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problems with ageing technology, and some environments proved particularly corrosive to hardware, but ongoing data showed that the entire system worked better if full Service was run at every College, regardless of whether there was an Active in residence.
    It had also proved beneficial to run Colleges at the local level. No Student attended College outside his national borders, so language and customs were not an issue. Locality proved more important than colour or religion in placing Students.
    Several dozen Colleges had not had an Active for more than two generations, but they were maintained, none-the-less.
     
     
    S TRAZINSKY HANDED THE Operator a pair of worn, stained neoprene gloves with cotton liners, and waited for him to vacate the chair. Strazinsky sat in his place, and keyed in his Morse signature, using the switch on the facing edge of the counter in front of him. Then, he pulled in his chair, which still carried his predecessor’s body-heat, and rested his right hand on the rubberpro sphere.
    He rotated the sphere slowly, checking the halo around the mass of green, throbbing threads. Having completed the corona, he moved the sphere methodically left and right, and up and down, covering the entire surface of the screen, checking one sector at a time. False positives were not uncommon, but Strazinsky was scrupulous in his line-check. Thirty minutes into the procedure, he had found nothing of note, but the lights remained green. The previous Operator was still standing behind his chair, awaiting instructions.
    “Get me a headset,” said Strazinsky.
    “Verify,” said the Operator.
    “Verify headset,” said Strazinsky, and the Operator turned and made his way quickly across the Service Floor to the equipment racks at its centre. There was no headset on the first rack, so he moved to the second. Still, there was no headset.
    “Tech,” said the Operator.
    A Tech popped up from somewhere on the floor to the Operator’s right, and asked, “Sir?”
    “There are no headsets on these two racks,” said the Operator. “Get me a bloody headset.”
    Seconds were passing, and the Operator could be penalised if he took too long; he could be demoted, or even removed from Service altogether. No Operator ever left his station without his replacement on hand, and no Operator of Strazinsky’s grade would ever turn his gaze away from the screen for even a moment. When the Operator thought he could feel Strazinsky’s eyes boring into the back of his head, after another 45 seconds had passed, and he still didn’t have a headset in his hand, he was mistaken, possibly deluded.
    After two minutes, Strazinsky was finally inserting the earpiece on the headset and adjusting the mic before saying, “Receive audio.”
    He listened in.
    “Anomalies?” asked a woman’s voice, apparently calmly.
    “Minor and monitoring,” said Service.
    Strazinsky pulled the headset’s view-screen down in front of his left eye, and said, “Receive visual.”
    The three-inch screen filled with drifting snow. Strazinsky waited.
    “Receive visual,” he said, again. The screen in front of his left eye blinked into life.
    It had taken thirty-four minutes from the Operator’s alert to Strazinsky getting full audio and visual: thirty-four minutes. There was nothing to see, now, or hear.
    “Void visual,” he said, lifting the screen away from his face. He examined the swirling, pulsing green strings of light in front of him for another sixty seconds, and then said, “Void audio.”
    Strazinsky took off the headset, and handed it back to the Operator, who still wore the neoprene gloves, even though his hands were becoming uncomfortably warm inside them.
    “Rack 2,” said Strazinsky, “and stand down.”
    The Operator turned his back on Strazinsky, and began to peel off the gloves. He walked over to rack 2, and placed the headset on the hook provided. He breathed once, long and slow, and left the Service Floor. The debrief on a stand-down