They were executed, and their fate was recorded
in the Party histories, a warning to posterity. About five years after
this, in 1973, Winston was unrolling a wad of documents which had just
flopped out of the pneumatic tube on to his desk when he came on a fragment
of paper which had evidently been slipped in among the others and then
forgotten. The instant he had flattened it out he saw its significance. It
was a half-page torn out of the Times of about ten years earlier -- the top
half of the page, so that it included the date -- and it contained a
photograph of the delegates at some Party function in New York. Prominent
in the middle of the group were Jones, Aaronson, and Rutherford. There was
no mistaking them, in any case their names were in the caption at the
bottom.
The point was that at both trials all three men had confessed that on
that date they had been on Eurasian soil. They had flown from a secret
airfield in Canada to a rendezvous somewhere in Siberia, and had conferred
with members of the Eurasian General Staff, to whom they had betrayed
important military secrets. The date had stuck in Winston's memory because
it chanced to be midsummer day; but the whole story must be on record in
countless other places as well. There was only one possible conclusion: the
confessions were lies.
Of course, this was not in itself a discovery. Even at that time
Winston had not imagined that the people who were wiped out in the purges
had actually committed the crimes that they were accused of. But this was
concrete evidence; it was a fragment of the abolished past, like a fossil
bone 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 u