The clicking heels across the library floor elicited the same reaction from Chin as a boot squeaking in snow. Chin calmly hit the ‘Back’ button even as the sweat beaded at his forehead. As his heart raced. As his entire body tensed up and he experienced a clarity of vision and of thought he’d never known before the war. The enemy passed uneventfully. He wore the uniform of an ordinary police officer — white belt, white gloves clasped behind his back, white holster with a white lanyard hanging from his black automatic. Nothing but the finest for China’s most elite university. But Chin and everyone else knew that he and the others like him were from the Ministry of State Security. You could tell it from the way the real police officers at the university’s gates acted. They wore the drab uniforms and bored looks of the low-paid, and they snapped to attention when such men stopped by. Chin couldn’t wait to see the blood drip from the fine, white accouterments.
The government kept a watchful eye on Beijing University. After years and years of turmoil, admission was now limited to the trusted few. To the sons of peasants, to war heroes, to the apolitical. They’d done checks in Chin’s village and he’d scored high on all three. ‘Congratulations!’ the admissions officer had said. ‘We not only turned up no politically insensitive remarks in your past. We apparently turned up no remarks of a political nature whatsoever. And that’s rare.’
But that had been before the war. Before ‘The Laws of Human History.’ Before Valentin Kartsev.
The cop was flirting with a girl who worked at the main desk of the library. Chin switched back to the book and hit ‘Find.’ In the small window he typed the last phrase he’d read before being kicked out the night before. ‘It is man’s most basic nature,’ Chin typed, ‘to subvert all attempts at control.’ When he hit ‘Go,’ the computer quickly found the passage. As Chin began his night’s reading, he had to force himself to remain alert. He got so absorbed in the book that he was at risk of ignoring the danger signs. For the words sparked wildfires of imagination. Streaming banners. Barricades manned by armed and defiant people. ‘Creative destruction.’
He set his jaw, and ground his teeth, and clenched his fists. His body was tensed in preparation for action. But now was not the time or the place.
The day will come, he thought — he pledged. Soon…