It was just Mark’s luck that being to all intents and purposes fucked would have the effect of producing in the conspicuously cowardly Cosmic Traveler a curious calm, so that instead of cowering in the back of Mark’s head and yammering in terror, he criticized.

Mark tried to hold his head up, but it dipped and wobbled like a kite in the wind, so he let his chin drop to his bare chest. “I don’t even know what you want from me,” he said through swollen lips.

“The truth.” This voice was vibrant, passionate, and All-American. “Who sent you here?”

“Nobody.”

Wham. Lights flashed, buzzers went off. The guy with the ham hand must have won a free game with that one.

“That’s ridiculous,” the All-American said earnestly. “You can’t seriously expect us to believe that. Now, let’s take it from the top: Who are you?”

“M-Mark,” he managed to say. “Mark Meadows.”

“What are you?”

“I’m a biochemist. No, don’t hit me again – I – I’m an ace too.”

“And what were your powers?” the Vietnamese asked.

“I called myself Captain Trips. I had… friends.”

“If you’re Trips,” the American said, “where are your potions?”

You had to play it smart, didn’t you? the Traveler’s voice sneered. You left us behind. We’re safe here in Vietnam, you thought…

Well, so he’d fucked up again; it wasn’t as if it was a new experience or anything. He really did figure he’d be all right stashing what remained of the powders he’d whipped up after his Athens score in Whitelaw’s digs, and he was wrong again. On the other hand, God alone knew what the minions of the notoriously blue-nosed Socialist Republic would be doing to him now if they’d caught him with a fanny-pack full of the most outlandish concatenation of outlaw pharmaceuticals they’d ever seen.

He shook his head. “Don’t… have any. Gave it up.”

A deep chuckle in the voice that belonged to the American. He felt breath on his face, lightly flavored with anise, for God’s sake.

“If you are the notorious American ace,” the Vietnamese voice hissed in his ear, “who sent you here to spy on us?”

“Nobody, man! I keep telling you. I’m – just – a refugee -”

Time for another allegro for face and fists, fortissimo. This is another fine mess you’ve gotten us into, the Traveler put in between beats of the beating.

For Christ’s sake, Trav, J. J. Flash responded, show some originality. Meadows at least has the sense to play dumb, and God knows he’s got practice.

Do not be cruel, came Moonchild’s voice, black silk and silver. Are we not all one?

Great, Flash said. Just what we need: inscrutable Eastern wisdom. If the East’s so goddamn wise, how come its anointed representative is doing a bang-tango on our corporate head?

… Mark became aware the debate was no longer being accompanied on percussion. And there were voices speaking outside the bruised box, his skull.

“- all bullshit, Vo, I’m telling you,” the All-American was saying confidently. “He’s no ace.”

Mark heard a click, smelled a cigarette coming alive, coughed. “We still await the results of the blood tests, Colonel,” the Vietnamese interrogator said.

“No, no, no,” the All-American said confidently. “I know aces. They’re arrogant bastards. No ace would put up with this kind of treatment, I can promise you. Besides, this Captain Trips character is known to be a major druggie. This guy isn’t holding squat.”

Mark could feel the wind off his headshake. “He’s not Captain Trips. He’s some random hippie burnout on the run.”

A smoky sigh. “As you say, Colonel Sobel. I bow to your superior experience. Very well, Minh: get rid of him.”

And just like that he was out on the sidewalk again. Oh, they threw some water over him before they threw him out, and they threw his shirt at him as he stood swaying on the sidewalk in front of the former French villa, blinking in the hot rain and feeling the eyes of passersby all over him.

It could have been worse, he assured his various selves, as he struggled his arms into the sleeves and started buttoning his shirt up crooked. When Vo had told his silent partner with the heavy hands to get rid of him, Mark assumed that meant he was going for a swim in the Saigon River with a brand-new smile beneath his chin. Sometimes it was a relief to be wrong.

“Oh, mama,” Flash crooned, “could this really be the end?

“To be stuck in Ho Chi Minh City with the Bangalore Blues again.”

“‘Bangalore?’” Mark asked aloud. The pedestrians and bicyclists streaming nearest him glanced at him and streamed a little quicker. It was not propitious to tarry near those encountered bloody-headed and talking to themselves in front of this particular address. “I thought that was in India.”

You got bangs galore back inside there, wouldn’t you say?

Funny, Flash. Real fucking funny.

Oh, dear, Moonchild thought. I believe we’re going to throw up.

Colonel Vo Van Song, People’s Public Security Forces, drew smoke through his black-lacquer cigarette holder. He turned in his chair to gaze out the blinds at the broad, tree-lined avenue outside, and let the smoke out.

“So he is the ace called Captain Trips, after all,” he said.

Folded into an uncomfortable French wooden chair, O. K. Casaday grinned. “Don’t be too hard on our boy Charles. He’s a halfwit, sure. But who’d know Meadows is a real ace just from looking at him?”

Colonel Vo turned to regard his visitor. He had large black eyes, sad and heavy-lidded. His cheeks were hollow, so that the cheekbones formed a tau with his jaws. He had a mouth very reminiscent of a carp’s. Jocularly pointing out the resemblance in the mess was not a way for young officers to secure rapid advancement in their careers. Colonel Vo believed in the axiom better police for a better police state, and he believed surveillance begins at home.

Vo and Casaday went back a long way. They had been actual antagonists, back in what both of them, ironically, thought of as the good old days – when they were not so tightly bound about by rules, unlike today, when you had to file a request form two weeks in advance to take a leak.

He had started out as an up-and-coming battalion political officer in a division working the wrong side of the DMZ. It was a job he hated. You faced the same risks as the grunt riflemen, but you got extra headaches. Lots of them.

To be sure, he enjoyed the sinister powers attributed to commissars in Western popular fiction. But the popularizers didn’t tell you the downside. There were the constant political meetings and self-criticism sessions he had to run, for example, which, not being a complete imbecile, he found as boring as everybody else in the PAVN. He also combined the roles of chaplain and guidance counselor, which meant that everybody in the battalion who had a problem whined about it to him. Finally, he was responsible for the performance of the unit in combat as well as out, which meant that his neck was at risk from the blunders of the actual unit commanders, whom he found to be a succession of alternately glory-hungering psychotics and dolts who didn’t know which end of Vietnam Hanoi was in.

His own indoctrination had not adequately prepared him for this.

His luck came in at the battle for Hue in 1968. His battalion got chewed up with great revolutionary panache – its current commander was the psychotic type – and he himself took a shell fragment in his shoulder from one of his own side’s 130mm field guns – the battery commander was a dolt. It was what the Americans would call a million-dollar wound. It wasn’t all that serious, though it hurt like a bastard the first few weeks, and it impressed the higher-ups enough to win him the transfer to Intelligence he’d been maneuvering for.

After some more training, he spent the rest of the war in the south, living undercover, playing spymaster, and generally having the time of his life. Much of his effort had gone into setting up loyal South Vietnamese so that the joint CIA and Special Forces Phoenix program would assassinate them for being part of the NLF infrastructure. O. K. Casaday had been with the Phoenix in those days.