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.