A Matter of Time

by Glen Cook

  The academy’s mission was to produce agent-larvae who would, eventually, devour the rotten fruit of capitalism from its core outward after their repatriation. Only an honored few men were to be reserved, at war’s end, for later special employment on behalf of the director.

  Michael’s dream of bearing the light to his near and dear was pure fantasy. He already knew that he was one of the elect stay-behinds.

  What he didn’t know was that his selection wasn’t an honor. He hadn’t been chosen as the American Mao. Those chosen to remain forever MIA were the moral weaklings, the personalities incapable of withstanding the heat of the forges of pre-Revolution. Michael had been singled out as a loser, as a blade good for but one stroke. In the long run he was as expendable as a hand grenade.

  Let him dream his dreams of becoming mighty among the socialist mighty. They did no harm, and kept him usefully eager.

  The academy’s population was never large, and the lot of a confirmed collaborator was loneliness. The weakness of character that made shifting allegiances easy was such that even defectors secretly loathed it in one another.

  Michael Cash didn’t have a single friend inside.

  So it was that he awaited Snake’s arrival with rising excitement.

  But people change. Time, separation, and hardship devour the commonalities that form the bedrock of friendship. Michael and Snake had lived out two years in radically different environments. They had worked toward radically different goals. They were no longer the two pained, frightened, bewildered GIs who had shared the march up the Ho Chi Minh trail.

  Snake wanted nothing more than to get the essential spark that was his self through this purgatory unconquered.

  “Hey, man!” said Michael as Cantrell came toward him, down the ramp, beneath the cold-eyed desert stars. “Hey! Two years.”

  His pleasure was genuine and absolute. He had missed Snake’s stubborn strength. “Really good to see you. How have they been treating you? I heard they gave you to Chico and Fidel for a while. They tell me those guys play rough. That’s why I been busting my ass trying to get you here. Things are better here. You’ll see.”

  While Michael’s mouth motored, Snake limped along beside him, following the other new students. The bone hadn’t set properly. The two Cubans, who operated out of their country’s Hanoi embassy, had refused to let the camp doctor see him. Their specialty was breaking spirits. Sometimes they shattered bones trying to shatter hope.

  They had met their match in Snake Cantrell. Snake hadn’t had a hope to lose, nor an illusion to kill, for a decade.

  He regarded Michael from the edge of his vision. His expression remained unreadable. Sometimes it threatened to become amusement, contempt, compassion, or sorrow, but always it faded before taking real life. He spoke only in response to direct questions.

  Even there in the night Michael’s apparel betrayed him. Spartan, a curious hybrid of Chinese Army and American work clothing, it did not resemble POW wear at all. The shiny new first lieutenant’s insignia were a dead giveaway.

  They passed through a camouflaged entrance into a long, steep stairwell illuminated by dull red lights which came to life only after the door closed. Posters and pennants clung to the pale green flaking paint on the concrete walls, sad imitations of college dormitory decor. Each proclaimed some gem of genius from Chairman Mao. Two years of study hadn’t made the meaning of most any less impenetrable to Michael.

  Snake broke step, frowned at one especially foggy quotation.

  “I think you have to be Chinese,” Michael observed. He felt euphoric, daring. “I guess the first thing should be to show everybody where they bunk. Then you and me can go down to the cafeteria. Shoot the shit about what’s been happening. How long since you’ve had a cup of coffee? Or bacon and eggs? Or a real American cigarette? We’ve got it whipped here, Snake.”

  It took only minutes to settle the new class. It consisted of just twenty men, and Cash had done most of the work beforehand. He had tagged bunks and lockers. Issue clothing — sized according to information received from the Vietnamese — and study materials were in place. Soap, towels, blankets, and so forth, he had placed in the lockers. It was an inspection-ready barracks. Occupants were all it needed to bring it to life.

  Michael worked hard, wanting to impress his new masters as much as the minions of his old.

  “Gentlemen, my name is Michael Cash,” he announced after the men had located their bunks and lockers. “I’ll be your platoon leader during your first week here. The setup is pretty much like your academies, OCS, or basic. But there’ll be no saluting. Your ranks will have no weight. We’re all equals here.

