The Gladiator

Twelve

Gianfraneo's heart pounded as he and his father and two policemen from San Marino in their silly uniforms trudged up the stairs toward the city's top level. One reason his heart pounded was that he'd already climbed a lot of stairs. If you lived in San Marino, you got your exercise whether you wanted it or not.

Still, nerves made his heart flutter, too. He thought Annarita thought he didn't think anything could go wrong. Thinking that was so twisted, it made him smile. But she wasn't right. He knew this might not work. He knew there would be trouble if it didn't-and there might be even if it did. He just didn't see any other scheme that had even a small chance of getting Eduardo and his comrades back where they belonged.

"It is very unfortunate that you let this shop go on operating," his father said to the policemen. "Very unfortunate. There was one like it in Rome, and they shut it down. There was one like it in Milan, and we shut it down." By the way he said it, he might have closed down The Gladiator all by himself. He hadn't had anything to do with it, but the Sammarinese policemen didn't need to know that.

"Si, Comrade," they said together. All they knew was that an important-well, a fairly important-Party official from Italy was up in arms about The Three Sixes. Well, no. They also knew they wanted to get him out of their hair.

But that wouldn't be so easy. Gianfranco's father kept thundering while he climbed. "My own son told me about this place," he said. "My own son! If he could find it, if he knew there was a problem with it, why couldn't you? Why didn't you:

He didn't say anything about the way Gianfranco had haunted The Gladiator. He was a practical working politician, after all. He knew you talked about what strengthened your case and ignored what didn't.

By the time they all got to the topmost level, Gianfranco's shirt was sticking to him. The policemen looked half wilted, maybe more. Gianfranco and his father wore light, comfortable clothes. Those dumb uniforms were made of wool. They had to feel like bake ovens under the summer sun.

"Why couldn't the stinking shop be lower down?" one of the policemen grumbled.

"We ought to jug the clowns who run it just for being so high up," the other one said. Gianfranco grinned. If they got mad at the people in the shop, that only helped. He was glad they weren't mad at his father-or, if they were, they weren't showing it.

They tramped toward the castle with anger in their eyes. "Now where is this place?" Gianfranco's father asked him. His tone said he was too important a personage to bother looking for the sign himself.

Most of the time, that would have annoyed Gianfranco. Here, he knew his father was talking that way to impress the policemen, so it didn't… quite so much.

He pointed. "There it is, Father."

"Right out in the open!" his father exclaimed, as if a hidden gaming shop could have done much business. "Well, we'll put a stop to that!"

He tramped into The Three Sixes, the policemen in his wake. Gianfranco came in, too. He wished he were coming to play Rails across Europe or even one of the other games. But if he were, his name would go on a list. Those weren't men from the home timeline behind the counter. They belonged to the Security Police.

Along with assorted tourists, Rduardo and three men from the repair shop in Rimini were inside The Three Sixes. They knew what would happen next, which was more than the tourists did-and more than the men from the Security Police did, either.

"How dare you run an operation like this?" Gianfranco's father thundered. "How dare you? This capitalist plot has been suppressed in Rome and Milan, and we'll suppress it here, too!" He sounded a lot more important than he really was.

He sounded convincing, too. Several tourists almost fell over one another getting out of there. Gianfranco guessed that a lot of the ones who stayed didn't speak Italian well enough to understand his father.

The men behind the counter did. One of them said, "Comrade, I'm afraid you don't understand what-"

"I understand much too well!" Gianfranco's father roared. "I understand you're corrupting the youth of Italy -and San Marino, and other places-with these miserable games and lying books. You think you can make the poison sweet, do you? Well, you won't get away with it." He turned to the policemen. "Do your duty!"

"All right, you guys," one of the cops said to the pair behind the counter. "Come along to the station with us. You've got some questions to answer."

"No," said the fellow who'd spoken before.

That was the wrong answer. It couldn't have been wronger if he'd tried for a week. Both policemen drew their pistols faster than a cowboy in an American Western. "Come along with us, I said. Now you're in real trouble."

"You don't know what real trouble is. You don't know who you're messing with, either," said the man behind the counter.

"We're with the Security Police," his pal added.

