“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. I 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 Crosettis 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. “Sì. 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 Alfa 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 t
he 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 Duomo, 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. “Sì. 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 fasartas 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?”
“Sì,” 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.
CROSSTIME TRAFFIC. 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.”
The Gladiator Page 23
