Comrade Pontevecchio picked on a boy. He didn't know what a popular front was, either.

"This will not do," the teacher snapped. "Get out your books. Write me a fifteen-minute essay on what popular fronts were and why they were important. Anyone who does poorly will have more work assigned. These are your lessons. You will learn them."

Gianfranco almost hadn't brought his textbook. The miserable thing was thick as a brick and weighed a ton. But he would have been in big trouble if Comrade Pontevecchio caught him unprepared. He opened the book and looked in the index. There they were-popular fronts. Oh, boy, he thought. He flipped to the right page and started scribbling as fast as he could. If he parroted the text, he couldn't go wrong. And he didn't have to think while he wrote, either. Comrade Pontevecchio didn't care what he thought or if he thought, as long as he ground out the right answers.

Popular fronts, he rediscovered, combined Communists with non-Communist Socialists and other fellow travelers. The first one came along in France before World War II, to try to rally the country against Fascism. It didn't work. But later popular fronts swung France and Italy and Scandinavia away from the weakening USA and toward the USSR.

Without these fronts, he wrote, the victory of Socialism in Europe, while it still would inevitably have come, would have been slower. It might even have required warfare to eliminate reactionary forces from the continent. That was what the textbook said, and the textbook had to be right. If it was wrong, the authorities wouldn't use it-and what would they do to an author who was wrong on purpose? Send him to a camp? Kill him? Purge his whole family? Gianfranco wouldn't have been surprised.

Was everybody in the class writing the same ideas in the same words? Everybody with any sense was. Why stick your neck out when the answers were right there in black and white? How many times would Comrade Pontevecchio read the same sentences? How sick of them would he get?