The Gladiator

One of his superiors must have been a human being under his fu

The Roman arch in the middle of the square was the same here as it was in his alternate. The little cars zipping around near it and under it sure weren't, though. There were many more different styles, and they were painted in much brighter colors. And there was another difference. "The exhaust doesn't make my eyes sting!" he said.

"That's right," Eduardo said. "They burn hydrogen, not gasoline-or gasoline and motor oil, like German Trabants." He made a face-Trabants were nasty. "The exhaust is water vapor, not a bunch of stinking, poisonous chemicals."

"I've heard talk about using hydrogen back home," Gianfranco said. "It's nothing but talk, though."

"They probably won't try to do it till they run out of oil," Eduardo said. "And that's liable to be too late."

"How will you get me back to my alternate?" Gianfranco asked. "1 don't think you can put me back in the basement at The Three Sixes."

"I don't think so, either, even if it would be nice if we could," Eduardo answered. "I don't know anything officially, you understand. My guess would be, they'll take you over to Milan and insert you there."

Gianfranco wasn't sure he liked the sound of that. It made him seem more like a needle than a person. And he said, "What? Back at The Gladiator? Aren't the Security Police still all over it, too?"

"Not any more. We monitor them," Eduardo said. "The shop is still locked up, but that's about it. They don't think anybody else will show up there."

"So if I appear down in the basement in the middle of the night…" Gianfranco began.

"You've got it," Eduardo said. "All you'd have to do is come out and go home. Of course, you might want to wear gloves while you're in the shop."

"I don't know why, except maybe when I touch the door to leave," Gianfranco said. "You probably have more fingerprints inside there than I do, but I can't think of many other people who would."

Eduardo laughed. "I can't even tell you you're wrong. You sure wasted a lot of time in there."

"I don't think it was a waste," Gianfranco replied with dignity. "If I hadn't spent so much time there, I never would have got here-even if you did have to kidnap me to get me down the stairs."

"That's not why 1 did it," Eduardo said. "Things were going wrong. We couldn't get down there unless I grabbed you."

"Whatever you do with me, I hope you do it soon. My family must be going out of their minds," Gianfranco said.

"And they're probably furious at the Grosettis because of me," Eduardo said. "They didn't figure I'd turn out to be such a desperate criminal. But none of what happens next is my call.

It's up to the bosses at Crosstime Traffic. They'll decide when they're good and ready, and that'll be that. Any which way, it's all over for me."

"What do you mean?"

"I won't be going back to that alternate. No chance they'll let me, and I don't think I would even if I could. I've been burned. I'm bound to be on every wanted list in the Italian People's Republic. If I show my nose there, everyone will jump on me with both feet."

"Oh." Gianfranco nodded. " St. I guess you're right." Ed-uardo wouldn't be coming back to see A

The higher-ups at Crosstime Traffic figured out what to do faster than Eduardo had made Gianfranco think they would. That afternoon, he and Eduardo got into an A If a Romeo to go back to Milan. "Please fasten your seat belt," a woman's voice said after he sat down.

He did. "How does it know?" he asked the guy who was driving, a fellow in his mid-twenties named Moreno. Whether that was first name or last Gianfranco never found out.

"Sensor in the seat, and another one in the lock mechanism." Moreno spoke a French-flavored dialect. Gianfranco had to listen to him closely to follow what he said.

He drove like a maniac. Gianfranco had never imagined going from Rimini to Milan so fast, not unless he flew. He was glad he wore the seat belt. How much good it would do in case of a crash at that speed was a different question. Every time the Alfa hit a bump, Gianfranco almost went through the ceiling.

They were doing better than 160 kilometers an hour when an unlucky sparrow bounded off the windshield. "That little bird is-"

"Kaput," Moreno finished for him, with a wag of the hand. Gianfranco would have said something like very unhappy, which didn't mean Moreno was wrong-there was a tiny splash of blood on the window glass.

The Italian countryside here didn't look much different from the way it did in Gianfranco's world. Milan was a different story. Parts of it hadn't changed. The old buildings-La Scala, the Duorao, the Galleria del Popolo or Galleria Vittorio Emanuele-seemed the same. But massive skyscrapers of glass and steel gave the skyline an alien look. And…

"What's that?" Gianfranco asked. Whatever it was, it covered a lot of space.

"That's the soccer stadium," Eduardo answered. "One of them, I mean. AC Milan plays there. Inter Milan has a stadium about the same size on the other side of town."

"Oh, my," Gianfranco said. Milan 's two big soccer clubs had the same names here as they did in his alternate. But the size of that stadium said soccer was a much bigger business in the home timeline. He wasn't sure whether that was good or bad. "Is the game better here than it is in my Milan?" he asked.

"Sometimes," Eduardo answered. "The big teams here have the best players from all over the world, not just from one country. The seasons are longer here, though, and the players don't always try as hard as they might. When it's good, it's better, I guess. When it's not…" He shrugged. Moreno said something rude. Eduardo went on, "The top players get so much money, they don't always want to take chances, either."

Gianfranco started to laugh. "We always hear about the capitalists exploiting the workers. It sounds like the soccer workers exploit the capitalists, too."

That made Eduardo laugh. "Si. It can happen. But the players make so much, they're capitalists, too."

Moreno had to drive around the Galleria del Popolo several times before he could nab a parking space. (Gianfranco knew that wasn't the right name here, but he still thought of the place that way.) "Traffic here is even worse than it is back home," he said. Moreno swore again.

"We've got more cars," Eduardo said. "We don't have to wait for years before we buy one. We just put down the money and drive away. We don't have to put down very much, either. There's a lot more buying on credit here than in your alternate."

"Doesn't that suck people into debt?" Gianfranco asked as he got out.

"It can," Eduardo said. Moreno zoomed off. Eduardo continued, "Yeah, it can-I'm not going to lie to you. But with most people, it doesn't. And they get to buy things they would have trouble affording if they had to save up the money ahead of time."

"Advertisements everywhere," Gianfranco remarked as they walked through the Galleria. Electric signs and TV screens shouted at him to buy cars and cologne and (asartas and soda. He didn't even know what a fasarta was. He didn't want to ask Eduardo, for fear of seeming ignorant. After a while, though, he did ask, "Doesn't all this drive people crazy?"

"Oh, you'd better believe it," Eduardo said. "Most people try to tune it out. But that just means the people who put the ads together make the new ones even bigger and noisier than the ones that came before. It's a war, like any other war. Ignore this if you can! the advertisers say. So people do."