Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

He watched it from the gantry above the transfer dock, because that was where he had gone the moment the trainee's first note came through — lost cat; no form; taking it — and a report about a loading chain is best read directly over one.

He had not been needed. He noted that as a finding, not a feeling.

What he had expected to watch was the chain. In three hours a departing family's crates would go up it, hand to hand, and if one of those crates held a sleeping cat then the cat would go up with them, helped aboard by people who would each have said they were only passing along what somebody earlier had cleared. He had a file on exactly this. The file said the chain stops for nobody. It had not stopped for a valley warden naming the specimen to the quartermaster's face; the note had travelled exactly as far as notes travel. And he had come to the gantry to see whether it would stop for a boy.

He did not find out, and he recorded why with some care, because the reason mattered more than the answer would have. The trainee had not brought the boy to the ramp. She had brought him to the crate, three hours early, before there was a chain to stop. She had understood something he had not put in her log because he had not yet put it into words: the place a refusal works is not the place the institution is strongest. It is the place where there is still a person and not yet a procedure. A crate in a berth is a person's crate. The same crate on the chain belongs to the manifest.

So the quartermaster never had to choose. Barsik filed that as the correct outcome and declined to speculate on the other one, which was the kind of comparison a reader should be left to make.

Two additions to the file.

The first: five objects recovered, in a bedding crate, beside the animal that had put them there. He had been right about where they were. Nobody had asked. He confirmed for the record that this remained the correct arrangement.

The second went into the trainee's log, and he weighed it as usual, because she would read it. She had taken a case with no form, from a client who could not file, on no instruction, and closed it by going to where the thing was before the institution could get between them. He wrote correct rate of progress, and considered stopping there, and did not.

The agency's doctrine is two words. She has found the case those two words do not reach — the one that is over before anything could be filed — and closed it anyway. Note for doctrine: a report is sometimes a person you bring somewhere in time.

Below him the shuttle lifted on schedule, carrying exactly what its manifest said. He stayed on the gantry a while after it had gone. The rail was warm. He had no other reason to be there and did not need one.