Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

He had read the first Unattended Article Report on the morning of day two, from the cabinet top, and had known by the third what he was looking at.

The loose-article requirement is one of the twelve that arrived after the Constant Margin transit, and it is the least read: any unattended article under two hundred grams on a walkway or common floor is collected on the housekeeping units' night pass and logged to lost property in the records room, one form per article, filed to a queue whose digestion time is measured in whether anyone ever asks. Six forms in six days, all from this floor, all from places nobody leaves anything by accident. Behind the urn. Under the lip of a shelf. Somebody was hiding things badly, or hiding them for a reader with a very particular eye, and he knew which somebody, because he kept a note on which of the three junior detectives wrote things down, and it was a short note.

The agency's doctrine is thin on this. A cover fails, the doctrine says, when someone hostile looks at it. Barsik's experience was otherwise. A cover is never in danger from an enemy, who wants a particular answer and will find it whether or not it is there. It is in danger from a competent colleague who has not finished asking, and there is nothing you can do to make such a person stop. You can only let the world finish the answer for her, and make sure the answer she reaches is true, and boring, and complete.

The world had already done most of it. The housekeeping unit had taken every hide and filed every form. All that remained was that she should find them, in a place and by a route that explained itself.

On the sixth morning he went into the records room and sat on the lost-property bin.

She came in with her notebook, looking for the gap by the door where her fifth object should have been, and found instead a cat on a bin. She looked at him for some time. He looked back. Then she did a thing nobody on Eden had done in all his years there: she put both hands under him, lifted him, and set him on the floor, without comment, the way one moves a colleague's coat off a chair. He allowed it. He noted it.

She opened the bin. Six objects, each in a bag, each bagged with a form, each form giving the place and the hour and the unit's number. He watched her face do what a good detective's face does when a hypothesis dies of natural causes: nothing, and then a small honest exhale. She read every form. She wrote, in her notebook, three words he could read upside down from the floor: Control compromised. Abandoned.

She took her six objects and went back to work.

Two additions to the file.

The first, to the trainee's log: Six days of nothing, in front of a detective, and nothing is what the detective saw. The hardest exercise on the list. I set it in four words and she has done it in none. Correct rate of progress. He did not write that part; she would know.

The second, to his own, under the heading he keeps for people on this habitat who have not finished a question. There had been one name on it, a Superintendent's. There were now two.