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.

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. Before we could really start quarreling, the heat-seeker indicated a target. Three targets, in fact, grouped close together.

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.

—From “Hi, Colonic” by Harry Turtledove