A canary in the coal mine

A canary in the coal mine. This phrase means an early warning of danger. It comes from real life: coal miners, in places like Arunachal Pradesh, used canaries to detect carbon monoxide, a dangerous gas. The birds are very sensitive to it, so a sick canary warned the miners to get out.

That is the story's joke and its point. A space station, the most advanced machine people had built, with two alarm circuits and half a million dollars of engineering, was saved by a small bird smuggled aboard as a pet.

This does not mean machines are useless. The alarms were a good idea. They failed because one connection was not finished, and a completely different kind of safeguard caught the danger.

How the crew sees Claribel changes:

• first, Sven's secret;
• then everyone's pet, hidden from VIPs;
• then a little tragedy in an open hand;
• finally, a safety device: 'you're being doubly safeguarded, at practically no extra expense.'

Jim. 'Nonsense! The alarms would have gone off.' He is not foolish; he trusts the system as designed. What changes his mind is not an argument but a fact from his own assistant.

The humour runs all through:

• 'When the stars had ceased to explode before my eyes';
• a cook-doctor-dietitian (one man, three jobs);
• the men 'passing the oxygen bottle around like a pipe of peace' while they argue.

The best line is an understatement (saying much less than you mean): 'Without Claribel, we should soon have been slightly dead.' There is no such thing as slightly dead. That is why it is funny, and why it hits harder than a dramatic line would.

The title. A 'feathered friend' is a fond name for a pet bird. And Claribel was a friend in the fullest sense: she saved everyone aboard without knowing it.