In Italy, that would have been plenty to get them off the hook. Gianfranco's father looked worried, almost horrified. Gianfranco suspected he did, too-because his father did.

But the Sammarinese policemen laughed. "For one thing, chances are you're lying through your teeth. For another, even if you're not, so what? Do you think you're in Italy or something?"

Both men behind the counter looked daggers at him. "This little tinpot excuse for a country, pretending that it's real-"

That was also the wrong thing to say. It held a lot of truth, which made it even wronger. "Shut up, you jackal in a cheap suit," one of the policemen said. "For half a lira, I'd blow your brains out if you had any. You open your mouth one more time and I may anyhow. Now come along before I get itchy."

"You'll be sorry," the bigmouth in back of the counter said. But he and his friend kept their hands in plain sight and finally got moving.

One of Eduardo's buddies started toward the door that would take them down toward the subbasement where they could call a transposition chamber. He was too eager, though, and moved too soon. The second policeman snapped, "What do you think you're doing? This place is closed, as of right now. Get out of here!"

Now Gianfranco knew exactly what kind of expression he was wearing. Blank dismay-it couldn't be anything else. He'd thought of everything-except that. The police were supposed to be so busy arresting the people who ran The Three Sixes, they wouldn't worry about anything else. Some general or other once said, No plan survives contact with the enemy. Whoever he was, he knew what he was talking about.

And then Gianfranco let out a startled gasp, because Eduardo's arm was around his neck and something was pressing hard into the small of his back. He hoped it was only a knuckle, but he wasn't sure.

"Don't anybody try anything cute, or the kid gets it!" Eduardo sounded like a twelfth-generation Mafioso.

"My boy!" Gianfranco's father cried.

Without that, the Sammarinese policemen or the Security Police might have done something everybody would have regretted-especially Gianfranco. As things were, they stood frozen in place while Eduardo backed Gianfranco to the door. He waited till his buddies went through, then yanked Gianfranco in after him.

"Down the stairs! Quick!" Eduardo said, locking the door.

"Shouldn't I just wait here?" Gianfranco asked.

"No way," Eduardo said. "Now they really will shoot us if they get a chance. Congratulations. You're a hostage."

"Will you take me to the home timeline?" Gianfranco might have been the most enthusiastic hostage in the history of the world.

"Probably. Come on-hustle!"

Hustle Gianfranco did. He heard thuds behind him, then a gunshot through the door. That made him hustle even more.

Eduardo was right on his heels. He slammed another door behind him. "If this shop is like The Gladiator, this one's tougher," he said.

"It better be," Gianfranco said. "I don't like getting shot at."

"You just joined a big club," Eduardo told him.

The repairman called Giulio was busy in a room in the basement. Gianfranco got a glimpse of another computer, one with a screen bigger than Eduardo's handheld. "It's on the way, which means it's here," the man from the home timeline said.

"Huh?" Gianfranco said.

Nobody answered him. The repairman named Rocco touched the palm of his hand to a particular section of wall. Eduardo lifted a section of floor that didn't look different from any of the rest. A metal stairway waited below. "Come on!" Eduardo called. He want down last, and again closed the door after them. "That'll keep the Security Police scratching their heads," he said, sounding pleased. "I don't think they found the palm lock at all."

"Devil take the Security Police," Rocco said. "There's the transposition chamber. Let's get out of here. We'll have to fill out a million forms for bringing the kid with us, but what can you do?"

The shiny white chamber looked something like a box, something like a shed. An automatic door slid open. The men from the home timeline hurried inside. So did Gianfranco. The seats looked like the ones airliners used. They even had safety belts. Feeling a little foolish, Gianfranco closed his around his middle.

A man in funny-looking clothes-clothes from the home timeline?-sat at the front of the chamber. "Anybody else?" he asked.

"No. We're it," Eduardo answered.

"All right." The man spoke to the air: "Door close." The door slid shut. It must have had some kind of computer inside. The man pushed a button. A few lights on the panel in front of him went from red or orange to green. That was all.

But Rocco grinned and thumped Eduardo on the shoulder. "On the way home!"

"Si." Eduardo was grinning, too.

"But we're not moving!" Gianfranco said. Could it be that the Emperor had no clothes?

