The Gladiator

Eleven

Gianfranco was taller than Eduardo, and had longer legs. But he needed to hustle to keep up with the man from another world as they hurried toward the stairs that led down to the Crosettis' Fiat. "What are you going to do now?" he asked, breathing hard.

"I don't know. I just don't know," Eduardo answered.

"Those maybe-capitalist repairmen?" Annarita suggested. Gianfranco had the same thought at the same time, but she got it out first. It would never do him any good now.

"I suppose so." Eduardo sounded anything but thrilled. "They're probably from the Security Police, too. Heaven help the poor fools who go into Three Sixes. Next thing they know, they'll end up in camps wondering what the devil happened."

"And they're the people Italy really needs!" Gianfranco exclaimed.

"Some of them are, maybe," Eduardo said. "But some of the people Italy needs are the ones who'll stay away from a place like that after the Security Police shut down two others. They'll think something's fishy about this one."

"They'd better," Annarita said. "When the authorities closed down The Gladiator and the shop in Rome, it was all over the news. If you weren't paying attention, you had to be dead."

"Or stupid. Stupid in a particular way," Eduardo said. "Politically stupid."

"Ah," Gianfranco said. Lots of the people who'd been regulars at The Gladiator fit that bill. He probably had himself, and his father was in politics up to his eyebrows. Most people like that were harmless. Even the Security Police recognized as much. But those people left themselves open for trouble when crackdowns came-and crackdowns always came. Everybody had a file. If your file said you went into places where counterrevolutionary sympathizers gathered, that could be all the excuse the authorities needed.

Or maybe they wouldn't need any excuse at all. If they wanted to turn you into a zek, they could turn you into a zek. Who'd stop them?

Nobody. That was the trouble right there.

Going down all those flights of stairs was a lot easier than climbing them had been. When Gianfranco and Annarita and Eduardo got back to the car, the man from another world pulled out his pocket computer. He turned it on, checked something, and breathed a sigh of relief.

"What is it?" Gianfranco asked.

"They haven't put any tracers in here," Eduardo answered. "That's good, anyhow. You live in a place like this for a while, you start thinking everybody's after you all the time. Instead, it's only some of the people some of the time. Happy day."

Usually, Gianfranco took the possibility of being spied on for granted. Why not? He couldn't do anything about it. Nobody could. And chances were that someone he knew, someone he liked and trusted, sent the Security Police reports about him.

You couldn't guess who all the informers were. If you knew, you'd act different around them, and then what would their reports be worth?

Eduardo kept looking around nervously while he was using the marvelous gadget from the home timeline. "Relax," An-narita told him.

He looked at her as if he thought she'd gone round the bend. Gianfranco knew he did. "I can't relax," Eduardo said. "What if somebody sees me with this thing?"

"What if somebody does?" Annarita returned. "He'll think it's something fancy that belongs to the Security Police."

Eduardo blinked, then started to laugh. "Maybe you've got something there."

Gianfranco thought Annarita was likely to be right. Ordinary people didn't think about other worlds. They thought about secrets in this one-and they had reason to. Even so, he said, "What if somebody from the Security Police sees him?"

"He'll think Cousin Silvio's in military intelligence, or a Russian or a German." Annarita had all the answers.

She was also liable to be right there. The Security Police looked for secrets within secrets, sure. But they weren't equipped to understand a secret that came from outside this whole world. "They don't know the shops are from the home timeline, do they?" Gianfranco asked as Eduardo started the Fiat.

"Not unless they caught somebody and tortured it out of him," Eduardo said, backing the car out of its space. "I don't think they did. Otherwise, they'd know about me. No, I think everybody else got back to the home timeline just fine."

"What kind of evidence would your people leave behind?" Annarita asked.

"Maybe a computer, if they couldn't grab it and take it with them," Eduardo answered. "But without the right password or voiceprint, it wouldn't do the Security Police any good."

"There wouldn't be any sign of the machine you use to go back and forth?" Gianfraneo tried to imagine what that machine would be like. He pictured something that hummed and spat sparks. It probably wasn't like that for real-he had sense enough to realize as much. It was probably quiet and efficient, even boring. But when he thought of a fancy, supersecret machine, he thought of one that belonged in the movies.

