Guest Night on Union Station

by E. M. Foner

  “If your initial assumptions were correct, the number would be five trillion, but you made three mistakes. Can you tell me what they are?”

  “But I graduated already,” Dorothy complained. “Do you still quiz Blythe and Chastity like they never left school?”

  “Yes,” her former teacher replied.

  “Oh. Then I guess I shouldn’t have started by assuming that a few hundred items a day was three hundred.”

  “Correct.”

  “And I forgot that some people might come looking for their lost stuff, so the number could actually be a little less.”

  “I’ll give you partial credit.”

  “Why partial credit?”

  “We’re able to figure out from our station imaging who owns most of the items left behind by visitors, and in those cases, we contact them and arrange for delivery,” Libby explained. “For example, we get lots of luggage forgotten in restaurants or bathrooms by travelers who are waiting for connections between ships. By the time they realize they’ve left something behind they’re light-years away, but as long as we can identify the owner we’ll send their luggage after them.”

  “Doesn’t that get expensive?”

  “Most ships coming through the station will accept lost luggage deliveries for their destinations as a common courtesy, though many of the lost pieces are of such low value that the owners we contact tell us to dispose of them. There’s also the fact that the maintenance bots can have difficulty differentiating between lost objects and litter, and truthfully, some items may only have temporary value in the eyes of their owners.”

  “Like what?”

  “Take a look in the blue bin under the counter.”

  Dorothy pulled out the blue bin and saw that it was full of silvery jewelry. On further examination, it became apparent that all of the rings and bracelets were made out of foil, probably from food wrappers or some other disposable packaging material. Some of it was pretty elaborate, including long, flexible chains.

  “This is all throw-away stuff that people make while they’re waiting for a connection,” she declared confidently.

  “Are you sure that the sentients who created those pieces would feel the same way?”

  “They wouldn’t have left them behind otherwise.”

  “Maybe so,” Libby replied with a sigh. “But the maintenance bots tend to assume that anything shiny is of value, and we don’t like to discourage their initiative just because they aren’t sentient. Have you figured out your third erroneous assumption?”

  “Can I have a hint?”

  “Ka-ching.”

  “You don’t keep it all forever,” Dorothy exclaimed. “Of course, that would just be silly. So how often do you sell everything?”

  “The shelving units you see run on a track system which snakes back and forth, leaving enough space between the rows to get in and retrieve items. From the end of the back row, the shelves travel up the side of the hold and enter the front row again. When all of the shelves in the back row are full, we open that side of the room and invite the second-hand dealers to come and bid on lots from the exposed row. The last sale was twenty-three years ago.”

  “How many, uh, customers come into the lost-and-found each day looking for things on the shelves?”

  “The vast majority of the lost items that come in are from travelers. You might see a dozen walk-ins during a busy shift, depending on the way the clocks used by the various species are overlapping that day. Other shifts, you might be here five hours and not see a soul.”

  “That’ll be great once my course work for the Open University picks up,” Dorothy said enthusiastically. “Hey. Is that why Paul called this a ‘work-study’ job?”

  “Yes. When Paul was an Open University student, he was employed by the lost-and-found until he started doing his own lab work.”

  “So how do I catalog stuff the bots bring in?”

  “Flazint will be staying late today to show you the system. When I asked her to work overtime, she requested a short break to get her hair misted. Ah, here she comes now.”

  For a brief moment, Dorothy thought that a large bird of prey had entered the lost-and-found, but then she realized that it was an elaborate upswept hairdo of the sort favored by young Frunge women. She marveled that Flazint could walk through doors without damaging the trellis work that provided a template for her hair vines.

  “Hi. I’m Flazint.”

  “I’m Dorothy. I love your hair. How do you keep from breaking it?”

  “Practice,” Flazint replied. “You start with a flexible training-trellis, so even if you run into stuff, the worst that can happen is a few split vines. I usually don’t come to work like this, but it’s the start of pollination season and it’s the first year that my ancestors are letting me date.”

