The Gladiator

"Anyway, I'm here now and I'm fine," he said.

His father stepped in and added, "No thanks to the Security Police."

"We did what we could, Comrade. We're not done yet," the officer said. "We'll catch those villains-you wait and see."

Gianfranco knew better. His father didn't, but he also didn't seem much impressed. "I'll believe it when I do see it," he said.

"We work for the safely of the stale and of its people," the Security Police officer said.

"Shouldn't those be the other way around?" Gianfranco asked.

The officer sent him a hooded look. Who do you think you are, to doubt that the state comes first? The man didn't ask that out loud, but he might as well have. In the Italian People's Republic, the question was only too reasonable. The state had come first here for many, many years. But Gianfranco was just back from an Italy where that wasn't so, an Italian Republic that left the people out of its name but took them more seriously than this one did. He hadn't been able to stay there long, but the attitude rubbed off. Maybe the drugs should have fixed that too, so he didn't pop off.

"Can we finish this another time, Comrade?" his father asked the officer. "Gianfranco has to be tired, and so do you. Could you let him have a little rest, now that he can sleep in his own bed again?"

"Well, all right." The man from the Security Police didn't seem sorry to have an excuse to go home-and Gianfranco's father was a Party wheel, even if he wasn't a great big one. The officer got to his feet. "I'll report to my superiors, and we'll see if they have more questions to ask. Ciao." He left the apartment.

"Grazie, Father," Gianfranco said around another yawn. "I am tired."

"No wonder, after everything you've been through," his father answered. Gianfranco had been through more and stranger things than his father imagined. On the other hand, his father's imaginings had to be scarier. "I don't know what I would have done if you didn't come home safe."

"I'm here. I'm fine-except that I'm sleepy," Gianfranco said.

Lying down in his own bed did feel good. But one thought kept him from sleeping for quite a while. He understood all the reasons why he couldn't stay in the home timeline. Even so, coming back here after seeing what freedom was like made him feel as if he'd just got a life sentence to a prison camp he couldn't hope to escape from.

Gianfranco didn't want to talk about things in his apartment or in A

And so, as soon as they could, they went for a walk in a little park not far from the apartment building. A

"Well, he wasn't lying," Gianfranco said.

"I didn't think he was," A

"You mean the chamber?" he asked. A

"And when you got there?" she said.

"They wear fu

"That's nice." A

"They are. They really are." Gianfranco sounded awed.

"They let me watch TV. I listened to the news, and there were people talking about government programs that didn't work. They were going on about how much money the government had wasted-just telling people. They sounded disgusted. It was like, Well, here we go again."

"That's different, all right," A

No sooner had that thought crossed her mind than Gian-franco said, "And you should have seen the papers!" He clapped a hand to his forehead. "They made the TV seem like nothing. The things they called the Prime Minister! Here, people go to camps for even thinking things like that. They put them in print, and nobody gets excited."

"Why not?" A

"Because they take it for granted. I asked Eduardo about that. Here, everybody would have a stroke if you said anything bad about the Party or the General Secretary, right?" Gian-franco waited for A

"Why wouldn't just telling the truth do the job?" she wondered.

"Maybe it would-if it was real important or really interesting," Gianfranco answered. "But when it comes to politics, who knows for sure what's true? All the different parties try to sell their ideas, the same way companies try to sell cars or soap."

A

"Do they all walk around with their little computers all the time?" she asked.

"Do they!" Gianfranco rolled his eyes. "Those things are telephones, too, and they can send messages back and forth on them, and photos, and I don't know what all else. Half the time, people in the home timeline pay more attention to their gadgets than they do to what's going on around them. They'll walk out in the street without even looking. It's a miracle they don't get killed."

People here walked out in the street without looking all the time, too. Sometimes they did get killed. "Are the drivers there any more polite than they are here?" A

Gianfranco shook his head. "Not even a little bit. And with all those cars… Well, sometimes it jams up so nobody can move. Then it's all horns and cussing." A

She'd been skirting what she really wanted to know: "Did you like it there? Would you have stayed if you could?"

"In a minute," he answered. "1 could breathe without filling out a form first, you know what I mean?" He took her hand. "I would have missed you. I would have missed you like anything. But I would have stayed. This"-his wave took in not just the park, not just Milan, but the whole Italian People's Republic- "this is jail. We've got to find some way to change it, to get free."

"How?" A

Gianfranco seemed to shrink in on himself. "I don't know. I just don't know."

Gianfranco didn't want to go back to San Marino. He especially didn't want to go back to The Three Sixes. When the Security Police put him in one of their cars and got on the autostrada heading east, what he wanted stopped mattering. They intended to take him there, and they could do as they pleased. His only choice besides going to San Marino was going to a camp. All things considered, going to San Marino was better.