The Gladiator

A couple of hours of fun? Cheap at the price.

Other people-almost all of them guys from a couple of years younger than Gianfranco up to, say, thirty-sat bent over tables in the back room. They studied game boards with the attention they should have given to schoolwork. Carlo looked up and waved when he saw Gianfranco. "Ciao" he said. "Watch what I do to you."

"You can try," Gianfranco said, and sat down across from his gaming partner. Carlo was nineteen, just starting at the university. His father wanted him to be a pharmacist. He didn't know what he wanted to do with his life-anything but push pills, probably. Gianfranco felt the same way about being a bureaucrat.

For now, they both forgot about the real world. Here, they were railroad magnates building rival lines across Europe. They had to lay track, buy engines, and move passengers and goods from one city to another. Dice and the quality of locomotives controlled how fast they could go. Cards told them what to take where and added disasters and blizzards and floods. But there was still a lot of strategy. Getting your line through the mountain passes, picking the shortest or the safest route (the two weren't always the same) between two towns, building here so the other player wouldn't…

The Gladiator didn't just sell games and offer a place to play. It also sold books, so players who got interested could learn how things really worked. Gianfranco knew much more about nineteenth-century railroads than about twentieth-century history. He'd learned this stuff because he wanted to, and because the more he knew, the better he did in the game.

"Goal!" somebody three tables over shouted. He was ru

Carlo was building his own rail line into Paris, an important center where Gianfranco was already operating. Carlo offered lower shipping rates than Gianfranco was charging. Gianfranco lowered his even more so Carlo couldn't steal his business. He cut rates as low as he could while still making money. Then Carlo cut his so he was losing money on that route but trying to make up for it other places.

"Is that in the rules?" Gianfranco asked.

"It sure is." Carlo brandished the rule book, a thick pamphlet. "It's called a 'loss leader.' And it's going to ruin you."

"We'll see about that," Gianfranco said. He built toward Vie

Gianfranco didn't gloat-too much. "I think you got a little too cute," he said.

"Maybe," Carlo said unhappily. "I didn't expect you to get back at me so fast." He tapped the rule book with his forefinger. "I saw this loss leader thing in here, and it looked so cool I had to try it out."

"I've done stuff like that," Gianfranco said. "I think that one can be good, but you pushed it too hard. The game will bite you if you go with any one thing too much. You've got to stay balanced. That's how you make money."

"You old capitalist, you," Carlo said. They both laughed.

A

So she waited till the two of them went down the stairs together and started (or Hoxha Polytechnic before asking, "You've been to The Gladiator, haven't you?"

"Sure!" He sounded enthusiastic.

"What do you do there?" she asked.

"Play games, mostly. I get books sometimes, too." He started talking about a complicated coup he'd pulled off against somebody named Carlo. It didn't make much sense to her. Then he started talking about how railroads really operated in the nineteenth century. Some of that made even less sense, but he knew a lot about it.

"How did you find out about all that stuff?" A

"I told you-they've got books there. The more you know, the better you can play," Gianfranco answered. Playing well mattered to him-she could see that. He didn't care much about school, so he didn't work any harder than he had to there.

"Do you ever do anything… political at The Gladiator?" she asked.

He looked at her as if she were crazy. "I play games. I talk with the other guys who play games. What could be political about old-time railroads or soccer teams or hunting dragons?"

"Dragons? You're confusing me," A

"Some of the games are in this pretend world," Gianfranco explained. "They're all right, I guess, but the railroad's my favorite."

"How come?" A

"I don't know. I just like it," Gianfranco answered. She made an exasperated noise. He carried his books in his left hand, which kept his right free for gesturing. "Why do you like a song or a movie? You just do, that's all."

"I know why 1 like a movie," A

"All right, all right. Let me think." Gianfranco did-A

He'd talked about that when he was trying to explain what he'd done to Carlo. Carefully, A

The state hadn't done any withering lately. It still needed to be strong to guard against reactionaries and backsliders and other enemies. So it insisted, in films, on radio and TV, in the newspapers, and on propaganda posters slapped onto anything that wasn't moving.

Gianfranco understood that individualistic was a code word for something worse. You'd have to be dead not to. "It's no such thing!" he said hotly. "It's no more individualistic than chess is. You run a whole army there."

A

"I don't know." Gianfranco's shrug, a small masterpiece of its kind, showed that he didn't care, either. Then his eyes narrowed. "How come you're so curious about all this?"

She wondered if she should tell him. After a moment, she decided to-if she said something like I just am, that's all, it would only make him more suspicious. She realized she should have had a cover story ready. She wasn't much of a secret agent. "Don't get mad at me," she said, "but somebody at the Young Socialists' League meeting yesterday said they were politically unreliable."