Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

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'11 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."