He did mention his second honors at dinner, but only after his mother poked him in the ribs three different times. "Yes, Annarita already told us," her father said. "Good for you. Sooner or later, studying usually pays off. Sometimes it's so much later that it hardly seems worth it at the time, though. I can't say anything different."

A lot of families would have thrown Annarita's first honors back in the Mazzillis' faces like a grenade. None of the Croset-tis said a word. To listen to them, she might have earned ordinary marks, not outstanding ones. In their own quiet way, they had style.

"Bravo, Gianfranco!" Eduardo-"Cousin Silvio"-said. "Good grades impress people-more than they should sometimes, but they do."

Is that true in his home timeline, too? Gianfranco wondered. Too bad if it is. Because the home timeline was the source of the games and books and ideas he liked so much, he thought everything about it should be perfect.

He got a chance to talk with Eduardo about that a couple of days later. "No, no, no." Eduardo shook his head. "Don't idealize us. If you think you've found paradise anywhere, you're bound to be wrong. That's one of the things that's wrong with Marxism-Leninism-Stalinism. The proletariat isn't made up of nothing but saints, and capitalists aren't all devils."

Gianfranco felt a delicious thrill at hearing him say anything was wrong with the world's leading-the world's only legal-ideology. He supposed a priest hearing clever talk of heresy might have felt the same way. Like any Communist state, the Italian People's Republic glorified the workers. It said so, loudly, whenever it got the chance-especially on May Day every year. But the apartments the proletariat lived in made Gianfranco's seem a palace by comparison.

He knew hypocrisy when he saw and heard it. Some things, though, he didn't know. Shyly, he asked, "What are capitalists like? Do they really think of nothing but money? Do they really want to exploit their workers as much as they can?"

"Some of them do think about nothing but money," Ed-uardo answered, which disappointed him. "You need to think about money. And some of them would exploit workers as much as they could. That's why you have taxes, so some of the money capitalists make helps everybody. And that's why you have labor unions and you have laws regulating what corporations can do. The idea isn't to kill the goose that lays the golden eggs. It's to keep the goose healthy and get some of the gold."

"How do we get capitalists here, then?" Gianfranco found something else to ask: "How do we do it without making the government crack down, the way it did on you?"

"Good question. If there are no other good questions, class is dismissed," Eduardo said.

"Come on!" Gianfranco yelped.

"I don't know how you do that. Nobody in the home time-line knows. That's why we were trying the shops. They didn't work-or maybe they worked too well," Eduardo said. "However you do it, it'll have to be by stealth. That seems plain."

"Stealth? What do you mean?"

"People will have to start buying and selling and investing without realizing it's capitalism. You'd have to call it something else, something that sounds properly Communist. Stakhanovite economic effort, maybe. The idea of working harder than other people doesn't go away-it just gets changed around."

"It sure does," Gianfranco said. "Stakhanovites aren't supposed to work for themselves, though. They work for the state."

"But they can get rewarded for it," Eduardo said. "That's the point. If the state thinks your work toward getting rich will help it, it won't get in the way-except states always get in the way some, because they're like that."

"Hang on." Gianfranco raised a warning hand. "A minute ago, you said states needed laws to keep capitalists from exploiting workers. Now you say states get in the way. You can't have it both ways."

"Sure you can-why not?" Eduardo answered. "You need some laws, and ways to enforce them. That's why there are states in the first place. Otherwise, the strong and the rich would oppress the weak and the poor. But if you have too many laws and too many taxes, who's strong and rich then? The state is. And it oppresses everybody. Does that sound familiar?"

"Oh, maybe a little," Gianfranco allowed.

Eduardo laughed. "I thought it might. The question is, what kind of laws do you really need? Drawing the line is what polities ought to be all about, if you ask me."

Gianfranco had been asking him. His own political ideas were murky before he started going to The Gladiator. He largely accepted the system he was born into. Why not? It was all he knew, and his father had done well under it.

But now he saw some reasons why not. He hadn't missed freedom because he hadn't known there was anything to miss. Talking with Eduardo was like looking at another world. Just like that, he thought. And, no matter how Eduardo downplayed it, Gianfranco was convinced it was a better world.

How could it be anything else? People from Eduardo's home timeline knew how to come here. The cleverest scientists in this whole world had no idea any others lay off to the side, as it were. That right there said everything that needed saying about who knew more.

And Eduardo's computer put all the electronics in this whole world to shame. People here wouldn't be able to make anything so small yet powerful for a hundred years-if they ever figured out how. And even if they did, chances were the government wouldn't let them build the machine.

If everybody had a computer like that, what would stop people from hooking all their computers together? They'd be able to figure out in an instant if somebody in the government was lying. And people in the government lied all the time. All those Five-Year Plans got overfulfilled again and again, yet somehow life never looked any better. The state didn't wither away-it got stronger. And anyone who said out loud that the Emperor had no clothes discovered that, while the Emperor might be naked, he did have the Security Police.

If you kick up a fuss, they'll get you, too, Gianfranco thought. But if he didn't kick up a fuss, he'd never be free. He was damned if he didn't, doomed if he did. He saw no way out.

Final exams were coming. Everybody at Hoxha Polytechnic started going crazy. Seniors got especially jumpy. How they did would tell the story of who got into the good universities and who didn't. Anyhow, it would if they didn't have the right connections. You could tell the people who did. They were the ones who could afford to smile and take it easy. Everybody else hated them.

Annarita was only a junior, so she wasn't quite so frantic. She still wanted to do well. She had her own stubborn pride, and she knew her parents expected good marks from her. And, in spite of all the talking she'd done with Eduardo, she still took "from each according to his abilities" seriously. If she was able-and she was-she was supposed to do as well as she could.

She knew Gianfranco was also studying hard. He'd even turned down a couple of chances to play Rails across Europe. She hadn't thought a new outbreak of the Black Death could make him do that.

Neither had Eduardo. When he wasn't playing the railroad game with Gianfranco and her, he played chess with her father. He lost more often than he won, but he won often enough to keep him interested and playing. He fit in well with the Crosettis-he might almost have been a real cousin. If the Security Police weren't after him, everything would have been fine.

When Annarita said as much one evening, her father looked up from his book. "That's a big if, sweetheart."

"Well, yes, but-" Annarita stopped, not sure how to go on.

"But they haven't knocked on the door yet. That's what you mean, isn't it?" her father said.