"All right. All right." The teacher still seemed angry. "You need to know, so I'll tell you-this once. Doesn't London show the bosses raising some workers to the bourgeoisie with what amounts to bribes to turn them against their natural class allies?"

"Si, Comrade Pellagrini," everyone chorused. Once the teacher gave the answer, seeing it was right was the easiest thing in the world.

"I want you to finish The Iron Heel tonight," Comrade Pellagrini said. "We'll have the test on Friday, and then next week we'll start 1984. You'll see how Orwell shows the tyranny of capitalism and Fascism."

A girl raised her hand. "I had to read that book in another class," she said when the teacher called on her. "He calls the ideology in it English Socialism." She sounded troubled, feeling there was something dangerous in the book that she couldn't quite see.

But Comrade Pellagrini brushed the question aside, saying, "Well, so what? The Nazis' full name was the National Socialist German Workers' Party. They weren't real Socialists, and they weren't for the workers. They used mystification to confuse the German people, and it worked."

That seemed to satisfy the girl. It didn't matter to Gian-franco one way or the other. He hadn't read 1984 yet, and hoped it would be more interesting than The Iron Heel. But how interesting could a book be when even its title lay more than a hundred years in the past? And how interesting could it be when you had to read it for school?

The dismissal bell. Well, it was the dismissal bell for most people, anyhow. Annarita knew Gianfranco would be leaving now. But she had the Young Socialists' League meeting. She didn't really want to go-nothing would happen there. Nothing ever did. And she'd get back to the apartment an hour and a half later than usual, and still have a whole day's worth of homework to do.