Massimo sighed, then rubbed his nose. “You might think the death of religion would make a lot of difference to people. Well, it doesn’t. Because they think it’s normal. They don’t miss believing in God any more than you miss believing in Marx.”

“So first we can go to that Italy, and then nearby into my own Italy-is that the idea?”

“That Italy is boring! The girls there are boring! They’re so matter-of-fact about sex there that they’re like girls from Holland.” Massimo shook his head ruefully. “Now I’m going to tell you about a version of Italy that’s truly different and interesting.”

I was staring at a round of the sausage. The bright piece of gristle in it seemed to be the severed foot of some small animal. “All right, Massimo, tell me.”

“Whenever I move from world to world, I always materialize in the Piazza Vittorio Veneto,” he said, “because that plaza is so huge and usually pretty empty, and I don’t want to hurt anyone with the explosion. Plus, I know Torino-I know all the tech companies here, so I can make my way around. But once I saw a Torino with no electronics.”

I wiped clammy sweat from my hands with the cafe’s rough cloth napkin. “Tell me, Massimo, how did you feel about that?”

“It’s incredible. There’s no electricity there. There’s no wires for the electrical trolleys. There are plenty of people there, very well-dressed, and bright colored lights, and some things are flying in the sky… big aircraft, big as ocean-liners. So they’ve got some kind of power there-but it’s not electricity. They stopped using electricity, somehow. Since the 1980s.”

“A Turin with no electricity,” I repeated, to convince him that I was listening.

“Yeah, that’s fascinating, isn’t it? How could Italy abandon electricity and replace it with another power source? I think that they use cold-fusion! Because cold fusion was another world-changing event from the 1980s. I can’t explore that Torino-because where would I plug in my laptop? But you could find out how they do all that! Because you’re just a journalist, right? All you need is a pencil!”