Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

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. / wish Ed-uardo 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.

"Si, 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.

"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 1 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. / 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. "1 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?"