"No." Eduardo shook his head. "Just an empty room below ground with lines painted on the floor to warn people to stand back so they don't get in the way when the transposition chamber materialized."

"What would happen if somebody did?" Gianfranco and Annarita asked at the same time.

"Nobody wants to find out." Eduardo shifted gears even more roughly than usual. "It would be a pretty big boom- we're sure of that much. Two things aren't supposed to be in the same place at the same time."

How big was a pretty big boom? Would it blow up the shop? A city block? A whole city? Gianfranco almost asked, but finally decided not to. Any one of those was plenty big enough. He did ask, "You have armies and things in the home timeline, don't you?"

"Si." Eduardo steered carefully. The road twisted and doubled back on itself as it went down to the border checkpoint. It seemed to Gianfranco that the man from another timeline spoke as carefully as he drove.

Gianfranco persisted anyhow: "If one of your armies fought one of ours, who would win?"

"We would." Eduardo sounded completely sure. "If everything was even, we would, I mean. We're quite a ways ahead of you when it comes to technology. But we couldn't fight a war here or anything. We'd have to try to ship everything in through a few transposition chambers, and that just wouldn't work."

"Logistics." Gianfranco had played war games instead of Rails across Europe often enough to know the word.

"What?" Annarita didn't.

That gave him a chance to show off. "It's how you keep an army supplied. Being brave doesn't matter if you run out of bullets."

"Or food," Eduardo added. "Or fuel. Or anything else you need to fight with. Fools talk about strategy. Amateurs talk about tactics. Pros talk about logistics."

"So you're a pro, Gianfranco?" Annarita teased.

"No, of course not," Gianfranco said.

"But he could sound like one on TV," Eduardo said. Gianfranco and Annarita both laughed. So did Eduardo-at himself, Gianfranco thought. When Annarita made a questioning noise, the man from another world explained why: "In the home timeline, that joke is ancient-almost as old as television. Didn't occur to me it could really be funny here. But you haven't heard it before."

"We probably have jokes like that, too," Gianfranco said.

"You do. I heard one at The Gladiator," Eduardo said. "Every day, this guy would take a wheelbarrow full of trash past the factory guard. The guard kept searching the trash, but he never found anything. The guy finally retired. The guard said, 'Look, I know you've been stealing something all these years. Too late for me to do anything about it now. So will you tell me what it was?' And the guy looked at him and said-"

"'Wheelbarrows!'" Gianfranco and Annarita chorused the punch line. Sure enough, that joke was old as the hills.

"See what I mean?" Eduardo hit the brakes. "Here comes the checkpoint."

"Your papers." As usual, the guard sounded bored. Gianfranco hoped he looked bored as he handed over his internal passport. Eduardo's false documents had passed muster every time. Why wouldn't they now? And they did. The guard returned them with a nod. But then he said, "Let's see what's in your shopping bags."

Now Eduardo's shoulders stiffened. He couldn't know what Gianfranco and Annarita had bought, or whether they would get in trouble because of it. "Here you are," Annarita said, and gave them to Eduardo to give to the guard.

He looked inside each one, then nodded again and passed them back. "No subversive literature or music," he said. "Too much of that trash has been coming out of San Marino lately. But you're all right. You can go on." He touched a button in his booth. A bar swung up, clearing the road ahead for the Eiat.

They hadn't gone more than a hundred meters before Annarita said, "See what would have happened if we'd bought those records?"

"I said you were right back there in the shop," Gianfranco said.

"What's this?" Eduardo asked. Annarita told him about the shop with the music by bands the authorities didn't like. He said, "The Security Police are liable to be running that place, too. Wouldn't surprise me a bit."

"We thought of that," Annarita said. "It's one more reason we didn't buy anything there. We didn't want to take any kind of chances with you along."

"Grazie, ragazzi," Eduardo said. "You took a big enough chance just coming with me."

Gianfranco wanted to say it was nothing. It wasn't, though, not in the Italian People's Republic. "But that was important," Annarita said, which seemed to sum things up pretty well- better than Gianfranco could have, anyhow.

"Grazte," Eduardo said again, and drove on down toward Rimini.

