A Matter of Time

by Glen Cook

  He had to be made to feel alone. Naked and alone. Not a stitch of clothing, never a human touch or word. That had pushed many a stubborn man past his limit.

  But Snake had been alone all his life.

  While he was on a no-sleep program the technicians would give him an electric shock if he threatened to drift off. Or they might set the gimbled cell slowly spinning and tumbling.

  He was supposed to lose his belief in the fixity, the predictability of his environment, and in elementary concepts of fairness. He was supposed to begin hating the men he saw reflected wherever he looked. Once he wanted rid of the old Snake, the academy staff would begin building him a new one. In a more useful mold.

  But Snake had been through all that before, on his own, and had put himself together in his present form.

  “How’s he coming?” Michael asked the technician on duty.

  “Slow. Can’t seem to reach him. He just takes it. You know him. Any ideas?”

  “I never knew him under normal conditions. From what he told me, he never lived normally. His father was a wife-beater, child batterer, and child molester. He just hid back inside himself so far that nothing could reach him. Before he ever got to high school, let alone the army.”

  “Is he afraid of anything?”

  “Not that I know of. I don’t think he even cares if he stays alive. If you kill him, he figures he’s beaten you that way too. He’s never had anything to lose. How do you get a handle on a guy like that?”

  “Every man holds something too precious to lose.” The technician consulted his charts, pushed a button. The Crystal Palace began tumbling slowly. “Next time he passes out I’ll move him to the Closet. See how he likes that. He’s got me ready to start experimenting.”

  “Why not bring him out, shape him up, and run him through orientation again? See how he reacts to a chance to get into a less rigorous program. Let the contrasts sink in. If he doesn’t reform, give him the Closet at the end of the week.”

  The Closet was a cell sixty centimeters by sixty centimeters by two meters high. Not absolutely impossible. But all its faces were featureless, and there was no light or sound once its door closed. It had broken some tough men.

  Michael hoped Snake wouldn’t have to go in. He dreaded the Closet so much himself that he willingly risked compromising himself to save his friend that hell.

  “It might help. All right. Pick him up tomorrow afternoon.”

  Michael scarcely concealed his relief.

  He owed Snake. Maybe his life, from the march....

  “What’re his interests? His politics?”

  “Music was the only thing he cared about. Only time I heard him complain was when a Vietnamese soldier stole his harmonica. He could play the guitar, too, and, I think, the piano. He was in a band before he joined the army. Politically, you’d have to call him an anarchist.”

  “Bakuninite?”

  “No. Nothing that nihilist. He just wants government to leave him alone. Not to tax him, or draft him, or to do things to him for his own good, I really don’t think he can understand the differences between Marxism and capitalism. All he sees is that states are states. They all impose on their citizens.”

  This was dangerous stuff. For his own welfare he shouldn’t be saying it, even to express Snake’s beliefs.

  But the technician just looked bewildered. The ideas were too alien. Cash didn’t go on. It would be like explaining color to a man blind from birth.

  “I’ll fix a bunk for him then. Tomorrow afternoon, right? Well, I’d better get moving. Got things to do before the plane gets in.” He wanted out before the technician got to thinking that Snake might contaminate the incoming class.

  Michael stared into the Crystal Palace for several seconds, though, before he left. His guts tightened into a walnut of agony. Snake, why can’t you just go along? he wondered. Fake it if you have to, dammit.

  He put the thought to Cantrell the following Friday, once it became certain that he faced Intensive again.

  Snake was spacy all week. He needed guiding through anything he didn’t know as old military routine.

  “No,” Cantrell replied, eyes fixed on some distant illusion of peace.

  Cash, perhaps wishfully, had expected Snake to be eager to please after the Crystal Palace. But obstinance possessed the man. It kept tearing through his remoteness all week.

  “Why the hell not?” Try to help a guy...

  “I can’t.”

  “Snake, please!” He fought to keep his voice soft, his expression neutral. There would be observers.

  A thin, weak smile stretched Cantrell’s lips. “Thanks, Mike.” For an infinitesimal fraction of a second his fingers touched the back of the hand Michael held squeezed into a bloodless fist. His touch was light as a spider’s kiss. “You don’t understand. You never will. You can’t. Not without being me.”

  It took Cash two years to figure out what Snake had been thanking him for. For Snake’s sake that was just as well. It would have been used against him earlier.

  He was thanking Michael for caring. No one in his past ever had.

  Cantrell did his month in the Closet. Then they dusted him off and ran him through orientation again.

  And he failed again.

  And they did it all over again.

  For Michael’s sake.

  Other Intensives were not so favored. Few proved as stubborn.

  The pilots talked a good fight. They arrived believing they could hold up. But they didn’t have the background, the experience, the stamina. A comfortable middle-class American upbringing prepared no one for the overwhelming psychic pressures of the director’s program.

  Huang and his minions quietly humored Michael’s friendship for purely pragmatic reasons. Converts, even flawed, were going to be too few, too precious, in proportion to the population of their native land. Statistically, it looked like the institute would be lucky to produce a hundred fully employable agents for each year the war dragged on. Many students, though not as recalcitrant as Snake nor as weak as Michael, just could not be programmed reliably. This large group, therefore, would be activated only in an extreme emergency.