"It doesn't feel like we're moving, but we are," Eduardo said. "We'll be back in the home timeline in about ten minutes, and when you look at your watch it'll be the same time as it was when you left. Traveling between alternates is a weird business all the way around."

Gianfranco didn't know what time it had been when they left. He didn't know if Eduardo was pulling his leg, either. Pretty soon, though, if any of what the man from the home timeline said was true, he'd get the chance to find out.

Comrade Mazzilli was fit to be tied. Annarita couldn't blame him, not with what he knew. She also couldn't tell him some of the things that would have eased his mind. She and her parents just had to sit there and listen while he blew up in their faces.

"That cousin of yours-he's a snake in the grass!" Gian-franco's father shouted. "He grabbed the boy and took him away, and then-then he disappeared! With Gianfranco!"

"I don't know how he could have done that, Cristoforo," Annarita's father said, as soothingly as he could.

It didn't help. "I don't know how, either, but I saw it with my own eyes!" Comrade Mazzilli yelled. "Those thugs dragged poor Gianfranco down some stairs. There's no way out down there, no tunnels or anything, but the Sammarinese and the Security Police-it really was the Security Police running that shop-couldn't find 'em. They jumped into a rabbit hole with my poor boy!"

He and Gianfranco's mother were in agony. "I'm sure Silvio wouldn't hurt him," Annarita said. "I don't think Silvio would hurt anybody."

"Fat lot you know about him. You're lucky he didn't grab you, too," Gianfranco's father said. "So what can we expect now? A ransom note?" Kidnappings for money didn't happen very often, but they happened.

"I don't think it's like that, Cristoforo," Annarita's father said.

"Then where are they?" Comrade Mazzilli bellowed. "They have to be somewhere, but where?"

In the home timeline, I hope, Annarita thought. / wish Ed-uardo would have kidnapped me. Gianfranco would be hard to put up with when he got back-if he got back. Would he decide to stay in the home timeline if it really was so much better than this one? Would the people there want him to stay or make him stay? That would be bad-not for him, but for everyone here. How could the Crosettis and Mazzillis go on sharing a kitchen and bathroom if the Mazzillis thought a Crosetti cousin made their boy disappear?

"The Security Police say it's the best vanishing act they ever saw," Comrade Mazzilli went on, not shouting quite so loud. "They say stage magicians can't do any better. But what good does that do me? It might as well be real magic, because Gianfranco's really gone!"

"He'll turn up. I'm sure he will." Annarita's father had plenty of practice reassuring patients. He used that same skill on Cristoforo Mazzilli now. But he needed reassuring himself- he glanced at Annarita before he said anything. Annarita gave him a small, encouraging nod. That was all she could do.

And Gianfranco's father refused to be reassured. "I don't know how you can be so certain," he said. "Not unless you're part of the plot yourself, I mean."

"Cristoforo, if you don't know better than that, if you really mean it, we are going to have a problem," Dr. Crosetti said heavily. Sure enough, a world of trouble was in the air.

"Si, Comrade Mazzilli. That's just ridiculous," Annarita said.

"I've already got a problem. And everything that's happened is ridiculous-and it all revolves around your miserable cousin," Gianfranco's father said. But then he sighed and shook his head. "No, I don't mean it. I've know all of you too long to believe such a thing. I was upset. I am upset. I have reason to be upset." His voice got louder again with every sentence. But nobody could tell him he was wrong, not without giving away all the secrets that had to stay secret.

Annarita wondered whether he would believe the truth if he heard it. Even if they'd had it, they couldn't very well have shown him Eduardo's pocket computer, a miracle machine that couldn't possibly come from this world. The best thing Gianfranco's father could do was decide Eduardo had conned them before kidnapping him.

"Of course you do." Annarita's father was still trying his best to be soothing. "Yes, of course you do. But right now you have to wait. The police from San Marino and the Security Police must be working hard on the case."

"Fat lot of good they'll do." Comrade Mazzilli didn't seem impressed with the forces of law and order. "For heaven's sake, those… people snatched Gianfranco right under their pointy noses. You think they'll find him? They couldn't find water if they fell out of a boat!"

"Are you going to play detective by yourself?" Dr. Crosetti asked reasonably.