Annarita went through the telephone book, looking for the address of the elevator repairmen. Watching her, Eduardo fidgeted. So did her mother and father. Seeing their nerves made her start to realize how big a strain sheltering Eduardo was for them. They hadn't said much about it-they still weren't saying anything-but that didn't make it any less real.

"I'm not finding any Under the Arch Repairs," she said worriedly.

"Didn't you tell me the name of the place was By the Arch?" her father asked.

"I'm an idiot!" Annarita exclaimed, and went to the right place in the book. There it was! Her smile made Eduardo and her parents breathe easier. Yes, this would have been hard enough if he really were their cousin. By now, he'd spent enough time with them that he almost might have been. Almost. Amazing, the power one little word held.

"It's at 27 Avenue of the Glorious Workers' Revolution," she said.

Her father and mother both nodded. Like her, they were used to street names like that. Eduardo made a face. "I wonder what they called it before the revolution," he said. "Whatever it was, that's probably still its name in the home timeline."

"Is the Galleria del Popolo still the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in the home timeline?" Annarita asked.

To her surprise, Eduardo nodded. "Si-it is."

"Does Italy still have a king there?" she asked. She'd only read about kings in history books. If Eduardo came from a world where the country had a real one… She didn't like that idea very much.

But he shook his head. "No-I told you that once before, remember? We've been a republic-a real one, not a people's republic-for a long time. We don't forget we used to have kings, though, and we don't pretend they were always villains."

"What do you mean, a real republic and not a people's republic?" her father asked.

"Secret ballots. More than one candidate for each position. Candidates from more than one party running for each position. Parties with different ideas about how to solve problems. Parties that turn over power to the other side if they lose an election," Eduardo answered.

The more Annarita thought about that, the better she liked it. Here, the government did whatever it wanted. Every so often, voters got the chance to rubber-stamp the people who already ran things. Ballots were supposed to be secret, but everybody knew better. You needed to be brave, or a little bit crazy, to vote no. You needed to be more than a little bit crazy to run against a government candidate. Annarita didn't know what would happen to anyone who tried. Probably end up in a camp, not on the ballot.

She tried to imagine the Communist Party giving up power after it lost. She couldn't do it. Holding on to power was what the Communist Party was all about. It said it held on for the sake of the workers and peasants. They weren't the ones who benefited, though. The apparatchiks were.

Eduardo pulled out his pocket computer and called up a map of Rimini. A green dot of light blinked on and off close to the square with the Roman triumphal arch. He pointed. "There's the Avenue of the Glorious Workers' Revolution, and there's number 27." His tone took all the glory away from the name of the street.

Annarita's father got up and looked at the map. "Only a few blocks from where we are," he said. "That's lucky."

"Well, I hope so, anyhow," Eduardo said. "I'll find out in the morning."

"What will you do if it turns out to be no good?" Dr. Crosetti asked. It wasn't quite How long will you stay with us then?-but it was pretty close.

Eduardo understood that. With a sigh, he said, "I'll look for a job, and I'll look for an apartment. I don't know what else I can do in that case. I just have to try to fit in till my people come back to this alternate-if they ever do."

He would be exiled like no one else. To leave your country behind was bad enough. How much worse would it be to lose your whole world?

"I'm afraid that's a good answer," Annarita's father said. "If you're cast away on a distant island, you have to join the natives."

"It's not quite like that." Eduardo was doing his best to stay polite, only his best wasn't as good as it might have been. If he'd left the quite out, things would have been better. It said he thought living in this Italy was nearly as bad as living among savages would have been. Maybe he had his reasons for feeling that way. The computer that fit in the palm of his hand argued that he did. It irked Annarita all the same.

And when had Eduardo every irked her before? She didn't feel anything about him that should have made Gianfranco jealous. She might have, though, had Eduardo shown any sign of interest in her. She knew she was inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt in just about everything.

Or she had been, anyway. Now? Long ago, some American had written, Fish and visitors smell in three days. Eduardo had been as close to a perfect guest as anyone could be. But his welcome was, if not wearing out, at least fraying at the edges. If the repairmen were just repairmen, it was time for him to strike out on his own.

"I hope everything goes the way you want it to," Annarita said.

"Thanks," Eduardo said. "Me, too. It's about my last chance, isn't it?"

Maybe he'd hoped one of the Crosettis would tell him no. But none of them said a word.

