The Gladiator

Gianfranco looked up into the sky. Even at one in the morning, city lights washed out all but the brighter stars. But he hadn't come out here to find the Big Dipper. "So what's going on?" he asked Eduardo.

"I'm not trying to take your girl away," the older man said bluntly. "I'm not-all right?"

"A

"She's more your girl than she is mine," Eduardo said. "That's how it'll stay, too. She's too young for me, for one thing. And I don't belong here. This isn't my world. What I want most is to get back to the home timeline."

He'd said that before, but never so strongly. "You have somebody back there waiting for you?" Gianfranco asked.

"Not… like that, no," Eduardo admitted. "But it's my home. It's where I belong. So I'm not trying to muscle in on you, capisce?"

"I never said you were," Gianfranco answered. True-he hadn't. But that didn't mean it wasn't on his mind.

"All right. But I wanted you to know. You don't have anything to worry about there, anyhow," Eduardo said.

"Thanks." Gianfranco said it even if he wasn't sure he meant it. If A

"Sure," Eduardo said. "But I wanted you to hear that, and I wanted to make sure nobody else did."

They both turned to walk back up the steps. A police car came around the corner as they did. A spotlight blinded Gianfranco. "Stay right there!" one of the carabinieri called. "Let's see your papers! What are you doing out on the street in the middle of the night?"

Gianfranco's teeth started to chatter. He had his identity card and his internal passport with him. He would no more go outside without them than without his pants. Nobody would, not in the Italian People's Republic, not anywhere. He assumed Eduardo had his papers, too. But would they pass muster?

Both policemen got out of the car. One covered Eduardo and Gianfranco with a submachine gun while the other came up and held out his hand. He looked at Gianfranco's documents first. Nodding, he gave them back. "I know who your father is. But who's this guy?"

"I'm Dr. Crosetti's cousin," Eduardo said, giving the policeman his papers. "I'm staying in their apartment till I find something for myself here."

"He is," Gianfranco said.

"How do you know, kid?" the policeman asked.

"I ought to. We share a kitchen and bathroom with the Crosettis," Gianfranco answered.

The policeman only grunted. He shone his flashlight on Eduardo's papers. "Is he all right?" the other policeman asked. "Shall I radio headquarters?"

No! Gianfranco all but screamed it. That wouldn't do anybody any good. He bit down on the inside of his lower lip. "I don't think so," said the carabiniere with Eduardo's papers. Instead of returning them, he asked, "What are you doing out here at this time of night?"

"Talking about girls," Eduardo answered, and it wasn't even a lie.

The policeman thought it over. After a moment, he decided it was fu

"We'll do that." Eduardo stuck them in his pockets. "Thanks."

With another grunt, the carabiniere turned to his partner. "They're clean. And we got that drunk an hour ago, so we're on quota. Let's go."

They drove off. Gianfranco noticed his knees were knocking. He tried to make them stop, but they didn't want to. If the policemen hadn't picked up the drunk, would they have hauled him and Eduardo to the station instead? It sure sounded that way.

Eduardo wore a small, tight smile. "Boy, that was fun, wasn't it?" he said.

"As a matter of fact, no." Gianfranco could play the game of understatement, too. Without another word, he went back into the apartment building.

"You did real well," Eduardo told him as they trudged up the stairs. Would the elevator ever get fixed? Gianfranco wasn't holding his breath.

"Maybe I did," he said after a few steps. "I didn't like it."

"Well, who would?" Eduardo said. "Police shouldn't be able to bother you whenever they want to. In a free country, they can't."

As far as Gianfranco was concerned, he might as well have started speaking Korean. "What would stop them? What could stop them?" Gianfranco asked, certain Eduardo had no answer.

But Eduardo did. "The laws would," he said. "If the police do something wrong or bother people they've got no business bothering, they get in trouble."

"How?" Gianfranco still had trouble seeing it. "The police are… the police. They're part of the government. The government can't get in trouble." He might have been saying, The sun will come up tomorrow.

"Sure it can. Why shouldn't it, if it does something wrong? In a free country, you can sue the government. You can sue the police if they beat you up for no reason. And if a court decides they're guilty, they have to pay." Eduardo spoke with a certain somber relish. "It happens now and again. And because it can happen, the government is more careful about what it does."

"People… sue the government?" Gianfranco missed a step. Eduardo grabbed him by the arm and kept him from falling on his face. The idea was so strange, he might have been saying, The sun will come up tomorrow… in the west.

"Why not?" Eduardo seemed to enjoy provoking him. "You live in the Italian People's Republic, don't you?"

"Yes, but…" Gianfranco tried to imagine what would happen if someone tried to sue the government. He didn't need much imagination to figure it out. The Security Police would land on the poor crackbrained fool like a ton of bricks, and that would be that. "What about the Security Police?" he demanded.

"We don't have any, not like that, not to keep track of people who haven't done anything wrong," Eduardo said, and Gian-franco's jaw dropped. Eduardo went on, "We have carabinieri to go after criminals, but that's different. Some people will try to cheat no matter what kind of society they live in."

"I suppose." Gianfranco wasn't sure he would have walked past his floor if Eduardo didn't hold the door open, but he wasn't sure he wouldn't have, either. Eduardo had hit him with too many new ideas, too hard, too fast. He needed some time to get used to them.

"We wanted things to be like that here, too," Eduardo said as they walked down the hall to the Mazzillis' apartment and the Crosettis'. "That's what we were working toward." He shrugged. "Things don't always turn out the way you wish they would. We'll have to come up with something else and try again, that's all."

He paused at his doorway, Gianfranco at his. They nodded to each other and went inside. Gianfranco undressed and got ready for bed-quietly, so he wouldn't bother his folks. He lay down, but sleep was a long time coming. Some of the things Ed-uardo had said…

A country without Security Police? A country where the people actually had power instead of just giving the state their name? A country where, if people didn't like what the government was up to, they could do something about it? What would that kind of country be like? What would living in that kind of country be like?

Gianfranco didn't know. How could he, when it was so different from everything he'd grown up with? But he knew one thing: he wished he could find out.

After a moment, he realized something else. Without intending to, he'd just turned into a counterrevolutionary. Then he really had a hard time going to sleep.