  “Cool. Libby was just telling me how most of the lost stuff gets found before we catalog it, but she said you’d show me what to do. I feel bad about making you stay late, though.”

  “I’m happy to get the overtime. I’m saving to move out with friends, but don’t tell anybody,” Flazint added hastily. She eyed the human girl closely, wondering if her confidence might be misplaced.

  “I won’t,” Dorothy promised, pressing a fist to her forehead. It was a gesture she’d seen the little Frunge children on Aisha’s show make when they were promising to be good, and it seemed to satisfy Flazint.

  “Let’s get started then. The first step is to separate the legitimate lost items from the litter,” the Frunge girl explained. “All of the new stuff goes in the marked bins under the counter at this end. The borderline cases, like the foil jewelry, we keep for a little less than nine days before recycling.”

  “A little less than nine days?”

  “A Verlock boy who worked here like a couple million years ago came up with the system, so it’s all based on their calendar period of a Klunk. Whenever you come to work, you should take a few minutes to familiarize yourself with the new items in the bins under the counter at the intake end. The bins are sitting on a continuous belt that ages them towards the cold-storage end of the counter, a journey that takes one Klunk. The bots will then remove anything in blue bins for recycling, and whoever is working the counter is responsible for cataloging the unclaimed items in the white bins.”

  “Is there anything in the white bins now?” Dorothy left the Frunge girl behind as she ran down the length of the counter, so enthusiastic was she to get to work. “Is this one ready?”

  “Well, normally you wouldn’t pull it off until the bots take the blue one that’s ahead of it, but I guess we can make an exception for training purposes,” the girl called back. She was taking her time moving down the counter because she had to walk with her head turned sideways, so as not to catch one of her hairdo’s wings on the shelves.

  “Great!” Dorothy slid out the heavy white bin and heaved it onto the counter. “Wow. Is that a real gun?”

  “Don’t squeeze the—don’t fire it again. Just put it down on the counter. The maintenance bots are supposed to report abandoned weapons immediately, but the non-lethal varieties don’t count.”

  “Did I break anything?” Dorothy asked, more embarrassed than frightened by the accidental discharge. Other than the “Vrrriiippth” sound it had made, there was no sign that the gun had fired.

  “It’s alright. That’s a disposable Dollnick stun pistol. They’re popular with traders who want protection but don’t want to hurt anybody. We get them all the time because there’s no resale market for used ones, and traders who buy something better or decide they don’t need one anymore just leave them wherever. Press the little yellow stud on the side of the barrel. There, it’s on safety now.”

  “So how do I catalog it? Are there tags to fill out or something?”

  “First everything gets holo-imaged. See the easy-round at the end of the counter?”

  “Easy-round? I don’t think my implant got that right,” Dorothy said.

  “You know, for throwi
ng round clay vessels,” the girl explained. “I thought all the biologicals had them.”

  “You mean a potter’s wheel? That’s a big one.”

  “Just put the stunner on there and give it a gentle spin.”

  Dorothy gingerly placed the Dollnick weapon on the turntable and used her forefinger to impart a rotational force.

  “Dollnick stun pistol, model 625 A, Rev L2,” an artificial voice intoned. “Ready for storage.”

  “Now take it and find a place for it on the shelves directly behind you,” Flazint said. She carefully hopped up to sit on the counter, keeping the wings of her hairdo parallel to the shelves. “The metal plate on the floor in front of each shelving unit is a lift pad, so if there isn’t enough space on the shelves you can reach, just tell it to raise you up. It activates a three-sided restraining field so you can’t fall off.”

  “No, I can fit it in here,” Dorothy said. She crouched and placed the Dollnick weapon in the hollow space of what was either a floatation device from an ocean-going vessel or some sort of giant Frisbee. “Is that it?”

  “Now you read the shelf number out loud for the cataloging agent to record.”

  “It’s in Frunge,” Dorothy complained.

  “Just tell it you want Humanese.”

  “English, please,” Dorothy said to the shelving unit. The active display markings on the edge of the shelf where she’d placed the gun changed into a series of letters and numbers. The closest designation to the lifesaver was JER 29/13, so she spoke the code out loud.

