The Gladiator (24 page)

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Authors: Harry Turtledove

BOOK: The Gladiator
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“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.
“
Sì
, 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 I 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.
I
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. “I 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?”
“Not any more. We monitor them,” Eduardo said. “The shop is still locked up, but that's about it. They don't think anybody else will show up there.”
“So if I appear down in the basement in the middle of the night …” Gianfranco began.
“You've got it,” Eduardo said. “All you'd have to do is come out and go home. Of course, you might want to wear gloves while you're in the shop.”
“I don't know why, except maybe when I touch the door to leave,” Gianfranco said. “You probably have more fingerprints inside there than I do, but I can't think of many other people who would.”
Eduardo laughed. “I can't even tell you you're wrong. You sure wasted a lot of time in there.”
“I don't think it was a waste,” Gianfranco replied with dignity. “If I hadn't spent so much time there, I never would have got here—even if you did have to kidnap me to get me down the stairs.”
“That's not why I did it,” Eduardo said. “Things were going wrong. We couldn't get down there unless I grabbed you.”
“Whatever you do with me, I hope you do it soon. My family must be going out of their minds,” Gianfranco said.
“And they're probably furious at the Crosettis because of me,” Eduardo said. “They didn't figure I'd turn out to be such a desperate criminal. But none of what happens next is my call.
It's up to the bosses at Crosstime Traffic. They'll decide when they're good and ready, and that'll be that. Any which way, it's all over for me.”
“What do you mean?”
“I won't be going back to that alternate. No chance they'll let me, and I don't think I would even if I could. I've been burned. I'm bound to be on every wanted list in the Italian People's Republic. If I show my nose there, everyone will jump on me with both feet.”
“Oh.” Gianfranco nodded. “
Sì
. I guess you're right.” Eduardo wouldn't be coming back to see Annarita any more, then. That didn't break Gianfranco's heart, even if he did his best not to show it.
The higher-ups at Crosstime Traffic figured out what to do faster than Eduardo had made Gianfranco think they would. That afternoon, he and Eduardo got into an Alfa Romeo to go back to Milan. “Please fasten your seat belt,” a woman's voice said after he sat down.
He did. “How does it know?” he asked the guy who was driving, a fellow in his mid-twenties named Moreno. Whether that was first name or last Gianfranco never found out.
“Sensor in the seat, and another one in the lock mechanism.” Moreno spoke a French-flavored dialect. Gianfranco had to listen to him closely to follow what he said.
He drove like a maniac. Gianfranco had never imagined going from Rimini to Milan so fast, not unless he flew. He was glad he wore the seat belt. How much good it would do in case of a crash at that speed was a different question. Every time the Alfa hit a bump, Gianfranco almost went through the ceiling.
They were doing better than 160 kilometers an hour when
an unlucky sparrow bounded off the windshield. “That little bird is—”
“Kaput,” Moreno finished for him, with a wag of the hand. Gianfranco would have said something like
very unhappy
, which didn't mean Moreno was wrong—there was a tiny splash of blood on the window glass.
The Italian countryside here didn't look much different from the way it did in Gianfranco's world. Milan was a different story. Parts of it hadn't changed. The old buildings—La Scala, the Duomo, the Galleria del Popolo or Galleria Vittorio Emanuele—seemed the same. But massive skyscrapers of glass and steel gave the skyline an alien look. And …
“What's
that
?” Gianfranco asked. Whatever it was, it covered a lot of space.
“That's the soccer stadium,” Eduardo answered. “One of them, I mean. AC Milan plays there. Inter Milan has a stadium about the same size on the other side of town.”
“Oh, my,” Gianfranco said. Milan's two big soccer clubs had the same names here as they did in his alternate. But the size of that stadium said soccer was a much bigger business in the home timeline. He wasn't sure whether that was good or bad. “Is the game better here than it is in my Milan?” he asked.
“Sometimes,” Eduardo answered. “The big teams here have the best players from all over the world, not just from one country. The seasons are longer here, though, and the players don't always try as hard as they might. When it's good, it's better, I guess. When it's not …” He shrugged. Moreno said something rude. Eduardo went on, “The top players get so much money, they don't always want to take chances, either.”
Gianfranco started to laugh. “We always hear about the
capitalists exploiting the workers. It sounds like the soccer workers exploit the capitalists, too.”
That made Eduardo laugh. “
Sì
. It can happen. But the players make so much, they're capitalists, too.”
Moreno had to drive around the Galleria del Popolo several times before he could nab a parking space. (Gianfranco knew that wasn't the right name here, but he still thought of the place that way.) “Traffic here is even worse than it is back home,” he said. Moreno swore again.
“We've got more cars,” Eduardo said. “We don't have to wait for years before we buy one. We just put down the money and drive away. We don't have to put down very much, either. There's a lot more buying on credit here than in your alternate.”
“Doesn't that suck people into debt?” Gianfranco asked as he got out.
“It can,” Eduardo said. Moreno zoomed off. Eduardo continued, “Yeah, it can—I'm not going to lie to you. But with most people, it doesn't. And they get to buy things they would have trouble affording if they had to save up the money ahead of time.”
“Advertisements everywhere,” Gianfranco remarked as they walked through the Galleria. Electric signs and TV screens shouted at him to buy cars and cologne and fasartas and soda. He didn't even know what a fasarta was. He didn't want to ask Eduardo, for fear of seeming ignorant. After a while, though, he did ask, “Doesn't all this drive people crazy?”

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