The Gladiator

"If we can help him get there without any trouble, we should," A

"I'm not thinking about what happens if he gets there without any trouble," her father said. "I'm thinking about what happens if there is some. You have no idea what being a zek is like. And it's worse for a woman, believe me."

"Whatever happens, it won't land on A

"If something goes wrong, what happens after that will be up to the gentlemen in the jackboots. You won't have anything to say about it," Dr. Crosetti retorted. But he still didn't tell A

Maybe he got distracted. A blond girl with a tiny suit and a dancer's arched-back, catlike strut certainly seemed to distract Eduardo. A

Gianfranco didn't have much legroom in the back of the Croset-tis' Fiat. He'd probably feel folded up like an accordion by the time they got to San Marino. He also wished A

"We ready?" Eduardo asked. When nobody told him no, he put the car in gear and drove off toward the mountain republic.

He shifted gears clumsily. "You're used to an automatic transmission, aren't you?" Gianfranco said.

"Does it show that much?" Eduardo said. Again, nobody told him no. He sighed. "I'm afraid 1 am. Not many stick shifts in the home timeline. Hardly any, in fact."

The Mazzillis' Mercedes had an automatic. That made it special here. Everything in the home timeline seemed better than the way the Italian People's Republic did the same thing.

"Watch out for the traffic lights," A

Eduardo laughed. "Don't worry about that. I know all about red lights and green lights-we've got plenty of them back home."

He stopped when he was supposed to. Once or twice, he stopped when a local would have charged on through. Maybe he didn't want to take any chances. Or maybe they just didn't have any guts in the home timeline. Gianfranco almost got on him about it, but thought better at the last moment.

"Now we see what's what, or some of what's what," Eduardo said as they neared the border crossing. Italians needed only their internal passports to enter San Marino. It wasn't foreign enough to require the other kind. Approval to travel to real foreign countries was harder to come by.

"Papers." The guard on duty sounded bored. Gianfranco hoped he was. He sure seemed to be. He glanced at the three internal passports, stamped them, and handed them back. "Go on. Enjoy your stay."

"Grazie, Comrade," Eduardo said politely. The guard shrugged and waved him forward.

He didn't just go forward. He went up. The city of San Marino sat at the top of a mountain. One side was a sheer drop of most of a kilometer. The other side was only very steep. The fortress at the heart of the town had never fallen. Gianfranco could see why not.

With so many ups and downs, where where you supposed to find a flat place, or even a fairly flat place, to park your car? That, though, the people who ran San Marino had taken care of. There was an enormous parking lot near the bottom of the city. It was crowded when Eduardo drove into it, but not impossibly crowded.

"Whew!" he said when he turned the key and the motor died. "To drive a stick in a country like this, you need one foot on the gas, one foot on the brake, and one foot on the clutch."

Gianfranco thought about a tripod man. "Your seat wouldn't be very comfortable then," he said.

"Mm, no, I suppose not," Eduardo agreed.

"What's San Marino like in the, uh, home timeline?" A

"Yes, I've been here," Eduardo answered. "It doesn't look a whole lot different. Most of the buildings are old enough to go back before the breakpoint, so they're pretty much the same. This lot isn't there, though."

"In that case, where do people park?" Gianfranco asked as they got out of the Fiat.

Eduardo locked the car. "Everywhere."

A

Eduardo looked around. Nobody stood close by. There probably wouldn't be any microphones hidden in a place like this. You'd have to wait forever before you heard anything good. He nodded to himself and said, "In the home timeline, they didn't have who knows how many zeks to use up carving a big flat lot out of the mountainside."

"You think that's how they did it here?" Gianfranco asked.

"I know that's how they did it here." Eduardo pointed back toward the entrance to the lot. "There's a little sign over there that says, This lot built with the help of the Italian Department of Corrective Labor."

"Oh." Gianfranco nodded. "I didn't see that." Corrective Labor meant zeks, all right. Instead of using bulldozers and dynamite, you gave the political prisoners picks and shovels and turned them loose. If you felt especially mean, you also gave them impossible work norms. Then you punished them for not meeting those norms. The Russians and the Chinese went through zeks by the million. Italy was more economical, but even so…

"Come on." Eduardo pointed again, this time towards a stairway. "Let's go."

Gianfranco's shoes crunched on the gravel of the parking lot. He felt as if he were walking on dead men's bones. And maybe he was.

A

If you wanted a more direct route, you could climb stairways between levels. There were lots of them. They were tall and steep and tiring. "This is the first time I wish the repairmen hadn't fixed the elevator," she said as she trudged up and up and up. "I've got out of practice."

"If you're going anywhere here, it helps if you're part mountain goat," Gianfranco said.

"When mountain goats stop, though, other goats don't try to sell them stuff," Eduardo said. "Or I don't think they do, anyway."

You couldn't say that about the people of San Marino. Yes, it was a Marxist-Leninist-Stalinist state. A

Shops and hotels filled the gray stone buildings that lined the streets. Some of the shops sold cheap glass trinkets-oetopi with staring eyes, yellow lions, dragons. Some sold postage stamps, new and old. San Marino had been printing fancy stamps for collectors since the early days of the twentieth century. Some sold reproductions of antiquities, others the real thing. You could buy recordings of musicians from all over Europe, a lot of them bootlegs the local authorities pretended not to notice. You could buy… anything you had the money for. If you got hungry or thirsty while shopping, you could take care of that, too.

A

"The Triple Six," he answered. That was the best throw you could make in most of the games the shops sold.

"Where is it?" Gianfranco asked, panting a little. Yes, the stairs here put the ones in the apartment building to shame.