  The cataloging system’s voice confirmed the location with a verbose recitation. “Dollnick stun pistol, model 625 A, Rev L2, stored at location JER 29/13.”

  “So if somebody comes in looking for an item that was lost a long time ago, we get the description and the lost-and-found catalog tells us where to look?” Dorothy asked.

  “Maybe once a cycle a visitor to the station comes by to check if they lost something here years ago, but for most transients, it’s just the stuff under the counter,” the Frunge girl told her. “But remember, the Stryx don’t notify station residents when they leave stuff lying around because they don’t want to turn the bots into a free maid service. So most of the walk-in traffic we get is the people who live here stopping in to see if something they lost has turned up.”

  “I think I could fit more stuff on these shelves if I just rearranged things a bit.”

  “You can’t start rearranging unless you want to clean off the whole shelf, re-holo all of the items to take them out of inventory, and then reenter them all again. If you ever get to start with an empty shelving unit, begin at the bottom and pack the shelves as tightly as you can without hiding stuff. So you can’t put small things behind big things, or pack items in an empty suitcase. You’ll get the hang of it.”

  “So the shelving units are moving the opposite direction of the belt under the counter,” Dorothy surmised. “That way, the last few months of stuff is always right here at the front.”

  “Yup, except it takes at least twenty years to fill each row of shelves. And that’s pretty much the whole job,” Flazint concluded. “Go ahead and try another one.”

  Dorothy pulled out a surprisingly heavy object that resembled a rough file, with a handle made from two pieces of steel that were sprung apart at the end, forming a gap. The bent steel ends on either side of the gap featured a sharpened edge, one of which had a half-round cutout.

  “Any idea what this is?” she asked the Frunge girl.

  “It’s a manicure tool of some sort,” Flazint replied. “We get lots of them in here. I’m not sure about the species, though. Something with pretty big claws, I’d guess.”

  Dorothy placed it on the holo-platform and gave it a spin.

  “Huktra talon clipper and file,” the voice identified the tool.

  “What’s the grossest thing you ever found?” Dorothy asked her mentor, as she searched for a place to store the talon clipper on a shelf.

  “Medical stuff,” the other girl replied without hesitation. “There are plenty of jars with body parts on the shelves, embryos in portable stasis fields, vat-grown replacement organs that got lost along the way. Nobody ever seems to claim those, so it might all be black market.”

  “Is there any way to figure out where the bots found the stuff?”

  “Sure, it’s part of the permanent record. The bots image everything they find before they pick it up, and it all gets correlated by the storage system. Take something off the shelf and ask about it.”

  Dorothy pulled out the object next to where she had just stored the talon clippers and found it was a short tube with a small, round can on one side. The can had a handle on it, like a pepper-mill or a coffee grinder, and there was a little hollow sphere snugged up to one end of the tube.

  “Any ideas?” she asked the Frunge girl.

  “I think it’s a Vergallian fishing pole. Look for a button on the side, but don’t point it at me.”

  Dorothy quickly found a small sliding switch on the side of the tube and pushed it forward. The tube leapt in her hand, the end telescoping out to twice her height, the fishing bob dangling at the tip.

  “Hey, they run the line inside the pole. My dad might like one of these.”

  “I hope we can figure out how to collapse it again because it will never fit on the shelf that way,” Flazint said.

  Dorothy pulled the slide switch back, but nothing happened.

  “No luck. Maybe the tip needs to be pushed in.” She carefully brought the tip of the rod down behind the counter and pressed the end against the bulkhead. Instead of retracting, the rod bent when she pushed. Dorothy stepped back, and to her relief, it returned to being a straight pole.

  “Were you holding the button while you did that?”

  “Yeah. Maybe the battery is dead,” Dorothy speculated. “Libby? How can I make this fishing pole retract?”

  “Hold the button and reel in the line,” the Stryx librarian replied. “It may feel a little tight, but the bob is compressing a permanent spring. Don’t worry about the line snapping.