  “Now, today is a free day. Tomorrow we begin orientation. You’ll find a daily schedule posted on the bulletin board. It’ll be your responsibility to be at the right place at the right time. The schedule consists of the usual mix of physical fitness, classroom instruction, and testing. In addition, there will be daily periods of self-criticism. At the end of the week you’ll be assigned individualized courses of instruction.

  “During free time you can wander around, use the library, the rec room, or the cafeteria, as you see fit. The Chinese have gone to a lot of trouble to make us comfortable. Keep their facilities orderly and clean.

  “In that vein, you’ll find a duty roster posted with the daily schedule. It isn’t rough. Comes to about an hour per man per day. Nor is it rigid. If you want to trade off, it’s all right with me. Just let me know so I can pass the word to your supervisors.

  “Do the same thing with any problems that come up. Most of them I should be able to handle in a few minutes. This is a quiet, efficient institution, geared to your wants and needs. You’ll find it a welcome change.”

  Michael had worked hard on his speech, shaping it on the past half-dozen classes. He was proud of it. Its reward was the doubt and surprise he saw in his audience. Each minim of uncertainty was a bridgehead for their reeducation.

  “Lieutenant.”

  “Yes?”

  The speaker showed traces of gray at his temples. He was, probably, the senior officer present.

  “Where are we? What the hell is this place?”

  The man was less calm than he pretended. Michael remembered his own distress on arriving. Though the process was smoother these days, the new students were given no more idea as to their fate. Having seen fellow prisoners disappear forever, they would be in terror for their jives.

  The contrast between violent expectation and apparent pacificity were part of the academy’s program to generate uncertainty.

  “You’ll get most of your answers in your first class tomorrow. I couldn’t tell you where we are. I don’t really know, but we’re in the People’s Republic of China, somewhere in Sin-kiang province. Closer than that, only the director knows. And he wouldn’t tell you.

  “As to what the place is, it’s a school.” He said no more. They would learn soon enough.

  There were more questions in the same vein. He evaded them. “I suggest you shift into the uniform you’ll find in your locker. Shower if you like. Then wander around. Get to know the installation. Signs or the Chinese staff will let you know-politely — if you’re headed into a restricted area. I’ll be in the cafeteria with Sergeant Cantrell if anybody needs me. If you smoke, cigarettes can be obtained there, on request. One of the rules, though, is that you have to smoke them there. Same for food and drink. In the interest of cleanliness and sanitation. Sergeant Cantrell?”

  “Let me grab a shower first, eh, Mike? You been here two years. Maybe you forgot what it’s like, smelling yourself all the time.”

  Michael was full of talk, bursting with words. He waited impatiently. A Lieutenant Vlassic tried to pump him, but retreated with an expression of horror when he suddenly realized Cash’s true status. His reaction didn’t faze Michael. He knew his truths better than any new student. Vlassic would be around to his way of thinking sooner than he believed possible. Very few men were difficult, and none of those
were ever written off by the director.

  In its grossest, simplest form, the academy hinged on positive and negative reinforcement. A bell rings. Salute, get a treat. Fail to do so, receive a shock.

  Michael had been a good boy. Snake was one of his treats.

  All men are lonely. Each battles the loneliness in his own way, comes to terms with it in his unique fashion. Michael’s means of fending it off was to befriend newcomers, taking one or two from each class under his wing. The relationships never endured, though. He seemed to consume them. Within weeks his “friends” began evading him, began finding ways to detach themselves from him.

  He never learned that the fault was in himself, that he approached the relationships as a spider approaches a fly. He sucked their substance and gave very little in return. Just material things, or the few little privileges within his power to grant.

  That he was a chronic whiner, and absolutely refused to risk any self-responsibility or initiative, didn’t help. People got tired of listening to him.

  “Christ, that felt good,” said Snake, clomping from the shower. “Have to wear anything special to this cafeteria? I’m ready for coffee and a smoke. Going to grab all I can before they bring on the thumbscrews.”