Rimini in August hardly seemed like an Italian city. Most of the people on the streets didn't look like Italians. They didn't dress like Italians. They didn't sound like Italians, either. Taverns advertised beer and aquavit, not wine and grappa. Restaurants had strange signs in their windows.

"What's gravlax?" Gianfranco asked Eduardo.

"Smoked salmon," Eduardo answered. "It's pretty good, actually."

"What language is it in?" Gianfranco wondered.

"Swedish, I think, but don't hold me to it," Eduardo said. "Ah, good-there's the arch."

"Si," Gianfranco said. The Roman monument reminded him he was still in his own country. They wouldn't have anything like that in Hamburg or Copenhagen or Stockholm. Sure enough, several blond tourists were taking pictures of the arch. Gianfranco wondered if it commemorated a victory over their ancestors.

Getting across the square wasn't easy or safe. Cars packed it, all of them going wherever they pleased. They ignored the shouts and whistles of the policemen who tried to tell them what to do. Men and women on bicycles and on foot threaded their way among the cars. You needed nerve to cross the square on foot. Drivers blew horns and stuck their heads out the window to yell at anyone who dared get in their way. Gianfranco had no idea why hundreds of people weren't mashed flat every day. But they didn't seem to be.

And if you hung back, you'd never get across. Eduardo started for the far side with as much confidence-and attitude-as anyone who'd grown up here. Gianfranco stuck close to him and hoped for the best.

Some drivers leaned on their horns whether they needed to or not. That made Gianfranco's ears ring. Eduardo knew what to do about it. He got alongside one of them and yelled, "Beeeep!" right into the open window as loud as he could.

The man in the car almost jumped out of his skin. "You nuts or something?" he shouted at Eduardo.

"I don't think so," Eduardo said. "Are you?" And he walked away, Gianfranco in his wake. The driver, stuck in traffic, stared after them with eyes bugging out of his head.

"That was wonderful," Gianfranco said.

"Some people think they can act like idiots just because they're behind the wheel," Eduardo said. "Or maybe he's a jerk all the time."

"I wouldn't be surprised," Gianfranco said.

"Neither would I. Some people are, that's all." Eduardo shrugged. "You do your best to get along with them. You try not to let them do too much damage to you. Not much else you can do. If you scream at them all the time, they win, because they've turned you into a jerk."

"I never thought of it like that." Gianfranco knew more jerks at school than he wished he did. "Makes pretty good sense."

"Never underestimate the power of human stupidity." That sounded like a joke, but Eduardo didn't seem to be kidding. He stopped short to keep an Opel from running him down. "Like that moron, for instance."

"He's got a car. We don't. He thinks that makes him the boss," Gianfranco said.

"Well, if he hits us, he's right," Eduardo said. "Oh, they'd throw him in jail, but how much good does that do me if I'm in the hospital?"

"Not enough," Gianfranco said.

"Looks the same way to me."

They made it to the far side of the square without getting maimed. Gianfranco sighed with relief. The streets on the far side were crowded, but at least he and Eduardo had a sidewalk to use again. Cars hardly ever came up onto it with more than two wheels, which gave the two of them a fighting chance to dodge.

"Here's the Avenue of the Glorious Workers' Revolution," Gianfranco said.

"Sure looks glorious, doesn't it?" Eduardo could pack more bite into a handful of words than anyone else Gianfranco knew-except maybe Annarita's father.

The avenue looked anything but. Most of the buildings along it were a couple of hundred years old, dating from the late-nineteenth or early-twentieth century. Some of them might not have been painted in all that time. The sidewalk had cracks. The street had potholes. Big lumps of asphalt repaired some of them. Those stuck up like cobblestones, and were almost as hard on cars as the more numerous holes nobody'd bothered to fix.

"You said it was number 27?" Gianfranco asked.

"That's right." Eduardo nodded. "Now I have to hope everybody in the place isn't on holiday, even if it is legit. It's August, after all."

"What do you do if everybody is?" That hadn't occurred to Gianfranco.

"What can I do? I pound my head against the door," Eduardo answered. "Then I come back here when vacation time is over. But I hope I don't have to. Stuff breaks down in August, too. They ought to keep somebody around… I hope."