"Well, no," Gianfranco's father said. "But waiting? I'll be climbing the walls-that's what I'll be doing. And so would you." Without waiting for an answer, he pounded out of the Crosettis' hotel room.

Annarita's father let out a long, weary sigh. "I don't ever want to go through that again-and it's a thousand times worse for poor Cristoforo than it is for us. He's afraid Gianfranco's gone for good, and I'm pretty sure he's not."

"Just pretty sure?" Annarita asked.

"Yes, just pretty sure," her father answered. "We know what Eduardo told us. We know what he showed us. But we don't know what he didn't tell us and didn't show us. How much of what we heard was true? How much of it covered up things he didn't want us to know?"

"You don't really believe that!" Annarita said, the way her father had when Comrade Mazzilli accused him of being part of Eduardo's plot-which, in a way, he was.

"I don't want to believe it," he said now. "But I hope more than I can tell you that Gianfranco comes back safe and sound-and soon."

For as long as he'd known about visiting the home timeline, Gianfranco had thought visiting it would be a lot like going to heaven. It seemed more like a visit to purgatory. He could see heaven from there, but the people in charge of the place didn't want to let him go out and touch it.

They didn't make any bones about why, either. "The less you know, the less you'll be able to tell the Security Police," said one of their officials in an accent that sounded just like his own.

"Are you nuts?" he squawked. "I won't tell those clowns anything. And they don't know anything about crosstime travel. They think I've been kidnapped for ransom or something. If I wanted to spill my guts, I could have done it a million times by now."

"He's right, Massimo," Eduardo said. "All he had to do was let out a peep, and the Security Police would have put me through the meat grinder. He never said boo. He didn't even give a hint. Nobody ever thought I was anything special, and that's thanks to him."

"And to Annarita and her folks," Gianfranco put in-fair was fair.

"And to them," Eduardo agreed. "But you're here, and they aren't. And your being here is… well, a little awkward."

He might have said a big pain instead. Obviously, that was what he meant. Massimo said, "Keeping contamination to a minimum is standard Crosstime Traffic policy." He might have been a priest quoting from the Bible-or an apparatchik quoting from Das Kapital.

"Cut the kid some slack, will you, please?" Eduardo said. "We owe him a lot. / owe him a lot. Do it for me, not for him."

"And since when are you more important than a multinational corporation?" The way Massimo said it told Gianfranco that not everything he'd learned about capitalism was a lie. But then the Crosstime Traffic official unbent enough to add, "Well, we'll see what my superiors think." He sighed. "The least they'll do is drug him so he can't spill no matter what those goons try on him."

One of his superiors must have been a human being under his funny-looking suit. Clothes in the home timeline kept making Gianfranco want to giggle. The man gave Gianfranco permission to go around Rimini with somebody along to keep an eye on him. Eduardo was the somebody.

The Roman arch in the middle of the square was the same here as it was in his alternate. The little cars zipping around near it and under it sure weren't, though. There were many more different styles, and they were painted in much brighter colors. And there was another difference. "The exhaust doesn't make my eyes sting!" he said.

"That's right," Eduardo said. "They burn hydrogen, not gasoline-or gasoline and motor oil, like German Trabants." He made a face-Trabants were nasty. "The exhaust is water vapor, not a bunch of stinking, poisonous chemicals."

"I've heard talk about using hydrogen back home," Gianfranco said. "It's nothing but talk, though."

"They probably won't try to do it till they run out of oil," Eduardo said. "And that's liable to be too late."

"How will you get me back to my alternate?" Gianfranco asked. "I don't think you can put me back in the basement at The Three Sixes."

"I don't think so, either, even if it would be nice if we could," Eduardo answered. "I don't know anything officially, you understand. My guess would be, they'll take you over to Milan and insert you there."

Gianfranco wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. It made him seem more like a needle than a person. And he said, "What? Back at The Gladiator? Aren't the Security Police still all over it, too?"

"Not any more. We monitor them," Eduardo said. "The shop is still locked up, but that's about it. They don't think anybody else will show up there."

"So if I appear down in the basement in the middle of the night…" Gianfranco began.

"You've got it," Eduardo said. "All you'd have to do is come out and go home. Of course, you might want to wear gloves while you're in the shop."

