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.
The admiral disappeared. As suddenly as a light blinking out, one instant he was there staring solemnly at Konda, the next he was gone back to his own time.
«Banzai,» Konda whispered.
His finger hovered, trembling, over the key that would break the stasis and return him to the mainstream of spacetime. If all has gone well, this will be the end of me. Saito Konda will no longer exist. He pulled in a deep, final breath, almost savoring it, and then leaned savagely hard on the key.
And nothing happened. He blinked, looked around. His chamber was unchanged. His equipment hummed to itself. The display screens showed that everything was quite normal. The comm unit was blinking its red message light.
A terrible fear began to worm its way up Konda’s spine. He called out to the comm unit, «Respond!»
The station commander’s face took form on the screen. «When will you begin your experiment, sir?» she asked.
Konda saw the digital clock numbers on the screen: hardly ten seconds had passed since he had first put his chamber in stasis.
«It didn’t work,» he mumbled. «It’s all over for now. You can return my module to the low-gravity mode.»
The commander nodded once and the screen went dark. Konda felt a lurch in the pit of his stomach and then a sinking, falling sensation. He floated up out of his chair like a man in a dream.
Was I dreaming? he asked himself. Did it actually happen? Why hasn’t the world changed? Why am I still alive?
Puzzled, almost dazed, he activated the rewind of the cameras that had recorded every instant of his experiment. When the recorder stopped, he pressed the PLAY button.
And there was Yamamoto in the chamber with him. Konda stared, put the tape in fast forward. Their voices chittered and jabbered like a pair of monkeys’, they sped through their days together in a jerky burlesque of normal movement. But it was Yamamoto. It had really happened.
Konda sank onto his bed, suddenly so totally exhausted that he could not stand even in the low gravity. The experiment had worked. He had shown Yamamoto everything and sent him back to win his war against the Americans and save Japan’s soul. Yet nothing seemed changed.
He wanted to sleep but he could not. Instead, in a growing frenzy he began to tune in to television broadcasts from Earth. One channel after another, from Japan, China, the Philippines, Australia, the United States, Europe. Nothing had changed! The world was just the way it had been before he had snatched Yamamoto out of the past.
Konda beat his frail fists on his emaciated thighs in utter frustration. He tore at his hair. Why? Why hasn’t anything changed?
Frantically he searched through his history discs. It was all the same. The war. Japan’s defeat. The humiliation of achieving world economic power at the sacrifice of all that the Japanese soul had held dear in earlier generations.
I still live, Konda cried silently. My mother was born and grew up and plied her filthy trade and gave birth to a diseased, unclean son.
In desperation, he went back to the tapes of Yamamoto’s assassination. It was all the same. Exactly, precisely the same. Either the experiment had not worked at all, and Konda had hallucinated his days with Yamamoto, or …
He saw one thing on one of the tapes that he did not recall being there before. The screen showed the twin-engine plane that would carry the admiral and his staff from the base at Rabaul to the island of Bougainville. The narrator pointed out Yamamoto’s insistence on punctuality, «… as if the admiral knew that he had an appointment with death.»
A moment or two later, while the screen showed American planes attacking the Japanese flight, the narrator quoted Yamamoto as saying, «I have killed many of the enemy … I believe the time has come for me to die, too.»
«He did it deliberately!» Konda howled in the emptiness of his chamber. «He knew and yet he let them kill him!»
For hours Konda raved and tore through his quarters, pounding his fists against the walls and furniture until they bled, smashing the equipment that had fetched the greatest warrior of history to his presence, raging and screaming at the blankly immobile robots.
Finally, totally spent, bleeding, his chest heaving and burning as if with fever, he sat in the wreckage of his laboratory before the one display screen he had not smashed and called up the tape of Yamamoto’s visit. For hours he watched himself and the doughty old admiral, seeking the answer he desperately needed to make sense out of his universe.
He should have gone back and changed everything, Konda’s mind kept repeating. He should have gone back and changed everything.
For days he sat there, without eating, without sleeping, like a catatonic searching for the key that would release him.
He came to the very end of the tape, with Yamamoto standing at attention and gravely returning his own salute.
He heard himself say to the admiral, «Go back and win the war.»
He saw Yamamoto’s lips move, and then the old man disappeared.
Konda rewound the tape and replayed that last moment, with the sound volume turned up high enough to hear the admiral’s final words.
«Go back and win the war,» his own voice boomed.
Yamamoto replied, «We did win it.»
Haggard, breathless, Konda stared at the screen as the old admiral disappeared and returned to his own time, his own death. Willingly.
Tears misted his eyes. He went to his powered chair and sank wearily into it. Yamamoto did not understand anything. Not a thing!
Or perhaps he did. Perhaps the old warrior saw and understood it all. Better than I have, thought Konda. He sees more clearly than I do.
In the warrior’s code there is only one acceptable way for a man to deal with the shame of defeat. Konda leaned his head back and waited for death to take him, also. He did not have to wait very long.
SAM GUNN
Back when I was the Editor of Analog Science Fiction magazine (1971-78), one of my tasks was to feed story ideas to writers.
For years I tried to get one writer after another to write a story for the magazine around a certain idea. All I ever got for my efforts was a series of blank stares and muttered promises to «give it a shot.»
When I finally stopped being an editor and began to write short fiction again, I tackled the idea myself. «Sam Gunn» is the result. Sam is inventive and irreverent, feisty and tough, good-hearted and crafty, a womanizer, a little guy who is constantly struggling against the «big guys» of huge corporations and government bureaucracies.
Ed Ferman, who was then the editor and publisher of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, not only bought the story, he published it in his magazine’s 34th anniversary issue, which pleased me no end.
Over the years since then I’ve written dozens of stories about Sam. Here’s what he looked like when I first set my inner eye on him.
The spring-wheeled truck rolled to a silent stop on the Sea of Clouds. The fine dust kicked up by its six wheels floated lazily back to the mare’s soil. The hatch to the truck cab swung upward, and a space-suited figure climbed slowly down to the lunar surface, clumped a dozen ponderously careful steps, then turned back toward the truck.