Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

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 be-

248 Harry Turtledove

hind 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 1 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 Ed-uardo'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!" Ed-uardo 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 liocco 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!"

"Sj." 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!"