With a faint feeling of satisfaction Winston laid the fourth message aside. It was an intricate and responsible job and had better be dealt with last. The other three were routine matters, though the second one would probably mean some tedious wading through lists of figures.

Winston dialled “back numbers” on the telescreen and the appropriate issues of “The Times” slid out of the pneumatic tube after only a few minutes’ delay. The messages he had received referred to articles or news items which for one reason or another it was thought necessary to alter, or, as the official phrase had it, to rectify. For example, it appeared from “The Times” of the seventeenth of March that Big Brother, in his speech of the previous day, had predicted that the South Indian front would remain quiet but that a Eurasian offensive would shortly be launched in North Africa. As it happened, the Eurasian Higher Command had launched its offensive in South India and left North Africa alone. It was therefore necessary to rewrite a paragraph of Big Brother’s speech, in such a way as to make him predict the thing that had actually happened.

As soon as Winston had dealt with each of the messages, he clipped his corrections to the appropriate copy of “The Times” and pushed them into the pneumatic tube. Then, he crumpled up the original message and any notes that he himself had made, and dropped them into the memory hole to be devoured by the flames.

He knew in general terms what would happen next. As soon as all the corrections had been assembled, that issue would be reprinted, the original copy destroyed, and the corrected copy placed on the files in its stead. This process of continuous alteration was applied not only to newspapers, but to books, periodicals, pamphlets, posters, leaflets, films, sound-tracks, cartoons, photographs—to every kind of literature or documentation which might hold any political or ideological significance. In this way every prediction made by the Party could be shown to have been correct, In no case would it have been possible, once the deed was done, to prove that any falsification had taken place. Even the written instructions which Winston received, and which he got rid of as soon as he had dealt with them, never stated or implied that an act of forgery was to be committed. It was always the reference to errors, misprints, or misquotations which it was necessary to put right in the interests of accuracy.

But actually, he thought, it was not even forgery. It was merely the substitution of one piece of nonsense for another. Most of the material that you were dealing with had no connexion with anything in the real world. Statistics were just a fantasy; a great deal of the time you were expected to make them up out of your head. For example, the Ministry of Plenty’s forecast had estimated the output of boots for the quarter at 145 million pairs. The actual output was given as sixty-two millions. Winston, however, in rewriting the forecast, brought the figure down to fifty-seven millions, to allow for the usual claim that the quota had been overfulfilled. And so it was with every class of recorded fact, great or small.

Winston glanced across the hall. In the corresponding cubicle on the other side a small man named Tillotson was working steadily away, with a folded newspaper on his knee and his mouth very close to the mouthpiece of the speakwrite. He had the air of trying to keep what he was saying a secret between himself and the telescreen. He looked up, and his spectacles darted a hostile flash in Winston’s direction.

Winston hardly knew Tillotson, and had no idea what work he was employed on. People in the Records Department did not readily talk about their jobs. In the long, windowless hall, with its double row of cubicles and its endless rustle of papers and hum of voices murmuring into speakwrites, there were quite a dozen people whom Winston did not even know by name, though he daily saw them hurrying to and fro in the corridors or gesticulating in the Two Minutes Hate. He knew that in the cubicle next to him the little woman with sandy hair was tracking down and deleting from the Press the names of people who had been vaporized and were therefore considered never to have existed. And a few cubicles away a mild, ineffectual, dreamy creature named Ampleforth, with very hairy ears and a surprising talent for juggling with rhymes and metres, was engaged in producing garbled versions—definitive texts, they were called—of poems which had become ideologically offensive, but which for one reason or another were to be retained in the anthologies. And this hall, with its fifty workers or thereabouts, was only one sub-sectionas it were, in the huge complexity of the Records Department. Beyond, above, below, were other swarms of workers engaged in a multitude of jobs: printing-shops with sub-editors, typography experts, the teleprogrammes section with its engineers, its producers, and its teams of actors. There were the armies of reference clerks whose job was make lists of books and periodicals due for recall. There were the vast repositories of corrected documents, and the hidden furnaces where the original copies were destroyed.

And the Records Department, after all, was itself only a single branch of the Ministry of Truth, whose primary job was not to supply the citizens of Oceania with newspapers, films, textbooks, telescreen programmes, plays, novels. Here were produced newspapers containing almost nothing except sport, crime and astrology, sensational five-cent novelettes, films oozing with sex, and sentimental songs which were composed entirely by mechanical means. There was even a whole section—Pornosec—engaged in producing the lowest kind of pornography.

Three messages had slid out of the pneumatic tube while Winston was working, but they were simple matters, and he had disposed of them before the Two Minutes Hate interrupted him. When the Hate was over he returned to his cubicle, took the Newspeak dictionary from the shelf, pushed the speakwrite to one side, cleaned his spectacles, and settled down to his main job of the morning.

Winston’s greatest pleasure in life was in his work. Most of it was a tedious routine, but included in it there were also jobs so difficult and intricate that you could lose yourself in them as in the depths of a mathematical problem—delicate pieces of forgery. Winston was good at this kind of thing.

Winston read through the article. Big Brother’s Order for the Day, was about praising the work of an organization known as FFCC, which supplied cigarettes and other comforts to the sailors. A certain Comrade Withers, a prominent member of the Inner Party, had been singled out for special mention and awarded a decoration, the Order of Conspicuous Merit, Second Class.

Three months later FFCC had suddenly been dissolved with no reasons given. Withers and his associates were now in disgrace, but there had been no report of the matter in the Press or on the telescreen. There was no clue as to what had happened to them.

Winston did not know why Withers had been disgraced. Perhaps it was for corruption or incompetence. Perhaps Big Brother was merely getting rid of a too-popular subordinate. Perhaps Withers or someone close to him had been suspected of heretical tendencies. Or perhaps—what was likeliest of all—the thing had simply happened because purges and vaporizations were a necessary part of the mechanics of government.

Winston thought for a moment, then pulled the speakwrite towards him and began dictating in Big Brother’s familiar style: a style at once military and pedantic, and, because of a trick of asking questions and then promptly answering them (“What lessons do we learn from this fact, comrades? The lesson—which is also one of the fundamental principles of Ingsoc—that,” etc., etc.), easy to imitate.

The lunch queue moved slowly forward. The room was already very full and noisy.