"I don't know why, except maybe when I touch the door to leave," Gianfranco said. "You probably have more fingerprints inside there than I do, but I can't think of many other people who would."

Eduardo laughed. "I can't even tell you you're wrong. You sure wasted a lot of time in there."

"I don't think it was a waste," Gianfranco replied with dignity. "If I hadn't spent so much time there, I never would have got here-even if you did have to kidnap me to get me down the stairs."

"That's not why I did it," Eduardo said. "Things were going wrong. We couldn't get down there unless I grabbed you."

"Whatever you do with me, I hope you do it soon. My family must be going out of their minds," Gianfranco said.

"And they're probably furious at the Grosettis because of me," Eduardo said. "They didn't figure I'd turn out to be such a desperate criminal. But none of what happens next is my call.

It's up to the bosses at Crosstime Traffic. They'll decide when they're good and ready, and that'll be that. Any which way, it's all over for me."

"What do you mean?"

"I won't be going back to that alternate. No chance they'll let me, and I don't think I would even if I could. I've been burned. I'm bound to be on every wanted list in the Italian People's Republic. If I show my nose there, everyone will jump on me with both feet."

"Oh." Gianfranco nodded. " St. I guess you're right." Eduardo wouldn't be coming back to see Annarita any more, then. That didn't break Gianfranco's heart, even if he did his best not to show it.

The higher-ups at Crosstime Traffic figured out what to do faster than Eduardo had made Gianfranco think they would. That afternoon, he and Eduardo got into an A If a Romeo to go back to Milan. "Please fasten your seat belt," a woman's voice said after he sat down.

He did. "How does it know?" he asked the guy who was driving, a fellow in his mid-twenties named Moreno. Whether that was first name or last Gianfranco never found out.

"Sensor in the seat, and another one in the lock mechanism." Moreno spoke a French-flavored dialect. Gianfranco had to listen to him closely to follow what he said.

He drove like a maniac. Gianfranco had never imagined going from Rimini to Milan so fast, not unless he flew. He was glad he wore the seat belt. How much good it would do in case of a crash at that speed was a different question. Every time the Alfa hit a bump, Gianfranco almost went through the ceiling.

They were doing better than 160 kilometers an hour when an unlucky sparrow bounded off the windshield. "That little bird is-"

"Kaput," Moreno finished for him, with a wag of the hand. Gianfranco would have said something like very unhappy, which didn't mean Moreno was wrong-there was a tiny splash of blood on the window glass.

The Italian countryside here didn't look much different from the way it did in Gianfranco's world. Milan was a different story. Parts of it hadn't changed. The old buildings-La Scala, the Duorao, the Galleria del Popolo or Galleria Vittorio Emanuele-seemed the same. But massive skyscrapers of glass and steel gave the skyline an alien look. And…

"What's that?" Gianfranco asked. Whatever it was, it covered a lot of space.

"That's the soccer stadium," Eduardo answered. "One of them, I mean. AC Milan plays there. Inter Milan has a stadium about the same size on the other side of town."

"Oh, my," Gianfranco said. Milan's two big soccer clubs had the same names here as they did in his alternate. But the size of that stadium said soccer was a much bigger business in the home timeline. He wasn't sure whether that was good or bad. "Is the game better here than it is in my Milan?" he asked.

"Sometimes," Eduardo answered. "The big teams here have the best players from all over the world, not just from one country. The seasons are longer here, though, and the players don't always try as hard as they might. When it's good, it's better, I guess. When it's not…" He shrugged. Moreno said something rude. Eduardo went on, "The top players get so much money, they don't always want to take chances, either."

Gianfranco started to laugh. "We always hear about the capitalists exploiting the workers. It sounds like the soccer workers exploit the capitalists, too."

That made Eduardo laugh. "Si. It can happen. But the players make so much, they're capitalists, too."

Moreno had to drive around the Galleria del Popolo several times before he could nab a parking space. (Gianfranco knew that wasn't the right name here, but he still thought of the place that way.) "Traffic here is even worse than it is back home," he said. Moreno swore again.

