The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  Still, he scanned the news media and the educational channels of hundreds of TV stations all around the world that he orbited. Nothing appeared out of place. All was normal. His experiment had not changed anything. He still had the wasting immunodeficiency disease that his mother had bequeathed him. His body was still rotting away.

  He thought of bringing the puppy back and killing it with a painless gas, to see what effect the change would make on history. But he feared to tamper with the space-time continuum until he actually had Yamamoto in his grasp. He wondered idly if he could kill the puppy, then told himself angrily that of course he could; the dog must be long dead by now, anyway.

  He knew he was ready for the climax of his experiments: snatching Yamamoto from nearly a century in the past. The time for hesitation is over, Konda told himself sternly. Set up the experiment and do it, even if it destroys this world and everything in it.

  So he did. Making arrangements for the necessary power from Greater Nippon Electric took longer than he had expected: blacking out most of Asia for several hours was not something the corporate executives agreed to lightly. But at last they did agree.

  As a final step in his preparations he asked the commander of the space station to increase its spin so that his isolation area would be at almost a full Earthly gravity.

  “Will that not be uncomfortable for you?” the station commander asked. She was new to her post, the first woman to command one of Japan’s giant orbiting stations. She had been instructed to take special care of the guest in the isolation module.

  “I am prepared for some inconvenience,” Konda replied to her image in his comm screen. He was already seated in his powered wheelchair. The low-g of the station had allowed him to move about almost normally, despite the continued atrophy of his limbs. His body spent most of its energy continually trying to destroy the fast-mutating viruses that were, in their turn, doing their best to destroy him. The lifelong battle had left him pitifully weak and frail—in body. But he had the spirit of a true samurai. He followed the warrior’s path as well as he was able.

  In truth he dreaded the higher gravity. He even feared it might put such a strain on his heart that it would kill him. But it was a risk he was prepared to take. Yamamoto would find his sudden emergence into the twenty-first century startling enough; there was no need to embarrass him with a low-gravity environment that might make him physically ill or overwhelm his spirit with sudden fear.

  The moment finally arrived. The great power satellites turned their emitting antennas to the huge receiver that had been built near the space station. Half of Asia, from Beijing to Bangkok, went dark.

  Grand Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, commander in chief of the Japanese Imperial Fleet, suddenly appeared in the middle of Konda’s living quarters. He had been seated, apparently, when the wave harmonics had transported him. He plopped unceremoniously onto the floor, a look of pain and surprise widening his eyes. Konda wanted to laugh; thank the gods that the field included the admiral’s flawlessly white uniform. A naked Yamamoto would have been too much to bear.

  Konda had divided his living quarters in two with an impervious clear plastic wall. Both sides were as antiseptic as modern biotechnology could make them. Yamamoto, coming from nearly a hundred years in the past, was undoubtedly carrying a zoo of microbes that could slay Konda within days, if not hours.

  For a frozen instant they stared at each other: the admiral in his white uniform sitting on the floor; the scientist in his powered wheelchair, his face gaunt with the ravages of the disease that was remorselessly killing him.

  Then Yamamoto glanced around the chamber. He saw the banks of gauges and winking lights, the gleaming robots standing stiffly as if at attention, the glareless light panels overhead. He heard the hum of electrical equipment, smelled the mixed odors of laboratory and hospital.

  Yamamoto climbed to his feet, brushing nonexistent dust from his jacket and sharply creased trousers. He was burly in build, thickset and powerful. His heavy jaw and shaved scalp made him look surly, obtuse. But his eyes gleamed with intelligence. Two fingers were missing from his left hand, the result of an accident during the battle of Tsushima, young ensign Yamamoto’s first taste of war.

  Konda bowed his head as deeply as he could in his wheelchair and hissed with respect.

  Yamamoto granted him a curt nod. “I am dreaming,” he said. “This is a dream.”

