“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.” Gianfranco’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 O. 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.
Twelve
Gianfranco’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 thutter, 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.
“Sì, 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, Eduardo 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!”
“Sì.” 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!” Gianfranco’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. I wish Eduardo 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.
“Sì, 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.
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