Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

Barsik read the form on its first day, from the top of the records cabinet, upside down. That is the only way a cat on a cabinet reads anything, and it is a better way than it sounds. Upside down, you read slowly. Slowly, you notice things.

The form was about food. Eleven crates had been signed out of Eden's stores and never signed in anywhere else. Food does not do that by itself. Somebody had carried it, and the paperwork had been stamped along the way: four stamps, each one saying this passed through here. There should have been a fifth. Where the fifth belonged there was nothing to read.

Barsik did not know where the fifth stamp had gone. He noted that he did not know. That is a different note from writing nothing, and the agency is particular about the difference.

Then the form went into the Inspector's queue, which is where forms on this habitat go to grow old. The agency's rule is two words long: filed, not volunteered. A cat does not walk up to a Detective Inspector and put a paw on a form. A cat sits where the form can be seen and waits to find out who else is looking.

For six days, nobody was.

On the sixth day the Inspector came in carrying a thermos. He never drinks tea at his desk, so it was not for him. He set it down beside the form and did not open it. A thermos that comes in full and is meant to leave full has a job, and the job is not tea.

Then the Commander came.

The Commander runs the Governor's task force, the one everybody calls Orbital Five-O, for cases that cross from one habitat to another. They work out of Eden. The Inspector did not bring him through the front desk. He let him in at the side door, by the stairs. The front desk is for visitors. The side door is for things that are leaving.

The Commander read the form with the gap in it. He read it three times. Then he took the file, the logs and the thermos, went out the way he had come, and patted Barsik on the way past, the way people do. Barsik allowed it. It costs nothing, and it keeps everyone sure of what he is.

Out in the corridor, exactly on time, stood Jeeves: the Inspector's house-minder, tall and grey and not on anybody's list either. The thermos had been his all along. He poured the Commander a cup, said something about the lift, and the Commander went away reading.

Eleven crates had gone somewhere nobody on Eden could read. The form about them had just left with a man who could read further than Eden. That is what a form is for. Barsik noted the time. He also noted that the tea had reached the right person in the end, which on this habitat is rarer than it sounds.