  “No, this is not a dream,” said Konda, wheeling his chair to the clear partition that divided the room. “This is reality. You, most revered and honored admiral, are the first man to travel through time.”

  Yamamoto snorted with disdain. “A dream,” he repeated. But then he added, “Yet it is the most unusual dream I have ever had.”

  For hours Konda tried to convince the admiral that he was not dreaming. At times Konda almost thought he was dreaming himself, so powerful was Yamamoto’s resistance. Yet he persisted, for what Konda wanted to do depended on Yamamoto’s acceptance of the truth.

  Finally, after they had shared a meal served by the robots and downed many cups of sake, Yamamoto raised a hand. On the other side of the partition, Konda immediately fell silent. Even through the plastic wall he could feel the power of Yamamoto’s personality, a power based on integrity, and strength, and limitless courage.

  “Let us arrange a truce,” Yamamoto suggested. “I am willing to accept your statements that you have created a time machine and have brought me here to the future. Whether I am dreaming or not is irrelevant, for the time being.”

  Konda drew in a breath. “I accept the truce,” he said. It was the best that he would get from the utterly pragmatic man across the partition.

  He felt terribly weary from trying to convince the admiral of the truth. He had deliberately wrapped his entire module in a stasis field, making it a small bubble of space-time hovering outside the normal flow of time. He wanted true isolation, with not even a chance of interference from the space station crew or the doctors. He and Yamamoto could live in the module outside the normal time stream for days or even years, if Konda chose. When he was ready to turn off the field and the bubble collapsed, no discernible time would have elapsed in the real world. He would return himself to the instant the experiment began, and Yamamoto would return to his writing desk in 1941. Not even his three friends would know if the experiment had worked or not.

  If his friends still existed when Konda ended the experiment.

  They slept. The robots had prepared a comfortable cot for Yamamoto, and suitable clothing. Konda slept in his chair, reclined in almost a horizontal position. His dreams were disturbing, bitter, but he suppressed their memory once he awoke once again.

  Time within the windowless chamber was arbitrary; often Konda worked around the clock, although less and less as his body’s weariness continued to erode his strength. When Yamamoto awoke, Konda began the admiral’s history lessons. He had painstakingly assembled a vast library of microform books and videotapes about the events of the past century. Konda had been especially careful to get as many discs of boastful American films from the World War II years. This would be a delicate matter, he knew, for he intended to show Yamamoto his own death at the hands of the murderous Yankees.

  Slowly, slowly Konda unreeled the future to his guest. Yamamoto sat in stolid silence as he watched the attack on Pearl Harbor, muttering now and then, “No aircraft carriers at anchor. That is bad.” And later, “Nagumo should have sent in a third attack. The fool.”

  By the time the viewing screen at last went dark, Yamamoto looked through the partition toward Konda with a new look in his eyes. He is beginning to believe me, Konda told himself.

  “This dream is very realistic,” the admiral said, his voice dark with concern.

  “There is more,” Konda said. Sadly, he added, “Much more.”

  Konda lost track of time. The two men ate and slept and watched the ancient discs. Yamamoto put away his uniform, folding it carefully, almost reverently, and wore the comfortable loos
e kimono that Konda had provided for him. The admiral had far more energy and endurance than Konda. While the scientist slept, the admiral read from the microform books. When Konda awakened Yamamoto always had a thousand questions waiting for him.

  He truly believes, Konda realized. He sees that this is not a dream. He knows that I am showing him his own future. The admiral watched the disastrous battle of Midway in stoic silence, his only discernible reaction the clenching of his heavy jaw whenever the screen showed a Japanese ship being sunk.

  To his surprise, Konda felt enormous reluctance when it came time to show Yamamoto his death. For a whole day he showed no further videos and even cut off the power to the microform book reader.

  “Why have you stopped?” Yamamoto asked.

  From behind his impermeable plastic screen, Konda grimaced with pain. But he tried to hide it by asking the older man, “Do you still believe that all this is a dream?”