  And of the prime graduates no more than a handful could be expected to reach critical policy-making positions. The director couldn’t program a man for competence.

  So no chance was being overlooked. Especially as Michael’s evaluators had begun to detect a genius for administrating the conversion of his countrymen in their subject, a genius they intended to test to its limits.

  A leader he was not. He lacked all charisma. But, after four years of training, a better pillar for a throne, or a puppet master pulling strings from behind a throne, Huang could not have asked.

  Yet Michael was never so devout a Maoist that maltreatment of his friend might not alienate him. That was one face of Marxism-as-practiced that he just couldn’t internalize. He couldn’t abandon a friend for the good of the state.

  By then, because of his talents, he loomed so large in the director’s plan that he might one day be in a positon to destroy it.

  Snake’s education, therefore, remained wholly under Michael’s control.

  Nevertheless, Snake endured it all — for his own good. Michael shed his tears, but hit the man with every psychological assault ever devised, every nonlethal persuasion ever invented. Only torture and death were tools forbidden the technicians.

  Not only did Snake resist the Maoist faith, he refused to recant any other.

  So they finally discarded him. But, like a cracked cup that might come in handy someday — perhaps as leverage on Michael — not completely. The director kept him on a back shelf.

  Two years later Snake Cantrell was just another tunnel miner, fed, worked, and ignored. He had won. The staff had given up on him. His only service could be to help the academy grow.

  While Cantrell hauled baskets of broken rock, Michael studied, trained and administered. He became a brilliant marksman, superior in hand-to-hand, and, in ex
ercises, revealed a strong sixth sense for personal danger. He rapidly soared to the top of the academy’s heirarchy. As the years marched, he, and the elect stay-behinds and men who would be repatriated as “live,” aware Chinese agents, gradually took command of the American division.

  In July 1972, Michael assumed the post of director of curricula for the entire institution. He was the senior officer inside, answerable only to Huang himself.

  His cozy little world began fraying almost immediately. The director called within the month.

  “Damn Henry Kissinger!” he exploded after breaking the connection.

  What was he going to do?

  He had known it was coming, someday, but had hoped the petty bickering about table shapes and such would delay the inevitable a lot longer than it had.

  Without the war he would be out of a job.

  He summoned his administrative assistant. “Dwight, I just talked to the Old Man,” he told Jorgenson. “He said get ready to close up shop. Peace is going to break out any day now.”

  “We’re going home?” The man seemed to glow.

  “That’s the word. Maybe as soon as six months. So we’ve got to close the American division down, get everybody back to the camps, and clean up the evidence.” He never mentioned that some two hundred men would be staying. That would be the most carefully guarded secret of all. Only those staying would know. No one had more potential usefulness, the director felt, than a man who didn’t exist.

  “Physical plant shouldn’t be much problem,” Michael mused. “We’ll just turn off the lights on our way out. Personnel, though... bring me the lists. I’ll have to work out who goes where in a way that’ll maximize security.”

  “Aren’t you excited?” Jorgenson couldn’t hold still.

  Michael could only think of a wife and children he would never see.... Well, he had made his choice. It was as much for their sakes.... He hoped Nancy would find herself a good man. The kids would need a father.... No. No need to worry. Mom would make sure....

  He shoved them out of his mind. Remembering hurt too much.

  “Of course. My kids... they’ll be in school by now.... But it’s so sudden, and there’s so much to do. Find me those lists, then go see who wants to claim some of our American space. Samarov has been bugging me since I took over. Give him anything he thinks Russian division can use. Check with Burmese and Indian, too, for sure. They’re doing a lot of business. We’ll have a staff meeting this weekend. I want to carve up the pie before Peking cuts the budget or moves some other operation in here.”

  Michael studied the personnel lists the rest of that month. Men had to be placed precisely, according to their preparation and how knowledgeable they were. The least little error...

  Time and again his treacherous eyes stopped at:

  37. CANTRELL, A. O. 314 07 54 E-5 US Army 8 July 67 05 3 Jan 70

  38. CANTRELL, W. J. 05798-69 0-3 US Navy 19 Dec 71 02 12 July 72

  An accidental transposition...?

  And Snake went home while a young lieutenant from the last class admitted disappeared among the excavator crews.

  XXIII

  On the Y Axis;

  1975

  Old Man Railsback was prancing like a kid in desperate need of a visit to the bathroom. Cash didn’t ask why. He had arrived fifteen minutes early, trying to beat everyone in. But Hank had gotten there ahead of him anyway.

  “Come on in here, Norm,” the lieutenant called from his lair.

  Cash entered on tiptoe, perpetually poised to flee.

  “Sit down. And settle down. The shit ain’t going to hit the fan just yet.” He shoved the door closed. “Purely business.”

  “Well?”

  “First, soon as Gardner comes through with a warrant, we start taking the Groloch place apart. Brick by brick. I got a feeling we’re in for some surprises.” He kept fingering the edges of something that looked like a very old, hand-drawn, extremely complicated circuit diagram.

