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up. Us newcomers weren’t ready to go to sleep yet, she informed us. Instead she was taking the four of us to a Security office.
    It wasn’t the office the Bastard had pointed out to us. This one wasn’t even located where the other administration offices were. It was all by itself, a low, unmarked building at the far end of a gated cul-de-sac, with nothing else nearby. (So no outsiders would hear the screaming, somebody joked. I was pretty sure it was a joke.) There wasn’t any sign on the door and Brigitta wasn’t any help; as soon as we arrived at the building she turned around and pointed at me and at a door. I got the message. I took one last look at my colleagues, huddled together and looking both scared and kind of happy that at least they weren’t the first to go in, and turned to the door.
    I didn’t get a chance to knock on it. It opened as soon as I got there, and inside was a bare hall. Nobody was visible, but from somewhere a voice track said, “Wipe your feet and go to the room at the end of the hall.”
    When I did, two people were waiting for me there.
    My interviewers were a man and a woman, neither of them particularly good-looking or, actually, distinguished in any way at all. Neither of them was American, either, I was pretty sure, but I couldn’t tell from their names—Yvonne Feliciano and Johann Swinn, their badges said. Maybe Eastern Europe? Maybe not. The one who took me on first was the man, and what he did was ask me a long list of pretty personal questions. Had I ever owned a weapon? Did I ever take part in any demonstrations? How did I feel about the way the United States was treated since the Yellowstone accident? Had I ever known anybody who advocated force and violence as a solution to social evils? Did I have a police record anywhere?
    That was where I got into trouble. I said, “No.”
    That made the two of them look at each other, then go off in a corner and jabber, their voices too low pitched for me to hear. Then they came back and bracketed me on either side, both of them looking as though I had betrayed their trust. “Why do you lie to us?” the woman demanded, and the man asked, “Are you not Bradley Wilson Sheridan, formerly of 16-A Liberty Crescent, Floor 15, Molly Pitcher Redeployment Village, Staten Island, New York, arrested by the New York metropolitan police, Fifty-fifth Precinct, on May 26, 2065, for stealing with threat of violence certain cash and vouchers from one Terence Vincent Youngblood, a minor aged seven, of 16-B Liberty Crescent of the same redeployment village?”
    That was a nasty moment. Nobody had mentioned to me the name of that little snot, Terry Youngblood, in years. I hadn’t expected that anybody ever would. Anyway, when I caught my breath I pointed out to the two of them that I had been only eleven years old at the time myself, and the value of the stuff I stole from Terry’s locker—the threat-of-violence business came later, after he said he was going to report me and I said I would pound him seriously if he did—was less than $10,000 American. So the whole business wasn’t even a crime, just a misdemeanor. Besides, the charges had been dropped and the arrest expunged from my record—it was what they did for kids who didn’t ever get caught doing anything more serious.
    “Facts are never expunged from the record if one knows how to look for them,” the woman informed me, “and a crime is a crime regardless of its magnitude. Continue standing here. Do not sit down.”
    The two of them went back to their corner for more inaudible jabbering. Then, without comment, they came back and instructed me to take off my clothes. All of them.
    I’m not easily embarrassed. I’d been undressed in mixed company often enough before then—you can’t get a passport in the US of A without a strip search, or a work permit in Egypt. Some of the officials at those little events, too, had been female. So it wasn’t gender shyness. It was the way this