'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
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.