  “No special uniform. We only have one, a working uniform. And it isn’t that way at all.”

  Snake gave him his most cynical look. “Who are you trying to snow?”

  Michael shuffled nervously, embarrassedly. Some students did have it bad. But they made it tough on themselves.

  Cash hadn’t always been a sorry nebbish, nor would he always be one. Not to his present neurotic extent.

  The long march to prison camp, entirely at the mercy of brutal captors, dodging the bombs, shells, and ambushes of his own side, while suffering dysentary and the ravages of tropical diseases, had shaped him more than any five years of prior life.

  Snake it had only made more the way he was.

  Of the twenty-three prisoners who had begun the trek, only Michael, Snake, and three others had survived.

  In his way, Cash was tougher than most men. But he couldn’t suffer in silence, nor could he take an uncompromising stand.

  For six months he had devoted his whole being to survival. And he had managed. At the cost of having had his personality hammered to a shape suited to no more noble purpose.

  Evangelic espousal of the Maoist faith was another reason friends didn’t last. Americans tend to isolate and shun zealots.

  Michael, initially, was as abrasive as a brand new Jehovah’s Witness, by damned going to bring salvation to the unbeliever even if he had to manage it at bayonet point. Later he learned to pursue more subtle paths to conversion.

  His evangelism suited the director. New students needed a focus for their hatred. Diffuse, undirected emotion remained hard to tap, to channel, to control.

  Snake said little till they had filled their meal trays and had seated themselves. He sipped coffee, smoked half a Marlboro, stared at his tray. “Makes you light-headed after doing without for so long. And more food than we used to get in two days.”

  “They take good care of us here. You can go back for more if you want.”

  “Why?”

  “Try those pancakes. Like Mom used to make.”

  Michael had just begun to appreciate the investment that had gone into this place. Where, in Red China, did you find a cook able to whip up a midwestern breakfast and make it taste Iowa on a frosty autumn morning? Where did you get ham, bacon, eggs, sausage, grits, biscuits, gravy, cornbread, cereal, to prepare to each man’s taste? Twenty-four brands of cigarettes. Coke, Pepsi, and Seven-Up. Bud, Busch, Burgie, Coors, Hamm’s, Miller’s, Pabst, Schlitz, and a dozen others, in a beer cooler that was open two hours every evening....

  All the comforts of home. But no Playboy in the library. No newspapers or periodicals from home, except the like of the Daily Worker, and especially selected excerpts from editorial columns.

  Snake didn’t press. He downed half his meal before noting, “I thought there’d be more people around. They kept taking guys out of every camp I was ever in.”

  Only two Americans not of the new class were around. Like Michael, they were graduates.

  “This is just the orientation center. Only gets used when there’s a new class. The main installation is huge. And getting bigger every day.” Chinese lifetermers, condemned to see the sun nevermore, provided the labor digging the academy ever deeper and larger. “We have six national divisions, all separate, all broken up into as many independent sections as are necessary. The American division is the biggest right now, but the Russian and Burmese are pretty big too.” He frowned, wondering why that should be. Nobody knew what the hell was going on outside. The isolation kept you from finding out from anybody who had been there recently. Guys from the camps only knew what had happened before their capture.

  It was like living on the moon, trying to follow current events through a telescope.

  He shouldn’t be telling Snake anything. It wasn’t his job. “Most of our graduates go back to special camps.”

  That hadn’t always been the plan. But the threat of commando raids aimed at rescuing POWs had made the director decide that someone should be available for recapture.

  Then, too, he was unsure of the extent and efficacy of the CIA networks in the North. He feared a constant, unexplained depletion of prisoner populations would alert the enemy. As it was, the operation limped, crippled by balky, obstinate Vietnamese officials. The middle echelons, it seemed, cooperated as little as possible.

  Security was the reason, of course. Only Ho and General Giap had ever been in the know.

  Graduates were kept quarantined, doing post-graduate work, being brought ever more into line. The hypnotic treatments, needed to make the majority ignorant of what they were, was delicate, took ages to perfect, and occasionally needed reinforcement.

