He felt he was close to success. Alone, isolated from the rest of humanity except for the probing doctors and these occasional holographic meetings with his three distant friends, he had discovered that it should be possible to tap the temporal harmonics and project an object—or even a person—to a predetermined point in spacetime. It was not much different from achieving interstellar flight, in theory. Konda felt that his work would be of inestimable aid to his three friends.
His equations told him that to move an eighty-kilo human being from the crest of one spacetime wave to the harmonically similar crest of another would take all the energy generated by all of Japan’s power satellites orbiting between the Earth and the Moon for a period of just over six hours. When he was ready for the experiment, the Greater Nippon Energy Consortium had assured him, the electrical power would be made available to him. For although the consortium had no interest in time travel, Konda had presented his work to them as an experiment that could verify certain aspects of faster-than-light propulsion.
Konda had to assemble the equipment for his experiments, using the robots who accompanied him in his isolation module of the space station. His friends helped all they could. Konda had to tell them what he was trying to do. But he never told them why. He never showed them the hatred that drove him onward.
They thought he was trying to help them in their quest for a star drive. They believed that if he could transport an object across time, it would help them learn how to transport objects across lightyears of space. But Konda had another goal in mind, something very different.
Konda dreamed of making contact with a specific person, longed with all his soul to reach across the years and summon one certain hero out of history: Isoruku Yamamoto, Grand Admiral of the Japanese Imperial Fleet in the year 1941 (old calendar). Admired by all, even his enemies, Yamamoto was known as «the sword of his emperor.»
Konda remembered the day when he first told his friends of his yearning to reach the doughty old admiral. «There are no men like Yamamoto anymore,» he had said. «He was a true samurai. A warrior in the ancient tradition of Bushido.»
Raizo Yamashita had laughed openly. «A warrior who started a war that we lost. Badly.»
Tomoyuki was too polite to laugh, but he asked curiously, «Didn’t Yamamoto boast that he would defeat the Americans and dictate the terms of their surrender in the White House? He didn’t even live long enough to see the war end in Japan’s humiliation.»
Miyoko rushed to Konda’s defense before he could reply for himself. «Admiral Yamamoto was killed in the war. Isn’t that true, Sai?»
«Yes,» answered Konda, feeling weak with helpless rage at the thought. «He was assassinated by the cowardly Americans. They feared him so much that they deliberately set out to murder him.»
«But to contact a man from the distant past,» Tomo mused. «That could be dangerous.»
Raizo bobbed his burly head up and down in agreement. «I read a story once where a man went back to the Age of Dinosaurs and killed a butterfly—accidentally, of course. But when he came back to his own time the human race didn’t even exist!» He frowned, thinking hard. «Or something like that; I don’t remember, exactly.»
As usual, Miyoko stood up for Konda. «Sai won’t tamper with history, will you?»
Konda forced himself to smile faintly and shake his head. But he could not answer, not in honesty. For his overwhelming desire was to do precisely that: to tamper with history. To change it completely, even if it did destroy his world.
So he hid his motives from even his dearest friends, because they would never understand what drove him. How could they? They could walk in the sunlight, feel wind on their faces, touch one another, and make love. He was alone in his orbital prison, always alone, waiting for death alone. But before I die, he told himself, I will succeed in my quest.
Once his equipment was functioning he plucked a series of test objects—a quartz wristwatch, a bowl of steaming rice, a running video camera—over times of a few minutes. Then a few hours. The first living thing he tried was a flower, a graceful chrysanthemum that was donated by one of the space station’s crew members who grew the flowers as a hobby. Then a sealed beaker of water teeming with protozoa, specially sent to the station from the university’s biology department. Then a laboratory mouse.
Often the power drain meant that large sections of Shanghai or Hong Kong or one of the other customer cities in Greater East Asia had to be blacked out temporarily. At the gentle insistence of the energy consortium, Konda always timed these experiments for the sleeping hours between midnight and dawn, locally. That way, transferring the solar power satellites’ beams from the cities on Earth to Konda’s laboratory made a minimum of inconvenience for the blacked-out customers.
Carefully he increased the range of his experiments—and his power requirements. He reached for a puppy that he remembered from his childhood, the pet of a nurse’s daughter who had sent him digitized messages for a while, until she grew tired of speaking to the digital image of a friend she would never see in the flesh. The puppy appeared in the special isolation chamber in Konda’s apparatus, a ball of wriggling fur with a dangling red tongue. Konda watched it for a few brief moments, then returned it to its natural spacetime, thirty years in the past. His eyes were blurred with tears as the puppy winked out of sight. Self-induced allergic reaction, he told himself as he wiped his eyes.
He spent the next several days meticulously examining his encapsulated world, looking for changes that might have been caused by his experiment with the puppy. The calendar was the same. The computer programs he had set up specifically to test for changes in the spacetime continuum appeared totally unaffected. Of course, he thought, if I changed history, if I moved the flow of the continuum, everything around me would be changed—including not only the computer’s memory, but my own.
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.