Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

"Rails across Europe is for me, and I'm not the only one who thinks so," Gianfranco said.

Eduardo gave him a crooked smile. "Grazie. It's supposed to be interesting. If it weren't, we wouldn't have had any customers, and we wouldn't have been able to change any minds at all."

"You changed mine, that's for sure." Gianfranco looked down at the game board, and at his railroad route marked out in erasable crayon. "This is my only chance to be a capitalist. I'm not even an elevator repairman."

"What's that supposed to mean?" Eduardo asked.

"You should have heard those guys-Rocco and whoever the other one was-go on," Gianfranco said. "They were in it for the money, nothing else but. If racing baby buggies paid better, they'd do that instead. You could tell. I even called them capitalists, and they didn't get mad."

"Really?" Eduardo said.

"Si." Gianfranco crossed his heart to show he was telling the truth. There was one of the gestures that hung on to show Italian society was less godless than the government said and wished it was.

"Who exactly were these people? Rocco and his pal, you say?" Eduardo seemed more interested than Gianfranco had thought he would.

"What do you mean, who? They were a couple of repairmen, that's all." like a lot of people in the so-called workers' paradise, Gianfranco looked down his nose at men and women who really did work with their hands. He didn't know he did, and he would have denied it had anyone called him on it, but it was true.

Eduardo had other things on his mind. "Is there any way to find out exactly who they were? It could be important. They might be… friends of mine."

That took a moment to sink in. When it did, Gianfranco blinked. "You mean, people from your home timeline?"

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"I don't know," Eduardo said. "I sure would like to, though." He made a fist, then brought it down gently on the table by the game board. Gianfranco got the idea that he would rather have banged it down as hard as he could. "Maybe they were looking for me. If they were, if they came to the right building and didn't find me… It makes you want to scream, you know?"

"Plenty of people here like money, too, you know," Gianfranco said.

"Oh, sure. Maybe I'm building castles in the air, just because I want to so much." Now Eduardo's smile was sheepish. "But I can hope, can't I? And nobody ever said the authorities closed down our shop in San Marino."

"Ah, so that's where it is. You never told me before," Gianfranco said.

San Marino, southeast of Milan near Rimini on the Adriatic coast, covered only a few square kilometers. It was entirely surrounded by Italy. But it was an independent country, and had been for more than 1,500 years. It was also, Gianfranco realized, a good place for a shop like The Gladiator. Things were looser in San Marino than in Italy. The government was Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist, of course, but it wasn't very Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist. San Marino depended on vacationers and tourists. It took money, and the importance of money, more seriously than Italy did.

"That's where it is, all right," Eduardo agreed. "How do I go about finding out who these repairmen were?"

Gianfranco gaped. "/ don't know." He'd never had to worry about anything like that before.

"They didn't just fall out of the sky," Eduardo said patiently. "Somebody in this building would have hired them, right? Maybe the manager, maybe the janitor, but somebody. Whoever it is, he'll know their firm, won't he?"

"I guess so." Gianfranco knew he sounded vague. "Or would somebody in the city government have sent them out when our turn finally came up?"

Eduardo said a couple of things that should have set fire to the table. Somehow, they didn't. "It could be," he said when he calmed down a little. "Things work like that here, heaven knows. D'you think your father could find out for me if it is? He's got the connections to do it if anybody does."

"Well, yeah," Gianfranco said. "But why do I tell him that you want to know? Or even that I want to know, if you don't want him knowing you do?"

Some of the things Eduardo said this time made what had come out before sound like love poetry by comparison. He needed longer to get control of his temper. At last, he said, "Well, you're right. I wish you weren't, but you are. You don't want to become an apprentice elevator repairman all of a sudden, eh?"

"No," Gianfranco said with such dignity as he could muster. Sure enough, he didn't think much of working with his hands. He was an apparatchik's son, all right.

"Too bad." Eduardo sounded as if he meant it. But he also had some of his usual sarcastic edge back. Before, he'd been too upset for sarcasm. He went on, "You'd sure make things simpler if you did."

"Simpler for you, maybe," Gianfranco said.

"Si, simpler for me." Eduardo spread his hands. "Whenever somebody says something like that, what else is he going to mean?" Yes, he was closer to his normal self.

"Sorry," Gianfranco said. "But if f start asking too many weird questions, my father isn't the only one who'll wonder

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why. Before too long, some informer or other will get word to the Security Police. Then they'll start asking questions of their own."

"Do you know who's likely to be an informer?" Eduardo asked.

"I can guess some people who may be," Gianfranco answered. "Some, though, nobody'd guess in a million years. That's how things work."

How many people talked to the Security Police? No civilian knew for sure. Gianfranco would have bet no one official at the Security Police had the number at his fingertips. Handlers dealt with informers. But there were millions of them-he was sure of that. Brothers spied on sisters. Wives spied on husbands. Bosses informed on their workers-and the other way round. How huge were the archives with all those accusations, all those denunciations? Wouldn't they fill up the whole country sooner or later? Probably sooner, he thought.

Eduardo sighed. "All right. Do what you can without sticking your neck out. If you can find out, wonderful. If you can't…" He sighed again, louder. "If you can't, maybe it's time to go to San Marino."

"It's a nice place. People say so, anyway-I've been to Rimini, but never there," Gianfranco said.

"I wouldn't be going to sightsee," Eduardo reminded him.

Gianfranco nodded. He understood that. And if Eduardo found what he was looking for, he would disappear. Gianfranco understood that, too. And he himself would stay stuck in this dull old world after Eduardo had given him a glimpse-no, half a glimpse-of something so much better. Where was the justice in that?

Ten

The chief janitor of the apartment building was a large, impressive man named Marcantonio Moretti. He scratched his bushy, Stalin-style mustache as he nodded to Annarita. "Yes, it is very good to have the elevator running again," he said.

"And it's so smooth! Just like a dream!" Annarita wasn't in the drama society at Hoxha Polytechnic, but she knew how to lay it on with a trowel.

"Grazie" Comrade Moretti said, as if he'd done the work himself. He hadn't, of course. He didn't do much work of any sort. He was the chief janitor because his brother-in-law was a medium-important official in Milan 's Bureau of City Maintenance. Under Communism, capitalism, or any old kind of ism at all, whom you knew mattered at least as much as what you could actually do.

"Who were the repairmen who did the job? They ought to get commendations for the Stakhanovite work they did," Annarita said. If people really worked like Stakhanovites or anything close to it, the elevator would have got fixed as soon as it broke down. Maybe it wouldn't have broken down in the first place. But how long had they had to wait? Much, much, too long- Annarita knew that.