The historian Sebastian eventually hired arrived at the archive on a Tuesday morning in late November, a woman named Dr. Renata Okafor whose specialty, according to her university profile, was the labor history of mid-century American manufacturing, and whose first act upon entering the basement level was to ask Foster, with a directness that visibly delighted him, whether the sign-out logs before 1970 had ever been properly cross-referenced against the company's tax filings from the same period.
"Nobody's ever asked me that," Foster said, already pulling boxes from a shelf he'd apparently been waiting years for someone to request. "I've had my suspicions about a gap in the 1961 filings for a decade. Nobody in this building's been interested enough in the founding period to let me chase i
