A Matter of Time Read Online Free PDF Page A

she seized the feet of the hovel's remaining, now silent tenant and helped swing him onto the rude table. He was just a boy, yet his face was a land on which several bad diseases had left memorials.
     
    No one outside a labor camp lived this way. Dirt floor to sleep on, a pallet stuffed with straw. Only furniture a homemade table… No, there were a few crude pieces in shadowed corners. No water. No toilet.
     
    This wasn't her world.
     
    "The woman. She went for someone."
     
    Then she studied herself.
     
    And received a greater shock.
     
    The body she wore, beneath the crudest peasant clothing, was tiny, emaciated, just entering puberty. It was the female counterpart of the boy on the table. "Oh…" It couldn't be a labor camp.
     
    One of those places, only rumored, where they experimented on enemies of the State?
     
    Outside, the sun was rising. On a morning like this, the spires of Hradcany Castle would be visible from the church belfry.
     
    A scant sixty miles to the northwest, men named von Bismarck and von Moltke were defining her history with words spoken by the mouths of cannon. Already the troops were moving at Kцniggratz.
     
    She had come to a land more alien than she could believe.
     
    Its name was July 3,1866.
     
    V. On the Y Axis;

1975
    The collapse of South Vietnam had begun in January, a slow, snowballing thing that had not seemed serious at first. But when Hue and Da Nang went and the North Vietnamese started whooping down the coast routes like a juggernaut, it became obvious that the end had finally come. Those with an emotional investment in the country could, like watching the football Cardinals go into the second half down by seventeen, hope for a miracle, but that hope was wan.
     
    One night Cash woke to find Annie sobbing beside him. He pretended not to notice.
     
    Later that week he found her sniffling in the kitchen when he returned from work.
     
    "What's the matter?"
     
    "Been a rotten day. Everything went wrong. And now I burned my finger."
     
    She was lying. The stove wasn't hot. But he let it slide. Even shared griefs had to have their private facets.
     
    "Nancy's bringing the kids over tomorrow."
     
    "Yeah? Second time this week. What's up? I thought she didn't like us that much."
     
    "People change."
     
    "I guess." They just could not get it out in the open.
     
    The worst cruelty, for Cash, was the indifference of the people he encountered. But they were dead-tired of Vietnam. Most would have been pleased to see the damned country follow Atlantis's example.
     
    Cash was angry and unapproachable most of the time.
     
    During the downhill plunge to the fall of Saigon he remained utterly distracted. Nothing could draw him out of the netherworld to which he had retreated. He had little time for murders or murderers. His thoughts all revolved around that one little country, that pimple on the ass of the world, where his oldest son was still missing…
     
    He did not really care about Vietnam
per se.
He was no rabid anti-communist. The system had done wonders in China. Through the later years of the war he had been critical of United States involvement, though for reasons at variance with those vocalized in the streets. Those he could not comprehend at all. They had no apparent relation to reality, only to wishful thinking about how the world
should
be. He felt that, like a too cautious coach, the United States had gone, at best, for a draw. He felt the military should have been allowed to go for a victory with everything but nuclear weapons, and to hell with futile arguments about the propriety of being there in the first place. Once you're wet, you should go ahead and swim, not cry about falling in, he thought. But he kept his opinions to himself, being rational enough to know they were opinions and not something Moses had brought down from the mountain in his other hand.
     
    He had greeted the January, 1973, news of United States withdrawal with relief. The Kissinger "peace"