"Very good-so far," Comrade Pontevecchio said. "Why are they important?"

All of a sudden, Teobaldo didn't look so happy. "Because they showed capitalism was doomed?" You could hear the question mark in his voice. He wasn't sure he was right any more, even if he gave an answer that was almost always safe.

"Sit down," the teacher snapped, and wrote something in the roll book in red. Comrade Pontevecchio looked out over the class. "Anyone?" His scorn grew by the second when nobody took a chance. "Knowing what is only half the battle, and the small half at that. You have to know why. Do you think Marx could have invented dialectical materialism if he didn't understand why?"

Nobody said anything. When Comrade Pontevecchio got into one of these moods, keeping quiet was the safest thing you could do. Gianfranco stared down at his desk. People had been trying to drum dialectical materialism into his head since he was five years old, but he still didn't get it.

"When the United States backed down and let the Soviet Union keep missiles in Cuba to balance the American missiles in Turkey, what did that show?" the teacher demanded.

Gianfranco thought he knew, but he wasn't about to stick his neck out. Luisa Orlandini cautiously raised her hand. Luisa was pretty. Even if she got it wrong, Comrade Pontevecchio probably wouldn't bite her head off.

Probably.

He nodded to her. She stood up. "It showed the American capitalist regime was only a paper tiger, Comrade Pontevecchio," she said.

"That's right," he agreed-he'd called the USA a paper tiger himself. "And what does the Vietnam War have to do with this?"

"The Vietnamese were trying to liberate the south from a neocolonialist dictatorship, and the Americans tried to prop up the reactionary elements," Luisa answered.

"Yes, that's also right." Comrade Pontevecchio warmed all the way up to chilly. "And what happened then, and why?"