"We've got more cars," Eduardo said. "We don't have to wait for years before we buy one. We just put down the money and drive away. We don't have to put down very much, either. There's a lot more buying on credit here than in your alternate."

"Doesn't that suck people into debt?" Gianfranco asked as he got out.

"It can," Eduardo said. Moreno zoomed off. Eduardo continued, "Yeah, it can-I'm not going to lie to you. But with most people, it doesn't. And they get to buy things they would have trouble affording if they had to save up the money ahead of time."

"Advertisements everywhere," Gianfranco remarked as they walked through the Galleria. Electric signs and TV screens shouted at him to buy cars and cologne and (asartas and soda. He didn't even know what a fasarta was. He didn't want to ask Eduardo, for fear of seeming ignorant. After a while, though, he did ask, "Doesn't all this drive people crazy?"

"Oh, you'd better believe it," Eduardo said. "Most people try to tune it out. But that just means the people who put the ads together make the new ones even bigger and noisier than the ones that came before. It's a war, like any other war. Ignore this if you can! the advertisers say. So people do."

Gianfranco couldn't ignore the ads. He didn't have the practice people here did. In his Italian People's Republic, goods were scarce. There wasn't much competition. If you had something, people rushed out and bought it. Whether it was overcoats or avocados, they didn't know when they would see the like again. But everything seemed to be available all the time here. You had to persuade people to part with their money, make them want to buy your shoes and not Tod's. Gianfranco had no idea who Tod was or whether his-her?-shoes were good or bad. But ads for them were all over the Galleria.

So were ads for Crosstime Traffic. That surprised Gianfranco, though he didn't know why it should have. "You really do work for a capitalist corporation," he said to Eduardo.

"Yes, and I don't think it's evil or gross, either," Eduardo said. "Without Crosstime Traffic, the home timeline would be a mess. Oh, you'll get lots of people who tell you it's a mess anyhow, but it would be a different mess, and a worse one."

He knew what Gianfranco was thinking, all right. In the Italian People's Republic, looking out for a profit first was shameful. It wasn't quite illegal, but you didn't want to get caught doing it. Here… nobody cared.

A lot of the buildings in the Galleria looked the same as the ones in Gianfranco's alternate. They were the same buildings, like La Scala and the Duomo. They'd gone up before the two worlds split apart, so they existed in both. Strange to think of two sets of the same buildings in different worlds.

Or maybe more than two… "How many alternates have the Galleria in them?" Gianfranco asked. Eduardo looked startled. "I don't know. A lot-that's all I can tell you. All the ones where the breakpoint is after it was built. Some of them, though, you don't want to visit."

"Alternates where the Fascists won?" That was the worst thing Gianfranco could think of.

"Those are bad, but some of them aren't too much worse than yours," Eduardo answered. That gave Gianfranco a look at his own alternate, and at how it seemed to the home timeline, that he hadn't had before. He could have done without it. Eduardo went on, "Those are bad, but the ones where they really went and fought an atomic war are worse."

"Oh." Gianfranco winced. "How many of those are there?"

"Too many. We stay out of most of them," Eduardo said. "They've been knocked too flat to be worth doing business with. They've been knocked too flat to be dangerous, too. Nobody in any of them will find the crosstime secret any time soon."

"I guess not," Gianfranco said. "Do you try to nudge the fascist alternates the way you've been nudging mine?"

"Si," Eduardo said, and not another word.

"Any luck?"

Eduardo doled out two more words: "Not much." A little defensively, he added, "It's not easy. A world is a big place, and we don't have a lot of resources to put into any one alternate."

"I wasn't complaining. I was just wondering," Gianfranco said. "Boy, the buildings may be the same here, but the shops sure aren't." The one they'd just walked past would have got the shopkeeper flung into a camp in his Milan. Here, nobody but a couple of customers walking in paid any attention to it.

"Different alternates, different customs." Eduardo seemed glad Gianfranco had changed the subject. Was he embarrassed the home timeline couldn't do more with alternates it didn't like? Or was he embarrassed it wasn't trying harder? Its first job was to turn a profit. If it didn't do that, it wouldn't have the money to try to do anything else.

Gianfranco was surprised the sign in the familiar shopfront didn't say The Gladiator. He knew he shouldn't have been, but he was anyway. "What do we do now?" he asked as Eduardo held the door open for him.

