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 exercises, 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.