  Yamamoto’s eyes narrowed into an intense stare. “All of life is a dream, my young friend.”

  “Or a nightmare.”

  “You are ill,” said the admiral.

  “I am dying.”

  “So are we all.” Yamamoto got to his feet, walked slowly around his half of the room. In his dark blue kimono he needed only a set of swords to look exactly like a samurai warrior of old.

  Slowly, haltingly, Konda told him of his disease. The gift of his unknown parents. He had never spoken to anyone about this in such detail. He cursed his whore of a mother and damned the father that had undoubtedly spread his filth to many others. An American. He knew his father had to be an American. A tourist, probably. Or a miserable businessman come to Tokyo to ferret out the secrets of Japanese success.

  He railed against the fate that kept him confined inside a diseased body and kept the dying body confined inside this chamber of complete exile. He raged and wept in front of the man he had plucked from the past. Not even to his three best friends had he dared to speak of the depth of his hatred and despair. But he could do it with Yamamoto, and once he started, his emotion was a torrent that he could not stop until he was totally exhausted.

  The older man listened in silent patience, for many hours. Finally, when Konda had spent his inner fury and sat half dead in his powered chair, Yamamoto said, “It does no good to struggle against death. What a man should seek is to make his death meaningful. It cannot be avoided. But it can be glorious.”

  “Can it?” Koncla snapped. “You think so? Your own death was not glorious; it was a miserable assassination!”

  Yamamoto’s eyes flickered for an instant, then his iron self-control reasserted itself. “So that is what you have been hiding from me.”

  Almost snarling with searing rage, Konda spun his chair to the console that controlled the video screen.

  “Here is your glorious death, old man! Here is how you met your fate!”

  He had spent years collecting all the tapes from libraries in the United States and Japan. Most of the tapes were re-creations, dramatizations of the actual events. Yamamoto’s decision to visit the front lines, in the Solomon Islands, to boost the sagging spirits of his men who were under attack by the Americans. The way the sneaking Americans broke the Japanese naval code and learned that Yamamoto would be within reach of their longest-range fighter planes for a scant few minutes. Their decision to try to kill the Japanese warrior, knowing that his death would be worth whole battle fleets and air armadas. The actual mission, where the American cowards shot down the plane that carried Grand Admiral Isoruku Yamamoto, killing him and all the others aboard.

  The screen went dark.

  “If your flight had been late by five minutes,” Konda said, “the Americans would have had to turn back and you would not have been murdered.”

  The admiral was still staring at the blank screen. “I have always been a stickler for punctuality. A fatal flaw, I suppose.”

  Yamamoto sat silently for a few moments, while Konda wondered what thoughts were passing through his mind. Then he turned to face the younger man once more. “Show me the rest,” he said. “Show me what happened after I died.”

  Still seething with anger, Konda unreeled the remaining history of the war. The Imperial Fleet destroyed. The home cities of Japan firebombed. The kamikaze suicide attacks where untrained youths threw away their lives to no avail. The ultimate horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

  The humiliating surrender signed aboard an American battleship in Tokyo harbor.

  The robots offered meals at their preprogrammed times. Neither Konda nor Yamamoto ate as they watched the disastrous past unfold on the video screen, defeat and slaughter and the ultimate dishonor.

  “Does Japan still exist?” the admiral asked when the screen finally went blank. “Is there an emperor still alive, living in exile, perhaps?”

  Konda blinked. “The emperor lives in his palace in Tokyo. Japan not only exists, it is one of the richest nations on Earth.”

  For the first time Yamamoto looked confused. “How can that be?”

  Reluctantly, grudgingly, Konda showed the old man more recent history tapes. The rise of Japan’s industrial strength. Japan’s move into space. Yamamoto saw the Rising Sun emblem on the Moon’s empty wastes, on the red deserts of Mars, on the giant factory ships that plied among the asteroids, on the gleaming solar power satellites that beamed electrical power to the hungry cities of Earth.