  “Huh? Why?”

  “Well, I not only got idiots in my squad, I’ve got them in my family. After we left for the fire, the old man tossed the place.”

  “But...” He wanted to ask why he hadn’t been told last night.

  “Yeah. After I warned him. After what happened to the Kid. After all the time he spent on the force. But he has a mind of his own. And he wants to help, you know what I mean? To be useful, to impress the rest of us. This time it paid off.” He rolled his chair back, opened a side drawer, tossed two large, stringbound bundles onto the desktop. “He thought these might be important. He’s probably right, but not as right as he wants to be. A few more nails in her coffin, maybe.”

  One bundle consisted of gold notes. Twenties. Cash suspected he knew the amount without counting. The second bundle, far larger, was made up of old letters still in their original envelopes. There were more than a hundred.

  “The counterfeit?” The bills looked fresh, despite their age. Even if they were real, only a bank would accept them.

  He picked up a handful of envelopes after Hank cut the string with his nail clippers. The lieutenant admitted that he had been through them already. Hadn’t the man slept at all?

  “A nice collection of covers.” They sketched eighty years of turbulent postal history clearly, beginning with envelopes franked with stamps of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, then stamps of Austria and Hungary overprinted Czeskoslovenka, several dozen regular Czech issues of the prewar period, and, on the last few envelopes, Sudetenland provisional and stamps of the German puppet-protectorate, Bohemia and Moravia. Scattered among the predominate PRAGA postmarks were several indicating that Miss Groloch’s correspondent had on occasion wandered into Germany, Poland, Hungary, Austria, and Romania.

  “Nothing since the war.”

  “Since before we got into it, really.”

  A December 17, 1940, postmark was the most recent. The envelope had been rubber-stamped with censor marks and numerous backstamps indicating the circuitous routing followed by mail coming out of the Greater German Reich. The St. Louis backstamp, indicating date received, was March 6, 1942.

  Cash opened that one.

  “Your old man can read German, can’t he?”

  “Yeah. Only these aren’t in German. I seen enough when I was a kid to know that.”

  Cash looked again. “You’re right. Czech? Or Slovak?”

  Railsback shrugged. “Whatever they talk over there, I guess.”

  “There aren’t any American letters.”

  “From what Dad told me about the place he found these, there might have been. He said it looked like somebody had taken another bundle out of there.”

  “She took them with her.” Cash smiled. “Because she didn’t want to give Rochester away. She’s crafty all right. Except that I’ve already got the angle on her there. I already know.”

  “Which probably means there’s nothing in these we can use. Maybe she even left them to distract us.” Railsback tried to put a rubber band around the envelopes. It snapped, stinging him. He cursed. Next try he broke the pile into several bundles. “I’d have you check those bills with your friend the hood, only I want you checking the airport, bus station, and what not.”

  “She went to Rochester.”

  “Maybe. Check it. Use Beth if you want. Smith and Tucholski are tied up with this fire thing.”

  “Hank, I want to go up there.”

  “Where?”

  “New York.”

  “You’ve got to be shitting me.”

  “I mean it. She’s old. She’ll go by train. I could take a plane and be there waiting for her.”

  “And then what?”

  He hadn’t thought about it. “I don’t know. Maybe bluff her....”

  “Aren’t you a little scared? I mean, she’s burned seven or eight guys already.”

  “No.” He said it with surprise. “No. You know, I think the house made the difference. I feel like I’ve won just by getting her out of it.”

  “Yeah? W
ell, get on the road. I want to know how she left and where she went.”

  “I’m going up there, Hank. If I have to pay out of my own pocket.”

  “Yeah. Sure. Meantime, get on the job I just gave you.”

  Beth had arrived while they were closeted. Cash whispered with her for a minute, then turned to Old Man Railsback, who was grinning. “Bad as me, eh?”

  The elder Railsback chuckled.

  “You’re not doing anything this morning, you can do me a couple favors.”

  “Such as?”

  “Make it down to St. John Nepomuk Church, Twelfth and Lafayette, and see if the priest can put you on to anybody who could translate those letters for us. Then take one of those bills down to the Feds and see if it’s kosher. Only one. We don’t want them grabbing the whole damned pile yet.”

  “Okay. It’s something to do.”

  Damned but it was going to be rough learning to do without John. He was going to have to do his own leg work.

  Cash followed his railroad hunch and visited Union Station first. And yes, the ticket agent remembered the little old lady with the foreign accent. But he didn’t remember where she had gone. The Amtrak ticket records — of course — were screwed up beyond hope.

  “That’s what you get when you let the government fuck around with things,” Cash grumbled as he walked back to his car, a rail schedule in hand.

  She had pulled out Thursday morning. Assuming the usual foul-ups and delays, a plane should get him into Rochester well ahead of her.

  He paused to call Beth. “Norm. Yeah. I was right. She took the train. No. Hold off telling him. I’m going to slide home and talk it over with Annie. And I’ve still got to tell John’s wife. You make my reservation? Good girl. Talk to you later.”