Agent Barsik (Cat, Smart Pet)

The route reconciliation entered the compliance queue at 2251, category maintenance discrepancy, priority none, and Barsik read it from the cabinet top before the Inspector had finished walking away from the terminal. Shelf E3 to be enclosed and registered as a sealed store. Housekeeping route four to be reconciled to the register as amended. Approved, Albercombe, same hour, because it was his own queue and he was the man at the bottom of it. Unit four's square was a square again by morning. Nothing was released to reclamation. The hearing had its bolts.

He filed the outcome and then sat with the part of it that was his.

The doctrine is two words, and for twelve nights they had held. He had read the thirteenth requirement the day it circulated — he reads the circulars; someone should — and had known by the second paragraph what unit four would do with an open shelf. He had said nothing, because there was nobody to say it to who had asked, and a report delivered to a bureau that has not yet noticed its own shelf is a cat volunteering an opinion about compliance policy, which is the end of a posting. So he had watched the shelf empty, and watched nobody look at it, and counted with the trainee, and waited for the day the bureau would want what it had lost.

The bureau did not want it in time. That is the ordinary case. Most things go to reclamation with the question still unasked, and the doctrine would have let this one go too, and the doctrine would have been wrong. He wrote that down plainly, because it was the finding: filed, not volunteered is a rule about the order of things, a question before an answer, and it says nothing about a clock. When the answer has a day left and the question has not arrived, the order can be kept and the clock still lost. On that one day the doctrine yields, not to volunteering — he had volunteered nothing; he had put the bureau's own form where the bureau's own Inspector would find it, which is filing by other means — but to time.

The cost was a cat seen carrying. He had accepted it, at night, on an empty floor, with one witness whose watching was the exercise. In the morning the Inspector had asked the floor who put a bag on his desk, and the floor had not known, and he would, Barsik judged, let that stand, because a man who wants his evidence back does not much care who returned it. A household intelligence with no bureau standing and an excellent memory had, he did not doubt, declined to say. So: two on the habitat who had not finished a question about him, one who had asked and would let it go, and one who had chosen not to start. He recorded the count and did not adjust the doctrine for it. A cover that nobody wonders about is a cover nobody is looking at; a cover that competent people decline to examine is the working kind.

The trainee's log, last.

Exercise five: to watch. She counted the route for a month after anyone asked her to, which is how the agency knew on the first night what the bureau learned on the twelfth. She has asked the right question about the waiting and written the answer down exactly. Note for doctrine, from her file and not mine: the day in between is found by counting, not by waiting for it.

He considered the last line for some time, decided it was hers, and let it stand under her name.