The Best of Bova: Volume 1

by Ben Bova

  “No, I don’t know anything more about it than you do,” Brockhurst’s voice is near frenzy. His shirt is open at the neck, tie ripped off, jacket rumpled, face sweaty. “How the hell do I know? The FBI . . . the Army . . . somebody’s got to do something!”

  His secretary fights her way through the crowd. “Mr. Brockhurst . . . on line three . . . it’s the President!”

  Every voice hushes. Brockhurst slams the phone down, takes his hand off it, looks at it for a long moment. Then, shakily, he punches a button at the phone’s base and lifts the receiver.

  “Yessir, Yes, this is Brockhurst . . . No, sir, I have no idea of how this came about . . . it . . . it seems to be genuine, sir. Yes, we’ve tried to communicate with them . . . Yessir, Romano is one of our, eh, graduates. No, sir. No, I don’t . . . but . . . I agree, we can’t let them get away with it. The Army? Isn’t there any other way? I’m afraid he’s got several million people bottled up in that city, and he’ll use them as hostages. If the Army attacks, he might start executing them wholesale.”

  Hansen props himself up on one elbow and speaks weakly, “Let me go to them. Let me talk to Danny. Something’s gone wrong . . . something . . .”

  Brockhurst waves him silent with a furious gesture. “Yes, Mr. President, I agree. If they won’t surrender peacefully, then there’s apparently no alternative. But if they fight the Army, a lot of innocent people are going to be hurt. . . .Yes, I know you can’t just . . . but . . . no other way, yes, I see. Very well, sir, you are the Commander-in-Chief. Yessir. Of course, sir. Before the day is out. Yessir.”

  Exterior, city streets.

  Tanks rumbling down the streets. Kids firing from windows, throwing Molotov cocktails. One tank bursts into flames. The one behind it fires its cannon point blank into a building: the entire structure explodes and collapses. Soldiers crouching in doorways, behind burned-out automobiles, firing at kids running crouched-down a half-block away. Two boys go sprawling. A soldier kicks a door in and tosses in a grenade. A few feet up the street, a teenage girl lies dead. A tank rolls past a children’s playground, while a dazed old man sits bloody-faced on the curbstone, watching. Flames and smoke and the constant pock-pock- pock sound of automatic rifles, punctuated by explosions.

  No picture. Sound only.

  The sounds of a phone being dialed, the tick of circuits, the buzz of a phone ringing, another click as it is picked up.

  “Yeah.”

  “Hey, Spade, that you?”

  “It’s me.”

  “This is Midget.”

  “I know the voice, Midge.”

  “You see what Danny did?”

  “I see what happened to him. How many dead, how many thousands? Or is it millions?”

  “They ain’t tellin’. Gotta be millions, though. Whole damned city’s flattened. Army must’ve lost fifty thousand men all by itself.”

  “They killed Danny.”

  “They claim they killed him, but I ain’t seen pictures of his body yet.”

  “It’s a mess, all right.”

  “Yeah. Listen . . . they got Federal men lookin’ for us now, you know?”

  “I know. All Danny’s ‘classmates’ are in for it.”

  “You gonna be okay?”

  “They won’t find me, don’t worry. There’s plenty of places to hide and plenty of people to hide me.”

  “Good. Now listen, this mess of Danny’s oughtta teach us a lesson.”

  “Damned right.”

  “Yeah. We gotta work together now. When we make our move, it’s gotta be in all the cities. Not just one. Every big city in the god damn country.”

  “Gonna take a long time to do it.”

  “I know, but we can make it. And when we do, they can’t send the Army against every big city all at once.”

  “Specially if we take Washington and get their Prez.”

  “Right. Okay, gotta run now. Stay loose and keep in touch.”

  “Check. See you in Washington one of these days.”

  “You bet your sweet ass.”

  BUSHIDO

  The challenge of “Bushido” was to make the reader feel sympathy for an enemy, a character who hates the United States. Who hates you. How well I succeeded is a question only you, the reader, can answer. But I can tell you how I went about making this “bad guy” as sympathetic as possible.

  First I gave him a crippling terminal disease. Then I made him a brilliant scientist. And I showed enough of his background to make the reader understand why Saito Konda hates the U.S. and Americans.

  Finally, I brought onto the scene a character out of history who stands in bold contrast to the protagonist: Isoruku Yamamoto, Grand Admiral of the Japanese Imperial Fleet at the outset of World War II. Whereas Konda is physically crippled, Yamamoto is a warrior, a man of action. Whereas Konda feels helpless and impotent, the admiral is a leader of men in war. But there is a flip side to their relationship, as well. Konda knows Yamamoto’s fate and can save him from the death that he suffered in the war. Helpless and impotent to save himself, Konda can nonetheless save the man he most admires—and by doing so, he can gain revenge on the United States.

  How can you feel sympathetic toward a man who wants to reverse the outcome of World War II and make Japan conquer the U.S.?

  I have long felt that writers should erase the word “villain” from their vocabulary. Scrub the concept out of your mind, in fact. There are no villains in the world, only people doing what they feel they must do. I’m sure that Adolph Hitler felt he was doing what was best for the German people and the entire human race, no matter how horrible the actions he authorized.

  Nobody sits in a dark corner cackling with glee over the evil they have unleashed. Not in good fiction. But every good story has not only a protagonist (the “good guy” or gal), but an antagonist, a character who is in conflict with the protagonist. As a thought experiment, try to visualize a story you admire told from the point of view of the ostensible villain . . . oops, excuse me—the ostensible antagonist. Imagine Hamlet being told from Claudius’ point of view. (Frankly, Claudius seems to be the only sane person in the whole castle.)

