He got his algebra book, then followed Annarita into the Crosettis' apartment. "Well?" he said as soon as his own folks couldn't hear him. "Where's Eduardo? What are you going to do with him?"
"What? You don't want to do algebra?" Annarita said, as innocently as if she thought he did.
What he said about algebra wasn't quite suited to polite company, even if, at the last moment, he made it milder than he'd first intended. "Where's Eduardo?" he asked.
"Who?" Annarita said. Gianfranco didn't clobber her and he didn't scream, which only proved he had more self-control than he thought. She took him by the arm. "Come on." She led him into the Crosettis' living room.
Eduardo sat on the sofa there, a glass of wine in front of him. Dr. Crosetti sat in his favorite chair, a glass of wine on the end table next to him. They both looked pleased with themselves. "Ciao, Gianfranco," Annarita's father said. "I'd like you to meet my distant cousin, Silvio Pagnozzi." He waved towards Eduardo.
Gianfranco gaped. He started to squawk. Then he realized something was going on. He held out his hand. "Mo/to lieto… Silvio."
Eduardo stood up and gravely shook hands with him. "Pleased to meet you, too, Gianfranco," he said, for all the world as if Gianfranco weren't a regular at The Gladiator.
"I hope your papers are in order… Silvio," Gianfranco said. "They're liable to be doing a lot of checking for a while. Looking for dangerous criminals like murderers and bank robbers and gaming-store clerks, you know."
"Si, si." Eduardo pulled out an identity card and an internal passport. Gianfranco wasn't astonished to see that they had Eduardo's photo, a fingerprint likely to be his, and the name of Silvio Pagnozzi. The internal passport said he was born in Acireale, down on Sicily, but had moved to Milan when he was only two. That made sense-he didn't talk like a Sicilian, so he couldn't have lived in the south for long.
"What happens if the Security Police telephone Acireale to find out if you were really born there?" Gianfranco asked.
Eduardo shrugged. "Acireale's right by Mount Etna. Most of the records there were lost in the earthquake of 2081," he said. "They can't prove anything one way or the other."
"I see." Gianfranco nodded and gave the documents back. "These look good. They look real."
"They're as good as the ones you've got," Eduardo- Silvio?-answered.
"If someone with a different name who looks like you had papers, would his be just as good, too?"
"Well, of course," Eduardo answered, smiling. "You're not a human being at all if you don't have papers that say you are, eh?" He winked.
Gianfranco didn't. "Where do you get papers like that?" he asked. Are you a spy? he meant. He hadn't wanted to believe that, but seeing those perfect documents in a false name made him wonder. Or was Silvio Pagnozzi a false name? Gianfranco realized he couldn't be sure.
Eduardo stopped smiling. "I've told Dr. Crosetti where I got them. The fewer people who know, the fewer who can tell."
That wasn't good enough for Gianfranco. "I've earned the right to know. The Security Police can already slice me into carpaccio or chop me up for salami. If I'm putting my neck on the line, I've got a right to know why."
"He's right," Annarita said. "I feel the same way."
Her father looked surprised-mutiny in the family? And Gianfranco was surprised, and tried to hide it. So Dr. Crosetti hadn't told Annarita whatever it was, either. Gianfranco would have guessed she'd know. Evidently not.
"What do you think?" Annarita's father asked Eduardo.
"Maybe I'd better tell them," answered the man with the interesting papers.
"They're children," Dr. Crosetti said.
Before Gianfranco could get angry, Eduardo said, "If not for them, I'd be wandering the streets right now-or else the Security Police would have grabbed me. They're acting like grown-ups. Don't you think we ought to treat them that way?"
"Mnirm." Dr. Crosetti made a discontented noise, down deep in his throat. "I wouldn't trust grown-ups with this, either. Who saw you on the stairwell?"
"Nobody who paid any attention to me. I made a point of looking away from the two or three people who came by-you'd better believe I did," Eduardo said.
Annarita's father grunted again. "And you may have looked straight into a surveillance camera, too. Those miserable things are common as cockroaches."
Eduardo smiled again. "They won't have picked me up. I have the power to cloud cameras' minds-or at least to jam their signals."
"How do you do that?" Gianfranco blurted.
"It has to do with where I come from," Eduardo said.
"And where's that?" Annarita asked. "From right around here, by the way you talk."
"I do come from Milan -from Arese, actually," Eduardo said. Gianfranco and Annarita both nodded-that was a suburb northwest of the city. "But I come from Milan in the Italian Republic, not Milan in the Italian People's Republic."
"Huh?" Gianfranco said, at the same time as Annarita asked, "What does that mean?" They both amounted to the same thing, even if Annarita was more polite.
"In my world"-Eduardo brought the phrase out as calmly as if it were something as ordinary as on my block- "Communism didn't win the Cold War. Capitalism did."
"Marx says that's impossible." Gianfranco brought out the first objection that popped into his head. Others stood in line behind it, waiting their turn.
"Si," Eduardo said. "What about it? A believer might think the sun goes around the earth because the Bible says the sun stood still. Does that make it true? Do you want to believe something because a book says it's so, or do you want to look at the evidence?"
"What is your evidence?" Annarita asked, beating Gianfranco to the punch. "So far, we've heard nothing but talk, and talk is cheap."
"It's also very light," Gianfranco said with a grin. "You can haul boxcars of it with a beat-up old locomotive in Rails across Europe."
"The game is part of my evidence," Eduardo said. "Do you think it would be legal-or safe-to make it anywhere in this world?"
Annarita looked very unhappy. "You sound like one of the hardcore people in the Young Socialists' League."
"I wouldn't be surprised. They're not all blind. I wish they were. My life would be easier," Eduardo answered.
"How do we know this isn't some sort of fancy scam?" Gianfranco asked.
Dr. Crosetti beamed at him. "I said the same thing. I didn't think the game was enough, either."
Eduardo sighed. "By rights, I shouldn't show you anything like this. By rights, I shouldn't be here at all. I should be back in the home timeline." He looked even more unhappy than Annarita had. "I should have gone home with everybody else. I should have been in The Gladiator before the Security Police raided it. But they must have planned the raid in a place where we didn't have bugs. I thought we'd done a better job of covering them than we must have."
"You… bugged the Security Police?" Gianfranco said slowly. Eduardo nodded. Gianfranco stared at him. "Nobody can do that-except the Russians, I guess. They can do whatever they want."
"They make junk. Everybody here makes junk." Eduardo's flat, take-it-or-leave-it tone was hard to disbelieve. Either he believed himself or he was one devil of an actor. Still gloomily, he went on, "But anyway, I was out shopping when the raid went down. I almost walked into the Security Police when I came back."
"That doesn't do anything toward showing me what I asked for," Gianfranco said.
"I know. The point of it is, though, I've got my mini in my pocket."
"Your mini what?" Gianfranco and Annarita asked the question at the same time.
"My minicomputer, that's what. Against regulations to take it out of the shop, but now I'm kind of glad I did," Eduardo said.
Gianfranco almost decided on the spot that he was lying. Computers were even more carefully regulated than typewriters. The Security Police knew where every single one of them was, and who was authorized to use it. Hoxha Polytechnic had a couple of small ones, but only the most politically reliable kids could get close to them. And they were the size of a small refrigerator. The idea that anybody could carry one around in his pocket was ridiculous.