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schoolchildren make less fuss than some of those people.”
    “No discipline. That’s what it is.”
    “You’re right. Although, mind you, I wouldn’t say no to some of those American women out there. How do they afford such clothes?”
    “Well, if they don’t do anything that’s worth enough to pay for them, then somebody else must pay for them. That’s capitalism.”
    “Give me a break. You sound like a Party hack.”
    Earnshaw finished putting tools into his box and turned from the closet, holding a reel of electrical wire. He had hidden his red-framed visitor’s badge in the closet and had exchanged it for an imitation blue-framed one, as worn by general workers and inhabitants of the colony. “I don’t know you,” he said to the steward. “You might be KGB.”
    “Do me a favor! I transferred here from Landausk a few days ago.”
    “I see. Landausk, eh?” Earnshaw lifted a stepladder out from the closet. “I suppose we’ll be seeing more of you around here, then.”
    “Yes, I suppose so. Well, I’d better be getting back. See you around.”
    “Sure.”
    The steward disappeared. Earnshaw waited for a few seconds, and then carried the ladder out into the corridor. He positioned it in the center of the floor underneath the translucent panel covering the light, climbed up, and had just begun undoing the fastenings when Paula emerged from the ladies’ room. She was wearing a maintenance engineer’s uniform, too, now. Her face had shed its makeup, and she had acquired dark hair.
    When a tubby man in a blue shirt came through from the off-limits direction a minute or so later they were hard at work, with several of the lighting tubes removed and wires trailing down from the opened panel in the ceiling. They said nothing, and the tubby man went through into the rest room. Earnshaw reached into his toolbox and handed down one of the subassemblies that the camera had come apart into. Superficially it looked like an electrician’s test meter. Recessed into it at one end, however, was a tiny lens sensitive to infrared. When the tubby man came out again and went back through the doorway, Paula aimed the unit to read the interrogation signal emitted by the transmitter above the door. It also read the response code from the tubby man’s badge, which reflected invisibly off the surrounding wall. A moment later, a sign appeared in the unit’s readout, confirming that the computer inside was set to mimic the tubby man’s code. Paula glanced up at Earnshaw and nodded.
    Earnshaw came back down the ladder, and Paula plugged a lead from the unit into another meter to program it from the first. Then she disconnected it and handed it to Earnshaw. Now they each had a device that would mimic a valid response signal. Earnshaw picked up his toolbox and approached the doorway. A light on his unit flickered as he went through, indicating that it had been interrogated and had responded. Paula came after him, and hers did the same. Now they were committed. They followed the wall on the far side of the doorway for a short distance and stopped at a switch panel, where they set down their equipment and tools. Paula removed the coverplate and began loosening connections inside, while Earnshaw squatted down and made a play of searching in the toolbox while he checked the layout of the surroundings against what they had been led to expect. Two men walked by, talking, then turned a corner and disappeared. A woman came out of a door and went off in the other direction.
    Paula fought to keep her hands steady and look as if she were working normally. The method they had used was far from foolproof, and it was possible, even now, that they had triggered an alarm, although there were no whooping sirens or flashing lights to indicate the fact. If the computer that the badge-readers talked to was programmed to check each individual’s movements from place to place, for example—which it possessed all the information to do—it would just