Hi, Colonic

Hi, Colonic Harry Turtledove

Some people say probing other planets for intelligent life is an exciting, romantic job. As far as I’m concerned, that only goes to show they’ve never done it. Me, I do it for a living, and I’m here to tell you it’s nothing but a pain in the orifice. The air smells funny even when you can breathe it, the animals smell even worse (and taste worse than that, half the time), and even when we do find people, they’re usually backward as all get-out. If they weren’t, they would have found us, right? Right.

Another planet from space. If I’ve sensed one, I’ve sensed a thousand. Third planet from a medium-heat sun. Water oceans. Oxygen atmosphere. Life. Oh, joy. We weren’t even the first ones here. This place had been checked a bunch of times over the past fifty local years. Always nothing. So why did we go back again? Orders. If I don’t do the work, they don’t pay me. Even when I do do the work, they don’t pay me enough, but that’s a different story.

Down we went, into the atmosphere. Iffspay—he’s my partner—and I rolled dice to find out who got stuck wearing the calm suit. I give you three guesses. The calm suit we needed for this planet is the most uncomfortable one in the whole masquerade cabinet.

It’s bifurcated at the bottom, it’s got tendrils near the top, and then an awkward lump at the very top. Guess who got to put it on. I’ll give you a hint: it wasn’t Iffspay. I think he uses loaded dice.

“This is all a waste of time,” I grumbled.

“We’re here. We might as well do it,” Iffspay said. He would. Of course he would. He got to lie back in the ship and soak up nutrient while I was out there doing the heavy lifting.

The atmosphere on this one was really noxious, too. Way too much carbon dioxide for a stable climate, plus oxides of nitrogen and assorted vile hydrocarbons. I made damn sure the purifier in the calm suit was working the way it was supposed to. You could fry yourself on air like that.

To add insult to injury, the weather was fermented. Antigravity or not, round flat aerodynamic shape or not, we bounced around enough to turn your insides inside out. Iffspay was doing the flying, which didn’t help. As a pilot, he doesn’t know his appendages from a hole in the ground. I thought he was going to fly us into a hole in the ground, but he didn’t. Don’t ask me why. Somebody out beyond the cosmos must like him. Don’t ask me why about that, either.

Rain pounded us. “I’m supposed to go out in this?” I said.

“I would have done it if I’d lost the roll,” Iffspay said virtuously. He would have bitched all the way, too. Am I lying? If you’ve ever met Iffspay, you’ll know I’m not. You can’t tell me that’s not him, segment by segment.

“Just find some of them so we can run the tests,” I said. “We’ll get another negative and we’ll go on to another world. And when it comes to finding out who wears the calm suit next time, I’m going to roll your dice.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?” he asked, as if he didn’t know. Ha!

Before we could really start quarreling, the heat-seeker indicated a target. Three targets, in fact, grouped close together. That actually cheered me up. If we caught all three of them, we could finish this planet in one fell swoop. I wouldn’t miss putting it behind me, not even a little bit I wouldn’t.

Trouble was, they were at the edge of a swamp. I worried that they might escape into the water or into the undergrowth, calm suit or no calm suit, before I could slap the paralyzer ray on them and we could antigravity them up into the ship. And if they did—if even one of them did—we’d have to go through this whole capture-and-release business somewhere else on the planet, too. Once was plenty. Once was more than plenty, as a matter of fact.

“As we lower, put on the full display,” I told Iffspay.

“We’re liable to scare them off,” he warned.

“Yeah, yeah,” I said. “If we do, we’ll try somewhere else, that’s all. But the data feeds say they usually gawk. They’re photosensitive, you know.”

“All right, already.” Iffspay complained, but he did it the way I wanted. He had to, pretty much. If he’d been going out, I would’ve done it his way. I wondered how much the rain would hurt the locals’ photosensitivity. Light is so unreliable. Since most planets rotate, half the time there isn’t any. Evolution does some crazy things sometimes.

I have to give Iffspay credit. He didn’t fool around when it came to the display. He had it radiating every frequency the locals could perceive, going from the high end to the low in rhythmic waves. He cranked the air vibrations way up, too. I could sense some of those myself. They seemed to go right through me.

I checked the heat-seeker. By the taste, the locals hadn’t moved. That meant—I hoped that meant—they were fixated on the show the ship was putting on. I struggled into the calm suit and went down to the exit orifice. “I’m ready,” I told Iffspay, exaggerating only a little. “Go on and shit me out.”