The Gladiator

"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 spal 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 A

"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?" A

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?" A

"No, of course not," Gianfranco said.

"But he could sound like one on TV," Eduardo said. Gianfranco and A

"We probably have jokes like that, too," Gianfranco said.

"You do. I heard one at The Gladiator," Eduardo said. "Every day, this guy would take a wheelbarrow full of trash past the factory guard. The guard kept searching the trash, but he never found anything. The guy finally retired. The guard said, 'Look, I know you've been stealing something all these years. Too late for me to do anything about it now. So will you tell me what it was?' And the guy looked at him and said-"

"'Wheelbarrows!'" Gianfranco and A

"See what I mean?" Eduardo hit the brakes. "Here comes the checkpoint."

"Your papers." As usual, the guard sounded bored. Gianfranco hoped he looked bored as he handed over his internal passport. Eduardo's false documents had passed muster every time. Why wouldn't they now? And they did. The guard returned them with a nod. But then he said, "Let's see what's in your shopping bags."

Now Eduardo's shoulders stiffened. He couldn't know what Gianfranco and A

He looked inside each one, then nodded again and passed them back. "No subversive literature or music," he said. "Too much of that trash has been coming out of San Marino lately. But you're all right. You can go on." He touched a button in his booth. A bar swung up, clearing the road ahead for the Eiat.

They hadn't gone more than a hundred meters before A

"I said you were right back there in the shop," Gianfranco said.

"What's this?" Eduardo asked. A

"We thought of that," A

"Grazie, ragazzi," Eduardo said. "You took a big enough chance just coming with me."

Gianfranco wanted to say it was nothing. It wasn't, though, not in the Italian People's Republic. "But that was important," A

"Grazte," Eduardo said again, and drove on down toward Rimini.

A

"I'm not finding any Under the Arch Repairs," she said worriedly.

"Didn't you tell me the name of the place was By the Arch?" her father asked.

"I'm an idiot!" A

"It's at 27 Avenue of the Glorious Workers' Revolution," she said.

Her father and mother both nodded. Like her, they were used to street names like that. Eduardo made a face. "I wonder what they called it before the revolution," he said. "Whatever it was, that's probably still its name in the home timeline."

"Is the Galleria del Popolo still the Galleria Vittorio Emanuele in the home timeline?" A

To her surprise, Eduardo nodded. "Si-it is."

"Does Italy still have a king there?" she asked. She'd only read about kings in history books. If Eduardo came from a world where the country had a real one… She didn't like that idea very much.

But he shook his head. "No-I told you that once before, remember? We've been a republic-a real one, not a people's republic-for a long time. We don't forget we used to have kings, though, and we don't pretend they were always villains."

"What do you mean, a real republic and not a people's republic?" her father asked.

"Secret ballots. More than one candidate for each position. Candidates from more than one party ru

The more A