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."