  Michael spent another hour introducing Snake to his new world.

  “Mike, I’ve had it,” Cantrell finally protested. “I’ve got to sleep.”

  Cash harkened back to his own long, harrowing plane ride. “Sure. I understand. Go ahead. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  Michael retreated to his own room, a bedroom-office off the dormitory. He lay on his bunk a long time, staring at the concrete ceiling.

  Snake was still Snake. He was still Michael Cash. But Time had been nurturing one of its infamous treasons. The old bond, wrought between men who had helped one another survive a prisonward hell march, had worn.

  He hadn’t been there to share and ease the pain when Snake had taken the injuries to his leg and soul. Snake hadn’t been here. They just hadn’t shared in too long.

  A single tear dribbled from Michael’s right eye. He brushed it away irritably. Then he moved to his desk, to lose himself in his language studies.

  Little of his graduate work was Marxist. The director wanted his special men to have skills making them suitable for the widest possible employment. Michael was pursuing a curriculum ranging from hard science to the softest liberal arts. It was more intense than any he had known in college. And he had his duties as well.

  This was higher education without the beer parties and football. And girls.

  Michael hardly remembered what a woman was anymore.

  In that way the institution mirrored its director thoroughly.

  The first class Monday was a simple and honest, if incomplete, lecture describing the academy and its purpose. Michael sat at the back and made notes. Each little reaction went down. A committee of instructors would review them before making course assignments.

  The next session was an introduction to Marxist thought. The twenty students fidgeted under a barrage of ideas they found offensive. A navy flier named Jorgenson thundered “Bullshit!” during a cataloging of the crimes of American capitalist-imperialism.

  The instructor peeped over round-lensed, wire-framed glasses quizzically, glanced at Cash, continued.

  Jorgenson came t
o Michael during lunch.

  “Lieutenant, you said tell you our problems. I’ve got one. The Chink cocksucker on the chow line won’t let me have any coffee or cigarettes. How come? He let everybody else.”

  Cash glanced at the man’s tray. Standard meal. Water to drink. Good. He nodded, ignoring Jorgenson’s defiance. “So I see.”

  “Well, how come? Why me? You said —”

  “Mealtimes make good times to reflect on our shortcomings. On our egoisms and willful errors. Reflect while you eat.”

  Michael caught Snake’s thoughtful look. He understood.

  Jorgenson ate in silence. He had figured it out too.

  These early lessons would be gentle, subtle. Resistance, the director felt, could be more easily disarmed that way.

  From that luncheon on Snake was the worst offender. And Cash knew he meant to ease the pressure on the others. He could handle the shit. It had nothing to do with any feud with the Chinese Communists. He loathed them no more than other Statists.

  Orientation week dragged.

  Michael had a tough night Saturday. His assignment recommendations were due.

  Snake was his best friend in this half of the world. Not once had Cantrell condemned him for his change of faith, nor had he been less friendly than in the past, despite the new distance between them. But the man wouldn’t let their friendship shape his behavior.

  Therefore, Michael decided, neither could he.

  And he had to protect himself....

  He finally signed that last bitter recommendation.

  Snake now faced what the staff called Intensive Reeducation.

  Snake, being Snake, would understand. And probably not hold a grudge. He was, himself, a disciple of the doctrine of doing what had to be done.

  He was still in Intensive when, a month later, on the eve of the arrival of his next class, Michael finally found the nerve to check on his friend.

  They had put Snake into the Crystal Palace, a hexagonal, furnitureless, featureless cell where all the surfaces were mirrors. One-way. Snake couldn’t see out but his tormentors could see in. Powerful kliegs pushed enough light through to keep the interior blindingly bright. Sometimes the technicians added deafening white sound, though they preferred recordings of Snake’s own mad ravings. Sometimes they turned up the heat, or starved him, or made him do without water. They never actually touched him, let him see them, or did him physical harm. Harm was forbidden by the director. The goal was a broken will, not a broken body.