Alfredo played as if Gianfranco weren't there. That was intimidating, too. It said he thought he could do whatever he pleased, and that Gianfranco didn't have a chance to stop him.

Their first clash came over Turin. The northern Italian city- Milan 's rival in everything from style to soccer-made engines you could ship to Moscow for a nice profit. Alfredo got there first. But Gianfranco had a route from Copenhagen to Turin, and Danish butter did well there. He used the profit from the first load to buy a stronger, faster engine to bring in more. And he built toward Moscow himself.

Alfredo did everything he could to throw Gianfranco out of Turin. Nothing worked. Gianfranco hung on. After a few turns, he started to prosper. Once, when he was deep in thought about whether he could move more tourists through Turin and build up a hotel business there, he happened to catch Alfredo studying him again. The older gamer looked more thoughtful than he had when they started.

I can play with this guy, Gianfranco thought. I really can, and he knows it, too. He had no idea whether he would win or lose. It was still much too early to tell. But, in a way, whether he won or lost hardly mattered. Alfredo was one of the best around. Everybody knew that. And Gianfranco was holding his own against him.

If I can play against Alfredo, I can play against anybody. Gianfranco grinned. He'd come as far as he could-he'd come as far as anyone could-with Rails across Europe. That made him proud. Then it made him sad. Once you'd taken the game as far as it would go, what else could you do?

"We are lucky today, class," Comrade Montefusco said in Russian. "Two Russians from the delegation in Milan to promote fraternal Socialist cooperation and trade are going to stop by the class. You will get to practice your Russian with native speakers."

Annarita nodded. Talking with someone who'd grown up speaking a language was the best way to learn it. She grinned. It sure was a chance she hadn't had when she was studying Latin!

The Russian teacher looked at his watch, then at the clock on the wall, then at his watch again. "They're supposed to be here now, in fact." He sighed. "But one thing I found when I studied in Moscow -Russians are often late, f know the Germans say the same thing about us…"

Everybody laughed. Germans had made fun of Italian inefficiency even when the two countries were allies against Russia in the Great Patriotic War. The next time an Italian cared about a German opinion would be the first.

"But Russians are often really late," Comrade Montefusco went on. "What do you suppose this has to do with the way the Russian verb works?"

Along with the rest of the class, Annarita blinked. That wasn't the kind of question they usually got. Almost everything was right or wrong, true or false, yes or no, memorizing. With those questions, deciding what a student knew was easy. This? This made her think in a way she wasn't used to doing in school. Some of the kids looked horrified. They didn't like anything different from what they were used to. A little to her own surprise, she found she did.

Hesitantly, she raised her hand. It was the first one up even though she hesitated. The teacher pointed at her. "Comrade, isn't it because the Russian verb isn't so good at describing when something happened in relation to now or in relation to some other time? There's just finished action or unfinished action. The Russian verb to be doesn't even have a present tense. You can't say / am in Russian, only / was or / will be." She'd been amazed and dismayed when she discovered that.

Comrade Montefusco didn't wear a smile very often, but he beamed now. "Si," he said. "Very good! That's just right. Ever since the glorious October Revolution, the Russians have tried to run more by the clock, the way Western Europe and America do. I have to say it hasn't worked too well. Their own language fights against them."

"Comrade, why is it the glorious October Revolution when it happened in November?" a boy asked. "Did their verbs make the Revolution late, too?"

The students laughed. Comrade Montefusco didn't. "No," he answered. "The Tsars were so reactionary, they were still using the old-fashioned Julian calendar, and it was out of phase with the sun and with the rest of the world. The Soviet Union brought in the Gregorian calendar and even improved it, though no one will see a difference between theirs and ours till the year 2700." He paused. "Since our distinguished guests aren't here, let's get on with our regular lessons."

They'd just got well into the homework on prepositions when the two Russians breezed into the classroom. They didn't apologize for being late. They didn't seem to notice they were. They both looked old to Annarita's eyes. The man had to be past forty, and the woman wasn't far from it. But they had on Italian clothes not much different from those Annarita and her classmates wore when they weren't in uniform. It made him look stupid and her look cheap. She wore too much perfume, too.

And the way they talked! Comrade Montefusco taught the class proper grammar and the best Moscow pronunciation. If they were going to learn Russian, he said, they should learn it right. The two real, live Russians couldn't have set things back further if they were trying to do it on purpose. The man's accent made him sound like a mooing cow. He stretched out all his O's and swallowed most of the other vowels. The woman sounded more like a Muscovite, but her mouth was so full of peppery-sounding slang that Annarita could hardly follow her. And some of what Annarita couldn't understand made the teacher's ears turn red.

"Comrades, do you have any suggestions for students learning your language?" Comrade Montefusco asked. He was careful to keep his own pronunciation and grammar as fine as usual.

Both Russians understood him well enough. "Stoody hard. Woork hard," the man said. "And yoo'll gooo fur."

The woman winked at the Russian teacher. "Dmitri's right," she said. "And having a pal on the left never hurt anything, either."

Annarita did understand that bit of slang, and wished she didn't. In Russian, doing things on the right was the legal way, the proper way. The left was the bribe, the black market, the underworld… all the things the glorious Revolution was supposed to have wiped out but hadn't.

These were the representatives of the greatest Communist republic in the world? Annarita knew Russians weren't supermen and -women, but seeing them with such obvious feet of clay still hurt. And they didn't really want to have anything to do with the class. Why are they here, then? Annarita wondered. But she didn't need to be Sherlock Holmes to find the answer to that. Because their boss told them to show up, that's why.

They'd come late, and they left early. When the door closed behind them, everyone in the class seemed to sigh at the same time. If any of the students had any illusions about Russians left, that pair would have shattered most of them.

Comrade Montefusco sighed, too. "Comrade Mechnikov"- the man-"comes from southern Russia, near the Volga," he said. "That accent is common there. We have different dialects here, too-think how much trouble you can have talking with someone from Naples or Sicily."

He wasn't wrong. Those southern dialects of Italian were so different, they were almost separate languages. Even so… Someone else said it before Annarita could: "The way he talked made him sound stupid. I don't know if he is, but he seemed like it."

"I know." The Russian teacher spread his hands, as if to say, What can you do? "For whatever it's worth, people in Moscow feel the same way about that accent."

"And what about Comrade Terekhova?" Annarita asked. "Am T wrong, Comrade Montefusco, or did she sound like a zek who'd just finished her term?"

"I'm afraid she did." Comrade Montefusco looked even more unhappy than he had before. "There's a whole other side to Russian-mat\ they call it. It's more than slang. It's almost a dialect of its own, and it's based on… well, on obscenity." He spread his hands again. "The more you deal with Russians, the more you hear it. And yes, it thrives in camps."