obvious and superficial, but it marked a slight body of knowledge which could only create useful thought processes and discussions. It was the ripples of irritation which satisfied him. Weighing it in his hand it occurred to him that it might go astray at the very first instance due to its lack of a title on the cover. Although it was not unusual for a federal document, particularly one with secret contents, to have blank exteriors, some sort of handle or attachment to the real world was required. He walked back into the office to retrieve a blank sheet of paper, a paper-clip and a marker. To his surprise, Archie was walking round the desks distributing a mixture of documents to the in-trays. Although Mulder did not dislike him, Archie was likely to eat into his minute-by-minute schedule. But so be it.
"Hey Mulder," Archie piped up, surprised. "You don't need to be in this early. I thought you weren't looking for promotion?"
"Ah Archie. You'll be the boss of us all one day," Mulder fake-smiled. "I'm leaving right now and just had a few things to tidy up. Good to get a chance to say 'good-bye' to you though."
"Sure. Let me help you there. Do you want a cover sheet for that document? If I'd thought about it, I'd have got the girls in the pool to type one out for you as they were gluing the thing together."
"That's the kind of thinking that will get you out of here and onto those cold cases Archie. But I got it. I'll pin this on when I get to the sub-director's office. Good-bye."
Mulder offered his hand. They shook hands briefly, Archie mumbling a muffled 'cheers' before continuing with his distributive duties.
Then, over the next three minutes, Mulder mounted the stairs, marked up the cover-sheet, clipped it on to the report, and left the report in the in-tray. By noon he was up in the hills with the trails. By the end of the day the director had reached the fifth bound report of the day. He wondered briefly why it contained only blank paper and had no cover sheet then returned it to the typing pool as surplus.