"Me, too," Gianfranco said. They went past 164, 161, 158, 153… Most of the businesses were dark. Eduardo muttered under his breath.

He started muttering again a little farther along. This time, Gianfranco could make out the words: "Getting close." And so they were. They walked by 47, 39, 38, 36…

"Look!" Gianfranco pointed at the grimy little sign ahead. BY THE ARCH REPAIRS, it said, and then, in smaller letters, ELECTRICAL EQUIPMENT OUR SPECIALTY.

"That's the place, all right." Eduardo walked faster. As Gianfranco had in San Marino, he needed to hurry to keep up. "Now we find out what's going on-or we find out nothing's going on."

When Gianfranco saw the dirty window at the front of the shop, he thought nothing was. Then, through the dirt, he saw a lightbulb shining. "Somebody's in there," he said.

"Looks that way." Before going in, Eduardo looked behind him and to both sides. If somebody from the Security Police was watching, he wasn't obvious about it. Eduardo's right hand came down on the latch. It clicked. The door swung open. Gianfranco thought the hinges should have creaked, but they didn't.

Eduardo went in. Gianfranco followed. Eduardo didn't say anything, though he hadn't wanted Gianfranco and Annarita along when he went into Three Sixes.

The guy behind the counter wasn't anyone Gianfranco had seen before. He looked half asleep. A ceiling fan spun lazily, stirring the air without cooling it. Gianfranco was surprised the calendar on the wall wasn't from 1996, or maybe 1896.

"Help you, Comrade?" the repairman asked when Eduardo showed no sign of vanishing in a puff of smoke.

"Well, I don't know," Eduardo said, and that had to be true on levels Gianfranco could barely imagine.

"You've got something that's busted. You want somebody to fix it. If it's a buggy or a gas lamp, you're in the wrong place. If it's got an electric motor in it, maybe we can do you some good." The repairman sounded so reasonable-and so sarcastic at the same time-that Gianfranco wanted to punch him in the nose.

"Well, I don't know," Eduardo repeated. "This isn't something just anybody can take care of." That was bound to be true. Maybe nobody in this whole world could take care of it. Certainly nobody from this whole world could take care of it.

"And so? Do I look like just anybody?" The fellow in the grimy coveralls drew himself up with touchy pride. The answer there, as far as Gianfranco could see, was yes. The repairman was around forty. He was chunky-not fat, but definitely chunky. He should have shaved this morning, but he hadn't. His face wouldn't set the girls' hearts pounding, not with that honker in the middle of it. "So what's your trouble? Home? Industrial? This is a good time to get industrial work done. Not much happens in August most places."

"Why are you open, then?" Gianfranco asked.

"Somebody's gotta be," the repairman said with a resigned shrug. "We take turns with four or five other outfits. It's our year. What can I tell you?" He spread his hands.

"How long have you been in business here?" Eduardo asked. For a moment, Gianfranco didn't get it. Then he did. Tf this guy's great-grandfather had started the shop, it had nothing to do with the home timeline.

But the man answered, "Just a few years. We're modern, we are. We don't have a bunch of old stuff to unlearn. When we do something, we do it right the first time."

"Were you here the last time the Azzuri made it to the World Cup finals?" Eduardo inquired. Gianfranco thought him a fool for asking. The Italian team hadn't got that far since before he was born. Then Gianfranco caught himself. The Blues hadn't got that far here. It was different in the home timeline. That story Eduardo told…

The repairman suddenly stopped being bored. He thumped his elbows down on the counter and leaned forward. "That lousy ref," he growled. "We were robbed, nothing else but. If Korea hadn't got that goal-"

"Vietnam. It was Vietnam," Eduardo said, his own excitement rising. Gianfranco wondered who was testing whom. He decided they were testing each other. They both needed to.

"Si, you're right. It was." The repairman nodded.

Now Eduardo did some prodding: "It was the plainest hand ball anybody could see-except the blind fool didn't."

"No, no, no. It was an offside. Don't you remember anything?"

Eduardo took a deep breath. "I remember as much as any Italian from the home timeline would."

"So do I." The repairman came out and threw his arms around him and gave him a bear hug. They started dancing, right there in the middle of the shop. To Gianfranco's eyes, they couldn't have looked much sillier if they tried.

