The Gladiator

"Thanks anyway, Papa." Gianfranco retreated in a hurry. He didn't want to spend the rest of his life going to an office and doing nothing the way his old man did. Yes, his father had a medium-fancy title. He'd got it not because he was especially smart but because he never made enemies. But it still amounted to not very much. He'd said himself that they could train a monkey to do his job.

So what do you want to do, then? Gianfranco asked himself. He knew the answer-he wanted to run a railroad. How did you go about learning to do that? Figuring out when trains would come in probably was part of it.

Gianfranco muttered to himseli, pretending airplanes were trains-very fast trains. His trouble was, he didn't just want to run a railroad that had already been operating for 250 years. He wanted to start one and build it up from scratch, the way he did in the board game. How could you do that when it wasn't the nineteenth century any more?

He sighed. You couldn't. He was no big brain like An-narita, but he could see as much. What did that leave him? Two things occurred to him-working at the railroad the way it was

now or starting some other kind of business and ru

He could almost hear Eduardo yelling at him. He could hear the midnight knock on the door, too, and the Security Police screaming that he was a capitalist jackal as they hauled him off to jail. Or maybe they wouldn't bother waiting till midnight. Maybe they would just grab him at his business and take him away. For a crime as bad as capitalism, why would they waste time being sneaky?

But the way things were now, people just went through the motions. Gianfranco's father wasn't the only one. He was normal, pretty much. Everybody knew how things went. People made jokes about it. You heard things like, We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us. That was why you had to wait years for a TV set or a car. That was why crews had to come out to repair repairs half the time. That was why the elevator here hadn't worked for so long, and might never again.

The people owned the means of production. They did here, they did in the Soviet Union, they did in Canada and Brazil, they did everywhere. What could be fairer than that? It kept things equal, didn't it? Gianfranco nodded to himself. He'd learned his lessons well, even if he didn't realize it just then.

Maria Tenace had a face like a clenched fist. "I say we condemn the reactionaries." Her voice said she wasn't going to take no for an answer. "They're trying to corrupt people. The authorities need to make an example of them."

"How do you know? Have you been to The Gladiator?" A

"What difference does that make?" Maria sounded honestly eonlused.

"Well, if you haven't been there, how do you know?" Lu-dovico Pagliarone said.

"Because that's what was reported at the Young Socialists' League meeting," Maria said. "It must be true."

"If someone said the earth was flat at one of those meetings, would you believe it?" A

"Don't be silly. Nobody would say such a counterrevolutionary thing," Maria declared.

A

"I went over there yesterday afternoon," A

"Miniatures? The kind you can paint?" Ludovico asked.

"Si, that's right," A

"Maybe 1 ought to go over there," he said. "Do they have any from the Roman legions?"

"I think I saw some." A

And Maria was getting angrier by the second. "I think the two of you want to cover up antistate activities," she said.

"Like what?" A

"Being right-wing deviationist is." Maria sounded positive. She always sounded positive. She probably always was. She was one of those people who thought being sure and being right were the same thing.

The trouble was, A

A

Because of A

Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism might be fine for analyzing historical forces. When it came to looking at how two people got along, or didn't get along, that was a different story.

"I think the shop is harmless," A

Maria did. A

Then she wondered who would marry Maria in the first place. But most women did find husbands, as most men found wives. Somebody else every bit as rigid as Maria might like her fine. When you got right down to it, that was a really scary thought.

And, by disagreeing with her about The Gladiator, A

"I say The Gladiator is anti-Socialist and needs to be suppressed, and that's what we should report to Filippo-to Comrade Antonelli, 1 mean." Filippo wasn't a Party member yet, but Maria didn't care. She stuck her chin out-she wasn't going to back down. She had the courage of her convictions. She would have been much easier to deal with if she didn't.

As gently as A

This was going to be one of those times. Maria gave her a look that could have melted iron. Then she gave Ludovico Pagliarone another one. "You're not going to let this-this Menshevik get away with being soft on deviationists, are you?"

"You can't call me that! My doctrine's as good as yours!" A