Usually, Gianfranco took the possibility of being spied on for granted. Why not? He couldn't do anything about it. Nobody could. And chances were that someone he knew, someone he liked and trusted, sent the Security Police reports about him.
You couldn't guess who all the informers were. If you knew, you'd act different around them, and then what would their reports be worth?
Eduardo kept looking around nervously while he was using the marvelous gadget from the home timeline. "Relax," An-narita told him.
He looked at her as if he thought she'd gone round the bend. Gianfranco knew he did. "I can't relax," Eduardo said. "What if somebody sees me with this thing?"
"What if somebody does?" Annarita returned. "He'll think it's something fancy that belongs to the Security Police."
Eduardo blinked, then started to laugh. "Maybe you've got something there."
Gianfranco thought Annarita was likely to be right. Ordinary people didn't think about other worlds. They thought about secrets in this one-and they had reason to. Even so, he said, "What if somebody from the Security Police sees him?"
"He'll think Cousin Silvio's in military intelligence, or a Russian or a German." Annarita had all the answers.
She was also liable to be right there. The Security Police looked for secrets within secrets, sure. But they weren't equipped to understand a secret that came from outside this whole world. "They don't know the shops are from the home timeline, do they?" Gianfranco asked as Eduardo started the Fiat.
"Not unless they caught somebody and tortured it out of him," Eduardo said, backing the car out of its space. "I don't think they did. Otherwise, they'd know about me. No, I think everybody else got back to the home timeline just fine."
"What kind of evidence would your people leave behind?" Annarita asked.
"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 Annarita asked at the same time.
"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?" Annarita didn't.
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?" Annarita teased.
"No, of course not," Gianfranco said.
"But he could sound like one on TV," Eduardo said. Gianfranco and Annarita both laughed. So did Eduardo-at himself, Gianfranco thought. When Annarita made a questioning noise, the man from another world explained why: "In the home timeline, that joke is ancient-almost as old as television. Didn't occur to me it could really be funny here. But you haven't heard it before."
"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 Annarita chorused the punch line. Sure enough, that joke was old as the hills.
"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 Annarita had bought, or whether they would get in trouble because of it. "Here you are," Annarita said, and gave them to Eduardo to give to the guard.
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 Annarita said, "See what would have happened if we'd bought those records?"
"I said you were right back there in the shop," Gianfranco said.
"What's this?" Eduardo asked. Annarita told him about the shop with the music by bands the authorities didn't like. He said, "The Security Police are liable to be running that place, too. Wouldn't surprise me a bit."
"We thought of that," Annarita said. "It's one more reason we didn't buy anything there. We didn't want to take any kind of chances with you along."
"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," Annarita said, which seemed to sum things up pretty well- better than Gianfranco could have, anyhow.
"Grazte," Eduardo said again, and drove on down toward Rimini.
Annarita went through the telephone book, looking for the address of the elevator repairmen. Watching her, Eduardo fidgeted. So did her mother and father. Seeing their nerves made her start to realize how big a strain sheltering Eduardo was for them. They hadn't said much about it-they still weren't saying anything-but that didn't make it any less real.
"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!" Annarita exclaimed, and went to the right place in the book. There it was! Her smile made Eduardo and her parents breathe easier. Yes, this would have been hard enough if he really were their cousin. By now, he'd spent enough time with them that he almost might have been. Almost. Amazing, the power one little word held.
"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?" Annarita asked.
To her surprise, Eduardo nodded. "Si-it is."