"I've been stuck here for months!" Eduardo exclaimed. "Now all I have to do is hop in a transposition chamber and I'm home."

"A transposition chamber? Here?" The repairman's face fell.

"Yes, here," Eduardo said impatiently. "The next closest one's in San Marino, and the Security Police are running that shop."

"Tell me about it!" the repairman said. "That's where we came through, and it's where we were going to go back from. Except now we can't."

Eduardo made as if to pound his head on the counter. "This isn't fair. It just isn't fair," he said. Gianfranco would have been screaming. In a way, Eduardo was, too, but in a quiet tone of voice. He went on, "I finally manage to connect with other people from the home timeline, and what good does it do me? Not even a little bit, because you're as stuck as I am."

" 'As I am'? Not 'as we are'?" The man in the coveralls jerked his thumb at Gianfranco. "Who's the kid? And how come you're running your mouth in front of him? If this is some kind of setup-"

"It isn't. He's all right. Odds are the Security Police would have nabbed me after they closed down The Gladiator if he didn't find me a place to stay," Eduardo said.

"Yeah?" The repairman gave Gianfranco a dubious look. "What have you got to say for yourself, kid?"

"Well, to begin with, stop calling me kid" Gianfranco said. "My name's Gianfranco. And it sounds like you need to get back into the shop in San Marino if you're going to go back to the home timeline."

"Brilliant deduction, Sherlock," the repairman said. "The only trouble is, we need to do it without making the Security Police land on us with both feet. I suppose you've got a way to manage that?" His sarcasm had a nastier edge than Eduardo's, which usually invited you to share the joke. When this guy gibed, the joke was likely to be on you.

But Gianfranco nodded. "I do. Or maybe I do, anyway."

Annarita and Gianfranco walked along the beach, their feet sometimes in the water, sometimes not, as little waves went in and out. A blond man with a dreadful sunburn jogged past. Annarita thought he was intent on putting in as many kilometers as he could before he burned to a crisp. By the look of him, he was almost there. A kid kicked a soccer ball around. He couldn't have been more than eight, but he was already pretty good.

"Do you really think this will work?" Annarita said. If she and Gianfranco couldn't talk safely here, they couldn't anywhere. Of course, that was also possible. And if they couldn't, they'd find out the hard way.

He shrugged. "I don't know. We have a chance. If you've got any better ideas, I'd love to hear them."

Farther up on the sand, two teams were whacking a volleyball back and forth over a net. Most of the men and women were almost as badly burnt as the jogger. They were all laughing and grinning. Annarita couldn't understand why toasting your brains out was supposed to be so much fun. Maybe the Germans and Scandinavians never saw the sun at home, so they had to overdo it when they went on holiday. All the same…

She tried to pull her mind back to the business at hand. "Your father won't know what he's getting into, will he?"

"Well, no," Gianfranco admitted. "He wouldn't do it if he did." He looked a challenge at her. "Go on. Tell me I'm wrong."

She couldn't, and she knew it. "How much trouble will he get into if this all works out the way you want it to?"

"Shouldn't be too much," Gianfranco said confidently. "He's a Party official. He'd be doing the best job he knew how to do. Nobody could hold it against him."

"No? Are you sure?" Annarita didn't usually play devil's advocate, but it seemed natural here. "When something goes wrong, people almost always hold it against somebody. That way, they don't have to blame themselves."

"If it goes the way it's supposed to, nobody will even know anything's happened-nobody but us, I mean," Gianfranco said.

"If things always went the way they were supposed to, we'd all be happier. Richer, too, chances are," Annarita said.

"Well, what's our other choice?" Gianfranco asked. "Leaving the people from the home timeline stuck here for good. Do you want to do that?"

His voice held a certain edge. Yes, he was still a little jealous of Eduardo. And maybe he had reason to be if Eduardo did get stuck here. Seventeen and thirty made a scandal, but twenty-two and thirty-five could make a match. Annarita didn't know if that would happen. She didn't know if she wanted it to happen. But she did know it wasn't impossible-and so did Gianfranco.

She sighed and picked her words with care: "No, he should go home if he can. But remember that if he can. Better Cousin Silvio should get an apartment and a job here than the Security Police should catch him and grill him and throw him in a camp. And they would grill him-over a hot fire. Or do you think I'm wrong.'

