which turns up in the wrong stratum and destroys a geological theory.
It was enough to blow the Party to atoms, if in some way it could have been
published to the world and its significance made known.
He had gone straight on working. As soon as he saw what the photograph
was, and what it meant, he had covered it up with another sheet of paper.
Luckily, when he unrolled it, it had been upside-down from the point of
view of the telescreen.
He took his scribbling pad on his knee and pushed back his chair so as
to get as far away from the telescreen as possible. To keep your face
expressionless was not difficult, and even your breathing could be
controlled, with an effort: but you could not control the beating of your
heart, and the telescreen was quite delicate enough to pick it up. He let
what he judged to be ten minutes go by, tormented all the while by the fear
that some accident -- a sudden draught blowing across his desk, for
instance -- would betray him. Then, without uncovering it again, he dropped
the photograph into the memory hole, along with some other waste papers.
Within another minute, perhaps, it would have crumbled into ashes.
That was ten -- eleven years ago. Today, probably, he would have kept
that photograph. It was curious that the fact of having held it in his
fingers seemed to him to make a difference even now, when the photograph
itself, as well as the event it recorded, was only memory. Was the Party's
hold upon the past less strong, he wondered, because a piece of evidence
which existed no longer had once existed?
But today, supposing that it could be somehow resurrected from its
ashes, the photograph might not even be evidence. Already, at the time when
he made his di