  Incidentally, there’s a bit of science in this story that most other writers have conveniently ignored. Time travel requires faster-than-light travel. Which explains, perhaps, why no one has yet built a time machine.

  So: Did I succeed in making Saito Konda a sympathetic character? Crippled in body, brilliant in mind, warped in spirit—yes, he is all that. But do you feel sorry for him?

  * * *

  Konda grimaced against the pain, hoping that his three friends could not see his suffering. He did not want their sympathy. He was far beyond such futile emotions. All that was left to him was hate—and the driving will to succeed.

  He was sitting in his laboratory, his home, his hospital room, his isolation chamber. They were all the same place, the same metal-skinned module floating five hundred kilometers above the Earth.

  The two men and one woman having tea with him had been his friends since undergraduate days at the University of Tokyo, although they had never met Konda in the flesh. That would be the equivalent of murdering him.

  They were discussing their work.

  “Do you actually believe you can succeed?” asked Miyoko Toguri, her almond eyes shining with admiration. Once Konda had thought she might have loved him; once he had in fact loved her. But that was long ago, when they had been foolish romantic students.

  “I have solved the equations,” Konda replied, hiding his pain. “As you know, if the mathematics have beauty, the experiment will eventually be successful.”

  “Eventually,” snorted Raizo Yamashita. Like the others, he was sitting on the floor, in deference to Konda’s antiquated sense of propriety. Raizo sat cross-legged, his burly body hunched slightly over the precisely placed low lacquered table, his big fists pressed against his thighs. “Eventually could be a thousand years from now.”

  “I think not,” said Konda, his eyes sti
ll on lovely Miyoko. He wondered how she would look in a traditional kimono, with her hair done properly. As it was, she was wearing a Western-style blouse and skirt, yet she still looked beautiful to him.

  The two men wore the latest-mode glitter slacks and brightly colored shirts. Konda’s nostrils flared at their American ways. The weaker America becomes in real power, the more our people imitate her decadent styles. He himself was in a comfortable robe of deep burgundy, decorated with white flying cranes.

  It happened that Konda reached for the teapot at the same moment that Miyoko did. Their hands met without touching. He poured tea for himself, she for herself. When they put the pots down again, her holographic image merged with the real teapot on Konda’s table. Her hand merged with his. He could not feel the warmth of her living flesh, of course. If he did, it would undoubtedly kill him.

  Tomoyuki Umezi smiled, somewhat ruefully. The window behind him showed the graceful snow-capped cone of Fujiyama. He raised his tiny cup.

  “To the stars,” he toasted.

  The other three touched their cups to his. But they felt no physical contact. Only their eyes could register the holographic images.

  “And to time,” Konda added, as usual.

  Back in their university days, Tomo had laughingly suggested that they form a rock group and call it the Four Dimensions, since three of them were trying to conquer space while Konda was pouring his soul and all the energy of his wasting body into mastering time.

  They had never met physically. Konda had been in isolation chambers all his life, first in an incubator in the AIDS ward of the charity hospital, later in the observation sections of medical research facilities. He had been born with no effective immune system, the genetic gift of his mother, a whore, and whoever his father might have been. They had also gifted him with a chameleon virus that was slowly, inexorably, turning his normal body cells into cancerous tumors.

  The slow and increasingly painful death he was suffering could be brought to a swift end merely by exposure to the real world and its teeming viruses and bacteria. But the medical specialists prevented that. From his unwanted birth, Konda had been their laboratory animal, their prized specimen, kept alive for them to study. Isolated from all the physical contamination that his body could never cope with, Konda learned as a child that his mind could roam the universe and all of history. He became an outstanding scholar, a perverse sort of celebrity within academic circles, and was granted a full scholarship to Tokyo University, where he “met” his three lifelong friends. Now he lived in a special module of a space station, five hundred kilometers above the Earth’s surface, waited upon by gleaming antiseptic robots.

  The four of them did their doctoral theses jointly, a theoretical study of faster-than-light propulsion. Their studies were handsomely supported by the corporations that funded the university. Japan drew much of its economic strength from space, beaming electrical energy to cities throughout Asia from huge power satellites. But always there was competition from others: the Europeans, the Chinese, the Arabs were all surging forward, eager to displace Japan and despoil its wealth.

  The price of peaceful competition was a constant, frenetic search for some new way to stay ahead of the foreign devils. If any nation achieved a faster-than-light drive, the great shoguns of industry insisted that it must be Japan. The life of the nation depended on staying ahead of its competitors. There could be no rest as long as economic ruin lurked on the horizon.

  For all the years since their university days, the three others continued to work on turning their theories into reality, on producing a workable interstellar propulsion system: a star drive. Miyoko accepted the chair of the physics department at the University of Rangoon, the first woman to be so honored. Dour Raizo became the doyen of the research laboratory at a major aerospace firm in Seattle, U.S.A., long since absorbed into the Mitsubishi Corporation. Tomo waited patiently for his turn at the mathematics chair in Tokyo.

  From the beginning, Konda had been far more fascinated with the temporal aspects of spacetime than the spatial. Since childhood he had been intrigued by history, by the great men who had lived in bygone ages. While his friends labored over the star drive, Konda strove to produce a time machine.

  In this he followed the intellectual path blazed by Hawking and Taylor and the AAPV group from the unlikely location of South Carolina, a backwater university in the backwater U.S.A.

  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.