  As Dorothy gingerly reeled in the bob, a handsome Vergallian wearing rubber boots strode up to the counter.

  “Be careful with that,” he ordered peremptorily. “I paid fourteen hundred creds for that pole, and I just spent two weeks during the Ferlock run on Thuri Minor twiddling my thumbs.”

  Dorothy flushed and began to mumble an excuse, but the Frunge girl was having none of it.

  “Who spends fourteen hundred creds on a fishing pole and then loses it right before vacation? Anyway, for all we know, you came in here looking for something else and you just decided to upgrade. Do you know where you lost it?”

  The Vergallian glowered at the girls as he considered giving them a piece of his mind, but he was so relieved to find that the pole hadn’t been stolen he decided to play along.

  “Sure. I know I had it in the departure lounge for the luxury liner to Thuri Minor because I took it out of my bag to admire it. I’d bought it specifically for the vacation, you see.” He furrowed his brows in concentration. “We had some time before boarding, and I remember that I went to buy some snacks. All I can think is that I must have left it at the kiosk because I needed both hands to carry back the tray.

  “Where was the fishing pole stored at JER 16/16 found?” Dorothy asked the cataloging system.

  “Vergallian Ferlock Pro, Deluxe Model, discovered under Star Ways departure lounge seat on…”

  “That’s enough,” Dorothy cut off the voice. “The owner is reclaiming the fishing pole, and the talon clipper is stored at JER 16/16 now.”

  “Huktra talon clipper and file, stored at location JER 16/16,” the cataloging system’s voice acknowledged.

  “Thanks,” the Vergallian said. He accepted the fully retracted pole from Dorothy and turned to go. Then he remembered his manners and slapped a five-cred coin on the counter as a tip.

  “You should take that,” Dorothy told the Frunge girl. “I’m j
ust in training.”

  “If you’re sure,” Flazint replied, picking up the coin. She turned her head a little and watched the Vergallian exiting the room. “He lost it less than two Klunks ago, right? Want to see something funny?”

  “Sure,” Dorothy replied, wondering what the Frunge girl might have in mind.

  “Librarian. Does security imaging for the Star Ways departure lounge where the item from JER 16/16 was lost include footage of how the pole got under the seat?”

  “Affirmative,” Libby replied.

  A hologram sprang to life over the turntable. It showed the bustling departure lounge, zooming in on a handsome Vergallian, who had one arm around a beautiful woman as he admired his Ferlock Pro rod. After a few minutes of this, he opened a piece of luggage and wrapped the collapsed rod tenderly in what appeared to be a woman’s nightgown. The hologram caught a look of fury flashing across the woman’s face, which then took on an expression of intense concentration. She said something to the man, who rose and headed off to a food kiosk.

  As soon as his back was turned, the beautiful Vergallian woman thumbed open the bag, unwrapped the fishing rod, and then carefully refolded the nightgown, patting it gently into place. Then she stuck the Ferlock Pro under the seat. When the man returned with a couple of drinks and some salty snacks, she was all smiles.

  “How did she get away with that?” Dorothy asked the Frunge girl.

  “Didn’t you see when she got all focused there for a couple of seconds?” Flazint asked. “She was zapping him with pheromones. She must have wiped out the last minute of his memory so he wouldn’t remember packing the rod and then sent him for snacks. High-caste Vergallian women are scary.”

  Four

  “So I’m supposed to find host families amongst the Union Station ambassadors for the visiting diplomats?” Kelly asked.

  “Just the top emissaries,” Libby reassured her. “The guests from the member worlds of the Cayl Empire who take advantage of the temporary tunnel will eventually number in the hundreds of thousands. Most of those will be from the local ruling classes, and they may prefer sleeping on their luxury ships to staying at the best hotels that can meet their physiological requirements. But it’s been our experience over the years that getting the important diplomatic representatives to live quietly with an unrelated species on the station for a couple of weeks before the open house officially begins can make all of the difference in the outcome. While the temporary tunnel is open to bring the emissaries here, we’ll send a sort of an exchange delegation in the opposite direction.”