Zhulik

Eden Space Habitat's small-livestock register carries two cats. For three weeks in the late spring of 2827 UCSD it carried one, and the second did all the work.

Zhulik came aboard with a family in the transfer berths, a boy of about eight, Lev Saunders, and his mother, four weeks before anyone on the bureau floor noticed him. Their small-livestock application went into the compliance queue the week they arrived and sat there, as things do on Eden, at week five and pending. Until it cleared he was not on the habitat. That is not a figure of speech. There was no line for him on any form, and a habitat that runs on forms has no other way of knowing what is aboard it.

What he did in those weeks is on record because the deck's monitoring officer kept a good list: fourteen small objects gone from the desks nearest the walkway, none heavier than a spoon, nine of them recovered from somewhere high or somewhere enclosed — a stylus in a boot, the Inspector's initialling stamp on top of the records cabinet, a seal crimp behind the water urn, reading glasses in a vent grille. Her finding, consistent with station animal (cat), was correct in every particular but the cat. Eden had one cat on its books, so the conduct box on Agent Barsik's quarterly return was ticked unacceptable, and a welfare review was set to sit.

Nobody saw Zhulik because everybody did. A young grey-and-white cat walked a stylus past the Senior Sergeant's desk in the middle of a shift, and the Senior Sergeant told him to put it down, by the wrong name, without looking up. On a habitat with one cat, every cat is that cat. He was found by Bubochka, who reasoned out where a cat with something in its mouth would want to go and sat in the evidence tray beside it, and he was witnessed by Superintendent Oyelaran, who followed a rabbit's line of sight to the cabinet top and found him there with the stamp under one paw. He entered Eden's record the same afternoon, as a note on the first cat's welfare return. He had a line of his own by the end of the week.

The name is Lev's. His mother says it means more or less what the cat does, and the record has not asked her to be more exact than that.

Character Notes

Zhulik is not a Smart Pet and was never a candidate for the programme. His register line reads pet (cat), one, which makes it the second animal file on Eden that means exactly what it says; Knopka's is the first. Barsik ran the quiet check he runs on any animal newly registered at Eden and closed it with the finding cat — noting, for the file, that the whole bureau floor had reached the same finding three weeks earlier, and had been right then too, about the wrong animal.

The record holds no motive. Play is the obvious reading, and a small collection on the cabinet top where the station mascot sits most afternoons admits at least one other; Barsik has declined to file either, on the grounds that a young cat's reasons are not evidence and are, in any case, his own. Five of the fourteen objects were never recovered. Barsik has a professional opinion about where they are and no intention of writing it down.

His conduct box is ticked acceptable. The boy has been told to keep the berth door shut. At the last check, the boot that propped it open was still where it had always been.

See also: Agent Barsik, Bubochka, Superintendent Rasa Oyelaran, Knopka, The Unacceptable Cat.