Guest Night on Union Station Read Online Free PDF Page B

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