"I don't, either," Annarita told him.
"In the home timeline, we were playing Vietnam in the World Cup finals in 2086. The ref missed the most obvious offside in the world, Vietnam scored, and we lost 2-1." Eduardo sounded furious as he explained. "We got robbed, right there in broad daylight. No Italian from my world doesn't know about that. This fellow didn't have a clue, so he's from here, not there. I hope the people from the home timeline got away, that's all."
Eleven
Gianfranco was taller than Eduardo, and had longer legs. But he needed to hustle to keep up with the man from another world as they hurried toward the stairs that led down to the Crosettis' Fiat. "What are you going to do now?" he asked, breathing hard.
"I don't know. I just don't know," Eduardo answered.
"Those maybe-capitalist repairmen?" Annarita suggested. Gianfranco had the same thought at the same time, but she got it out first. It would never do him any good now.
"I suppose so." Eduardo sounded anything but thrilled. "They're probably from the Security Police, too. Heaven help the poor fools who go into Three Sixes. Next thing they know, they'll end up in camps wondering what the devil happened."
"And they're the people Italy really needs!" Gianfranco exclaimed.
"Some of them are, maybe," Eduardo said. "But some of the people Italy needs are the ones who'll stay away from a place like that after the Security Police shut down two others. They'll think something's fishy about this one."
"They'd better," Annarita said. "When the authorities closed down The Gladiator and the shop in Rome, it was all over the news. If you weren't paying attention, you had to be dead."
"Or stupid. Stupid in a particular way," Eduardo said. "Politically stupid."
"Ah," Gianfranco said. Lots of the people who'd been regulars at The Gladiator fit that bill. He probably had himself, and his father was in politics up to his eyebrows. Most people like that were harmless. Even the Security Police recognized as much. But those people left themselves open for trouble when crackdowns came-and crackdowns always came. Everybody had a file. If your file said you went into places where counterrevolutionary sympathizers gathered, that could be all the excuse the authorities needed.
Or maybe they wouldn't need any excuse at all. If they wanted to turn you into a zek, they could turn you into a zek. Who'd stop them?
Nobody. That was the trouble right there.
Going down all those flights of stairs was a lot easier than climbing them had been. When Gianfranco and Annarita and Eduardo got back to the car, the man from another world pulled out his pocket computer. He turned it on, checked something, and breathed a sigh of relief.
"What is it?" Gianfranco asked.
"They haven't put any tracers in here," Eduardo answered. "That's good, anyhow. You live in a place like this for a while, you start thinking everybody's after you all the time. Instead, it's only some of the people some of the time. Happy day."
Usually, Gianfranco took the possibility of being spied on for granted. Why not? He couldn't do anything about it. Nobody could. And chances were that someone he knew, someone he liked and trusted, sent the Security Police reports about him.
You couldn't guess who all the informers were. If you knew, you'd act different around them, and then what would their reports be worth?
Eduardo kept looking around nervously while he was using the marvelous gadget from the home timeline. "Relax," An-narita told him.
He looked at her as if he thought she'd gone round the bend. Gianfranco knew he did. "I can't relax," Eduardo said. "What if somebody sees me with this thing?"
"What if somebody does?" Annarita returned. "He'll think it's something fancy that belongs to the Security Police."
Eduardo blinked, then started to laugh. "Maybe you've got something there."
Gianfranco thought Annarita was likely to be right. Ordinary people didn't think about other worlds. They thought about secrets in this one-and they had reason to. Even so, he said, "What if somebody from the Security Police sees him?"
"He'll think Cousin Silvio's in military intelligence, or a Russian or a German." Annarita had all the answers.
She was also liable to be right there. The Security Police looked for secrets within secrets, sure. But they weren't equipped to understand a secret that came from outside this whole world. "They don't know the shops are from the home timeline, do they?" Gianfranco asked as Eduardo started the Fiat.
"Not unless they caught somebody and tortured it out of him," Eduardo said, backing the car out of its space. "I don't think they did. Otherwise, they'd know about me. No, I think everybody else got back to the home timeline just fine."
"What kind of evidence would your people leave behind?" Annarita asked.
"Maybe a computer, if they couldn't grab it and take it with them," Eduardo answered. "But without the right password or voiceprint, it wouldn't do the Security Police any good."
"There wouldn't be any sign of the machine you use to go back and forth?" Gianfraneo tried to imagine what that machine would be like. He pictured something that hummed and spat sparks. It probably wasn't like that for real-he had sense enough to realize as much. It was probably quiet and efficient, even boring. But when he thought of a fancy, supersecret machine, he thought of one that belonged in the movies.
"No." Eduardo shook his head. "Just an empty room below ground with lines painted on the floor to warn people to stand back so they don't get in the way when the transposition chamber materialized."
"What would happen if somebody did?" Gianfranco and Annarita asked at the same time.
"Nobody wants to find out." Eduardo shifted gears even more roughly than usual. "It would be a pretty big boom- we're sure of that much. Two things aren't supposed to be in the same place at the same time."
How big was a pretty big boom? Would it blow up the shop? A city block? A whole city? Gianfranco almost asked, but finally decided not to. Any one of those was plenty big enough. He did ask, "You have armies and things in the home timeline, don't you?"
"Si." Eduardo steered carefully. The road twisted and doubled back on itself as it went down to the border checkpoint. It seemed to Gianfranco that the man from another timeline spoke as carefully as he drove.
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."