"We give you your cover story. We give you the drugs so you'll stick to it no matter what. Then we wait until midnight and send you home," Eduardo answered. "If they catch you inside and ask you how you got there, tell 'em we had a tunnel that runs all the way from Rimini to Milan. That'll shut 'em up."

Gianfranco laughed. "I bet it will."

"What do we do if Gianfranco doesn't come back?" Annarita's mother asked for about the fiftieth time as the family Fiat neared their apartment building. The Crosettis had never had such a miserable end to an August holiday.

"I think we change our names and run off to Australia," Annarita's father said.

"How are we supposed to do that?" Annarita asked, curious in spite of herself.

"Well, if we change our names, everyone will think we're Australians anyway, so there shouldn't be any trouble." Her father made it sound ridiculously easy. But the accent was on ridiculously.

"You're not helping," Annarita's mother said. "The Mazzillis are going to hate us forever. We may have to move, and wish we could go to Australia."

"I think Gianfranco will be back," Annarita said.

"He'd better be," her mother said. "Our life becomes impossible if he isn't, and that's nothing next to what happens to the poor Mazzillis. Their only child gone-" She shook her head. "I wouldn't want to keep on living if anything happened to you, Annarita."

"Don't talk like that, Mother," Annarita said. "Just don't. Not about me, and not about Gianfranco, either."

"What worries me is, he's liable to decide he likes it there," her father said. "And if he does, and if they let him, he's liable to decide to stay. A lot of the time, boys that age only think about themselves. What staying there would do to everybody who has to stay here… He may not worry about that for a long time."

"I hope you're wrong!" Annarita exclaimed.

"I hope I'm wrong, too," Dr. Crosetti said. "Eduardo and his friends are more likely to care about what happens here than Gianfranco does, though."

Gianfranco was her boyfriend. When her father criticized him, she felt she ought to leap to his defense. But she couldn't. She was too afraid her father was right. All the marvels the home timeline had to offer… Yes, they would tempt Gianfranco. They would tempt plenty of people from this alternate. And he was young enough and smart enough to start over there if he wanted to-and if they let him.

"Maybe I should fix something for us to eat," her mother said. "I don't think the Mazzillis will want to have supper with us tonight."

"I'll help," Annarita said.

Chopping vegetables and cooking pasta let her lake her mind off her worries for a while. Gianfranco's mother stuck her nose into the kitchen. When she saw Annarita and her mother busy there, she drew back in a hurry. Any other late afternoon, she would have come in and chatted. No, things wouldn't be the same if Gianfranco didn't come back.

They might not be the same even if he did. Annarita frowned when that occurred to her. The Mazzillis would go right on blaming Eduardo for kidnapping him. As far as they knew, Eduardo was the Crosettis' Cousin Silvio. Why wouldn't they think everybody in Annarita's family was responsible in some way?

The knife in Annarita's hand flashed as she cut zucchini into slices almost thin enough to see through. "This is a mess," she said. "Nothing but a miserable, stinking mess."

Her mother was slicing even thinner. "You're not wrong. I wish you were. If Comrade Mazzilli weren't who he was, Gianfranco might be able to tell him what was what. But the way things are…"

"Si," Annarita said unhappily. Because Comrade Mazzilli was a Communist Party official, Gianfranco had used him to get the Security Police out of the way so Eduardo and his friends could escape. His father wouldn't like that even a little bit. And again, how could you say he was wrong not to like it?

Supper turned out to be a very unhappy meal. The Crosettis ate quickly to get out of the dining room and let the Mazzillis have it. Annarita thought about going on like that day after day, year after year. It could happen. In the Italian People's Republic, moving away from neighbors who didn't like you was often harder than finding some way to put up with them. But it would be anything but pleasant.

"We'll have to take turns going first," Annarita's mother said with a sigh-she must have been thinking along the same lines.

"I wonder how much trouble Comrade Mazzilli can make for us if he really works at it," her father said. There was another interesting question. Because of his Party rank, he might be able to make quite a bit.

If Gianfranco didn't turn up, he'd have every reason to do just that. Annarita had never dreamt helping someone could do such a good job of complicating her life.