Harry Turtledove - The Gladiator

He went up the stairs to the trap door at the top. He pushed it up and went through into the basement. If there were Security Police officers in the shop, they would hear him. But Eduardo had promised him there wouldn't be, and he seemed right.

No motion sensors up there, or none that worked. It stayed dark. The Crosstime Traffic people had warned him it would. He held the trap door open for a moment so he could get his bearings with the light shining up irom below. Then he shut it and walked toward the next stairway with his hands out in front of him as if he were blind.

Even so, he almost tripped over the bottom step. He groped till he found the bannister, then went up the stairs. They put him in The Gladiator's backmost room. He came out into the room where he'd spent so much time playing games. The tables and chairs were still in place. He proved as much by nearly breaking his neck on a couple of them.

After a good deal of groping, he opened the door to the front of the shop. Then he could see again, thanks to the street lights outside. He waited for somebody from the Security Police to yell, "Don't move!" But he had The Gladiator all to himself.

He covered his fingers with a handkerchief when he opened the outer door. No alarm sounded. He scurried away as fast as he could go anyhow. The Security Police might not be here, but he would have bet they had some way to know when that door opened.

Even after midnight, the Galleria del Popolo wasn't deserted. Bars and restaurants-and maybe some shadier places- stayed open late. Gianfranco smelled fresh cigarette smoke in the air. (Many more people smoked here than in the home timeline.) Behind him, someone called, "Hey, you! What are you doing?" The voice didn't sound as if it belonged to anyone from the Security Police. It sounded more like that of an ordinary person worried about burglars.

No matter whose voice it was, Gianfranco ignored it. He turned a corner, then another, then another. He didn't run- that might have drawn unwelcome notice to him. But he did some pretty fancy walking.

Once he was sure nobody was on his heels, he slowed down, breathing hard. The man back near The Gladiator had worried that he was a criminal. Now he worried about running into a real one. That would be irony, wouldn't it? Go off on an adventure no one in this world could ask, and then get knocked over the head for whatever you had in your wallet? He shivered, though the summer night was mild.

Not many people were on the street. The ones who were seemed as nervous of him as he was of them. That reassured him. He knew he was no sneak thief or robber. All they knew was that he was tall and might be dangerous.

He turned around a couple of times to figure out where he was-he'd gone around those corners at random when he was getting away from The Gladiator. Then he nodded to himself. Milan 's skyline looked familiar again. Those skyscrapers that changed it from the home timeline were gone. His apartment building would be… over that way.

Off he went. He shrank into a dark doorway when a police car went by. The carabinieri inside didn't notice him, or else didn't care. The car rolled down the street.

When he got to the apartment building, he took the stairs. He somehow felt the elevator would draw too much notice. That was probably foolish, but he didn't care. He hadn't got used to the elevator yet anyway.

He looked at his watch. It wasn't even one o'clock yet. Ed-uardo had known what he was talking about. Time-or rather, duration-really did stand still inside a transposition chamber. Gianfranco wondered why. From what Eduardo said, chrono-physicists in the home timeline did, too.

Here was the familiar hallway. Here was the familiar-and familial-door. He reached into his pocket. Where the devil were the familiar keys? He'd had them-and now he didn't. They had to be somewhere in the home timeline, or maybe in the transposition chamber. He felt like pounding his head against the wall. Instead, he started pounding on the door.

People joked about the midnight knock on the door. They joked so they wouldn't have to cringe, because those knocks were much too real and much too common. Even so, Annarita didn't think she'd ever heard one… till now.

The terror that filled her also amazed her. That a simple sound could cause so much fear seemed impossible. No matter how it seemed, she lay shivering in her bed. She might suddenly have been dropped into crushed ice.

The pounding went on and on. Was it her door? Were they coming for her parents-and for her-because of what had happened to Gianfranco?

She almost screamed when the light in her bedroom came on. There stood her father in his pajamas. "It's not for us," he said. "It's next door."

Half a dozen words that sounded like a reprieve from a death sentence. And, no two ways about it, they might have been just that. There was a joke that ended, "No, Comrade. He lives one floor down." Annarita had always thought it was funny. Now she was living inside it and understanding the relief the poor fellow who said that had to feel.

Then the knocking stopped-the door must have opened.

A split second later, Annarita heard screams and shrieks. At first she thought the Security Police were beating the Mazzillis. Then she made out Gianfranco's name. His mother cried, "You're back!"

Annarita jumped out of bed. She ran over and gave her father a hug. "They played fair with us," she said. "They didn't have to, but they did."

"A good thing, too," her father said. "I just didn't know what to tell the Mazzillis any more."

"Shall we go over there?" Annarita asked. "They can't get mad if the noise woke us up."

"They can find plenty of other reasons to get mad if they want to," Dr. Crosetti said. "But yes, let's go over. At least they can't blame us for getting Gianfranco murdered now. That's a good start."

The Crosetti s needed to knock several times before the Mazzillis paid any attention to them. A lot of noise was still coming from inside the apartment. But Gianfranco's father finally opened the door. "Ah," he said. "You must have heard us."

Of course we did. Half of Milan heard you, Annarita thought. Her father only nodded. "We did," he agreed. "We're glad he's back. We're gladder than we know how to tell you."

"Is he all right?" Annarita asked.

"He seems to be," Comrade Mazzilli answered cautiously.

"I'm fine." Gianfranco came to the door. He was grinning from ear to ear. "I couldn't be better."

"How was it?" Annarita talked to him right past his parents.

"Amazing," he answered. "Just amazing."

"How did you get away from the villains?" Gianfranco's mother said. "I was so glad to see you, I didn't even ask yet."

"Oh, they let me go," Gianfranco said. "That was all a bluff to make sure nobody started shooting at them." He made it sound as if Eduardo and his friends hadn't done anything worse than knock on the wrong door.

"How did you-all of you-get away from the Security Police?" Comrade Mazzilli asked. "They swore up and down that there was no way out of the shop."

Gianfranco winked at Annarita. His parents didn't notice- they were out of their minds with joy to have him back safe and sound. But Annarita knew the answer, and they didn't. Gianfranco had had a ride in a transposition chamber. She hadn't imagined she could be so jealous. He couldn't tell his mother and father about the chamber, though. What would he say?

He didn't say anything at first-he let out a wordless, scornful snort. "The Security Police aren't as smart as they think they are, then," he declared. His parents both nodded. Everybody liked to believe the Security Police was nothing but a bunch of fools. That mostly wasn't true, but people wanted to believe it was, because it made the Security Police seem less dangerous than they really were. "They must have missed the trap door set into the basement wall," Gianfranco went on. "It opened into a secret room with a tunnel. They put a blindfold on me so I couldn't see where the tunnel went, but we got away."