Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

The next day the call came back.

Barsik heard it from the cabinet top, which is where he hears everything. A call to the Inspector's desk, from the Commander's people. The Inspector answered it standing up, the way he does everything, and Barsik got his half of it, which is the half you usually get.

"Halcyon." A pause. "No. No, I didn't." A longer pause. "Well."

That was most of it. The Inspector put the handset down and looked at the side door for a while, the one he had let the Commander out of three days before.

Here is what Barsik could put together from the Inspector's half, which is all a cat on a cabinet is entitled to. The case had gone to Halcyon. Halcyon is another of the five habitats. Barsik has never seen it; he has seen its paperwork. The Commander was going there himself, today, which in two years he had never done, and he had let the Inspector know as a courtesy, because the form had started on the Inspector's desk, and a man likes to know where his paperwork has got to.

The Inspector did not look like a man who liked knowing. He looked like a man who had handed a boring thing out of a side door so that it would stop being his, and had just found out it was now the size of two habitats. He said a word he says about once a week, and went to tell the Superintendent.

Barsik stayed where he was and thought about the form.

Six days in a queue. Out of the side door in a Commander's hand. Up the lift on one sheet of paper with a number circled twice. And now off Eden altogether, to a habitat Barsik has never seen, with the Commander following it. He has watched a great many forms on this habitat. Most of them do nothing, ever, as far as anyone can tell. This one had got further in three days than most get in a lifetime, and all it had needed was to be read by the right person, at the right desk, in the right order.

He thought about telling the trainee. This is what a report does after it is filed, he would say. Watch. Then he decided against it, and put the reason in his own log and not in hers. A thing like that is better found than told. He would have to find her a report of her own to follow. He had a feeling Eden would oblige.

By the evening the Commander and his people had gone, and the floor was a little quieter. The trainee was in her mug, counting who walked past. Fewer people did. Barsik noted that as well. The floor is his job, and today the floor had one kind of person fewer on it.

He went back to reading the queue. Something boring would be along. On Eden there always is.