If he said yes to that, she would know he wasn't thinking very well at all. But he didn't. She gave him credit. "You're not wrong," he answered. "I didn't mean that. I don't want those goons grabbing him-who would? But he's ready to try it. So are the guys from the repair shop. They don't want to spend the rest of their lives here."

So there, Annarita thought. Now she had to nod, even if she didn't much want to. Gianfranco was right. All the men from the home timeline weren't just ready to try to get away. They were eager. Even if this was home to Annarita and Gianfranco, it was something much less pleasant to them. Annarita said the only thing she could: "Do they understand how big a chance they're taking?"

Gianfranco didn't answer right away. His head swiveled towards a statuesque blonde who was tan, not pink, and whose gold suit covered as little of her as was legal, or maybe a little less than that. Annarita didn't kick sand at him. She couldn't have said why not, but she didn't.

When he still didn't answer, she repeated her question- pointedly. "Oh," he said, as if coming back from a long way away. "Well, why wouldn't they?"

"Because they aren't from here. That's the point," Annarita said. "They don't really know how dangerous those people are."

"Well, those people don't know all the tricks they've got, either," Gianfranco replied. "Things should even out."

She wouldn't be able to change his mind. She could see that coming like a rash-one of her father's favorite lines. "The worst thing that can happen to the Security Police is, they get embarrassed. The worst that can happen to Cousin Silvio and the others is a lot worse than that."

"But the best that can happen is, they get away. And then people from the home timeline come back here and figure out some other way to nudge us along toward freedom." Gian-franco's face lit up-and he wasn't looking at a pretty Swedish girl this time. He was seeing something inside his own head, something he liked even better than pretty girls. "One of these days, we can be just like the home timeline ourselves!"

"I don't want to be just like them," Annarita said, and his eyes widened and his mouth shaped an astonished 0. He couldn't have been any more shocked if she'd slapped him in the face. She went on, "I don't. I want to be what we're supposed to be. We're not the same as they are, and we can't be now. We've grown apart for too long. They do lots of things better than we do. But you know what? I bet we do some things better than they do, too."

Gianfranco didn't believe a word of it. "Like what?"

"Take care of each other, maybe," Annarita said. "And I bet we're a lot better at being happy with what we've got."

"Well, sure we are," Gianfranco said. "Next to them, we haven't got much. We'd better be happy with it."

"Yes, we'd better," Annarita agreed. That seemed to take Gianfranco by surprise. She went on, "Being happy with what you've got-it's not all bad, you know. If you're not happy with what you have, one of the things you can do is take away what somebody else has and keep it yourself. That's part of what capitalists do."

"That's part of what our schoolteachers say capitalists do," Gianfranco retorted. "Have you seen anybody from the home timeline really act that way?"

"Well… no," Annarita said slowly. How much of what she'd learned-how much of what everybody in the Italian People's Republic learned-in school was true? How much was just propaganda? She didn't know. She couldn't know, not for sure. If a fish always lived in muddy water, it wouldn't know that water could be clean and clear, either. But she added, "We're not seeing everything that those people do, either. They may have reasons for behaving one way here and some other way back in their home timeline."

Now she watched Gianfranco look thoughtful and a little unhappy, the way she had a moment before. She liked him better for that-it showed his mind wasn't closed. He also spoke slowly when he replied, "I suppose that's true for some of them. But I don't like to think Ed-uh, Cousin Silvio-would."

"No, I don't, either," Annarita said-and if her prompt agreement made Gianfranco jealous, then it did, that was all.

If it did, he didn't show it. She liked him better for that, too. "If he gets back to the home timeline, he can do anything he wants," he said. "But sooner or later-sooner, I hope-his people will come back here. And when they do, we ought to help them any way we can."

Annarita nodded. She almost said, Well, what can we do? But she and Gianfranco were doing everything they could now. They'd already kept Eduardo out of the hands of the Security Police for a long time. With some luck, they would help him and his friends back to the home timeline.

With some luck… How good was Gianfranco's plan? She could see that it might work. But she could also see that it might go horribly wrong. And if it did, it would come down on everyone's head. She wasn't even close to sure Gianfranco could see that.