Free All the Lives He Led-A Novel by Frederik Pohl Page A

either. Most of my classmates got involved, and by the time the professor let us leave I had actually learned quite a lot of useful stuff. Like the fact that almost everything in the Giubileo gift shops was free for us employees. (“Because we’d steal it anyhow,” somebody said from the back of the room. The professor just smiled.) And if there was anything I didn’t like about my job or my accommodations I had the right to report it to my union, the Confederazione Sindacale Lavoratori del Giubileo. Which I hadn’t even known existed but would have found out, it was explained to me, when I got my first pay and saw the deductions for union dues.
    When the class was over and I was bending over the drinking fountain in the hall I heard Maury Tesch’s voice from behind me. “You don’t want to drink that stuff, Brad,” he said amiably. “Don’t you know fish fuck in it?”
    Actually I’d seen the sign on the fountain that said “Aqua Potabile” and figured out in general what it meant. “It says it’s all right, doesn’t it? Are you telling me it would make me sick?” I asked.
    “Maybe, if you drank enough of it, but you wouldn’t do that. Tastes terrible. All the fountains recirculate, and by the twentieth or thirtieth time around it ain’t fresh anymore. How about a beer?”
    I considered that, wiping my lips as I straightened up. I wasn’t much interested in making him a bosom pal, as he seemed to want, but there was always the chance that he might be able to introduce me to somebody more interesting. Like, say, a woman. But it was getting late, and I had that early-morning session on the wheel to think about. “Maybe another time,” I said. “Something I was wondering about, though. What’s this union we’re all supposed to be members of?”
    Tesch took a quick look around, then grinned. “What?” he said. “You never heard of the Confederazione Sindacale Lavoratori, otherwise known as the Mafia? Tell him about it, why don’t you, Vespasiano, since one of your jobs is working there?”
    Old Gatti was just passing us in the hall. He looked us both over, but he didn’t exactly respond. “I do not want to talk to you,” he said, and this time he was definitely looking me in the eye. He pushed past, leaving Maury staring after him.
    “He’s really mad, isn’t he?” he said. “I was only joking.”
    “Maybe Italians don’t like Mafia jokes,” I offered, but I had something else on my mind. “Tesch? What was it you called him, Vespasian? Does that mean he’s like royal blood or something?”
    Tesch gave me a grin. “Him? Not likely. It’s a common name, like all the ones that once belonged to one of the emperors, but actually I have heard that his family did have money at one time. They don’t anymore.”
    I let it go at that; I only sympathized with families that had lost their money when they were my own. When Maury repeated his offer of a beer I told him I was too tired. “But listen,” I said. “I’ve been wanting to ask somebody why they call my boss ‘Bastard.’ Do you know?”
    He gave me a probing look. “Can’t say,” he said at last. “I think I heard once that he didn’t hire any pretty girls unless they’d go to bed with him. But I don’t know for sure.”
    And he walked off, leaving me pretty well convinced that he did know, but just didn’t want to say.
    Then, all alone in my lonesome little cot I lay awake for a while thinking about why Maury didn’t want to spread some gossip my way. And thinking, too, about old Vespasiano Gatti. It wasn’t the Mafia joke he had been mad about. It was Tesch who had made the joke, but the one Gatti had looked right in the eye of and said he didn’t like was definitely me.
     
     
    By the next morning I had pretty nearly forgotten about old Gatti. I woke up feeling almost cheerful. There definitely were good parts to working for the Giubileo, and one of the best was just looking out of my window when I got up in the early