  At last the admiral rubbed his eyes and turned away from the darkened screen.

  “We lost the war,” he said. “But somehow Japan has become the leading nation of the world.”

  Konda burst into a harshly bitter laughter. “The leading nation of the world? Japan has become a whore! A nation of merchants and tradesmen. There is no greatness in this.”

  “There is wealth,” Yamamoto replied drily.

  “Yes, but at what price? We have lost our souls,” Konda said. “Japan no longer follows the path of honor. Every day we become more like the Americans.” He almost spat that last word.

  Yamamoto heaved a heavy sigh. Konda tapped at the control console keypad again. The video screen brightened once more. This time it showed modern Japan: the riotous noise and flash of the Ginza, boys wearing Mohawk haircuts and girls flaunting themselves in shorts and halters; parents lost in a seductive wonderland of gadgetry while their children addicted themselves to electronic and chemical pleasures; foreigners flooding into Japan, blackening the slopes of Fujiyama, taking photographs of the emperor himself.

  “My father was one of those American visitors,” Konda said, surprised at how close to tears he was again. “A diseased, depraved foreigner.”

  Yamamoto said nothing.

  “You see how Japan is being destroyed,” Konda said. “What good is it to be the world’s richest nation if our soul is eaten away?”

  “What would you do?”

  Konda wheeled his chair to the plastic partition so close that he almost pressed his face against it.

  “Go back to your own time,” he said, nearly breathless, “and win the war! You know enough now to avoid the mistakes that were made. You can concentrate your forces at Midway and overwhelm the Americans! You can invade the west coast of the U.S. before they are prepared! You can prevent your own assassination and lead Japan to victory!”

  The admiral nodded gravely. “Yes, I could do all of those things. Then the government that launched the war against America would truly dictate surrender terms in the White House—and rule much of the world afterward.”

  “Yes! Exactly!”

  Yamamoto regarded the younger man solemnly through the clear plastic partition. “But if I do that, would that not change the history that you know? Such a Japan would be very different from the one you have just shown me.”

  “Good!” Konda exulted. “Excellent!”

  “Your parents would never meet in such a world. You would never be born.”

  Konda gave a fierce sigh of relief. “I know. My miserable existence would never come to be. For that I
would be glad. Grateful!”

  Yamamoto shook his head. “I have sent many warriors to their deaths, but never have I deliberately done anything that I knew would kill one certain individual.”

  “I can follow the warrior’s path,” Konda said, barely able to control the trembling that racked his body. “You are not the only one who can live by the code of Bushido.”

  The older man fell silent.

  “I want to die!” Konda blurted. “I want to have never been born! Take my life. Take it in exchange for your own. For the greatness of Japan, you must live and I must never have come into existence.”

  “For the greatness of Japan,” Yamamoto muttered.

  They ate a meal together, each of them on his own side of the partition, and then slept. Konda dreamed of himself as one of the kamikaze pilots, a headband proclaiming his courage tied across his forehead, a ceremonial sword strapped to his waist, diving his plane into an American warship, exploding into a blossom of fire and glory.

  He woke to find himself still alive, still dying slowly.

  Yamamoto was back in his stiff white uniform. The old man knew that his time here was drawing to its conclusion.

  With hardly a word between them, Konda directed the admiral to the spot in the room where the wave harmonics converged. Yamamoto stood ramrod straight, hands balled into fists at his side. The generators whined to life, spinning up beyond the range of human hearing. Konda felt their power, though; their vibrations rattled him in his chair.

  Only seconds to go. Konda forced himself to his feet and brought his right hand to his brow in a shaky salute to Japan’s greatest warrior. Yamamoto solemnly saluted back.

  “Go back and win the war,” Konda said, his voice shaking with emotion.

  Yamamoto muttered something. Konda could not quite hear the words; he was too intent on watching the display screens of his equipment.