“Where’s our friend with the cards?” Harry asked.
“He’ll be there. No names,” Gen warned Harry.
“Whatever you say.”
It didn’t matter. Harry knew the player’s name. Anyone who read a newspaper or saw newsreels knew the dour face and blunt manner of the commander in chief of the Combined Fleet. Although no names had been exchanged, Harry had recognized Yamamoto as soon as the admiral shuffled the deck of cards with the famous eight fingers instead of ten. Harry also understood that the meeting had been engineered for invisibility, at midnight in the back room of a willow house with no witnesses but the loyal acolyte Gen. Could Harry claim that he had even been introduced to Yamamoto? No. That was okay. A lot of people didn’t want to be associated with Harry.
Gen said, “This is a very sensitive situation.”
“You mean your career is on the line. Magic or miracle, what is that supposed to mean? The Great Man has looked me over and approved, but I’m still kept in the dark. Give me a clue.”
“You have to see it to believe it.”
“That’s a good clue. Are we talking about the resurrection? Water to wine? A burning bush?”
“On a par.”
“On a par? Wow. Like parting the sea and just marching where you want to go?”
“Sort of. This is very big, but…” Gen lowered his voice. “But there is also a risk of embarrassment.”
“Losing face?”
“Not face. Enormous, disastrous embarrassment.”
That sounded intriguing to Harry, but Gen shook his head to indicate the end of the conversation. South of the palace, the driver swung into an alley behind the Navy Ministry and stopped. Gen studied the shadows, then rushed Harry out of the car and down a flight of stairs as if delivering a prostitute. Inside, they followed a trail of dusty lights through a tunnel of steam and water pipes to a door that admitted them to a basement hall of office doors. Harry wondered who would be working at one in the morning. Someone was, judging by the sound of voices and haze of light down the hall. Gen went almost on tiptoe and, when they were nearly on top of the voices, slipped Harry though a door into what was more a tight space than a proper room, a catchall crammed with scales, sterilizing trays, bedpans. At eye level was an inset pane of glass.
Gen whispered, “On the other side, it’s a mirror. This used to be a medical clinic where we examined pilots. Sometimes that demanded discreet observation.”
Harry observed a room dominated by a metal table supporting a tank of water about eight feet wide and four feet high, a good-size aquarium that contained, instead of sand and fish, six bottles of blue glass. Each bottle was sealed and connected via an overhead electrical line to a battery big enough for a submarine. It had to be like moving a piano to get it in. V-shaped wands wrapped in copper wire stood around the tank, and over it hung a copper sphere. A small but impressive audience had been gathered: four navy officers, no grade less than a commander, and two unhappy civilians. Harry noticed a couple of petty officers with pistols standing at the door. He also saw Yamamoto, with so many rings around his sleeves they looked as if he had dipped his cuffs in gold. The uniform seemed to weigh on him, and his attention, like everyone else’s, was anxiously focused on a gaunt man in a white lab coat jotting numbers from a bank of gauges individually wired to the copper wands. Welder’s goggles hung around everyone’s neck. By Harry’s watch, five minutes elapsed before the man in the lab coat raised his head and declared. “Progress, definite progress.”
“Progress in what?” Harry asked Gen. “What is he doing?”
Gen couldn’t get the words out right away. “He’s making oil.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’s turning water into oil.”
Harry actually took a step back. He wasn’t dazzled by much, but this was blinding. “Water into oil?”
“You can smile, but I’ve seen him do it.”
“I don’t think even God tried that. Water and wine, yes; oil, no. You realize it’s impossible.”
“Opinion is divided,” Gen granted. “The program is secret.”
“I bet. What’s the researcher’s name?”
“Ito. Dr. Ito.”
While Ito adjusted controls, Gen explained what the doctor had explained to him, that the table of the elements was neither fixed nor limited and that through “electric remapping,” their atomic bonds could be broken and recombined. Ito was in the middle of mapping the transitional states of elements and, in recognition of the national need, had diverted his talents and discoveries toward the transformation of water into oil. From their faces, Harry saw who in the room bought it. At least one civilian was visibly suppressing professional outrage, but there were hopefuls and believers among the navy. And it wasn’t a bad show. Ito was dramatically thin, with lank hair overhanging a pale forehead and eyes hollow from lack of sleep. His coat was dirty, his hands filthy; everything about him spelled genius. He worked on the run in rubber overshoes, resetting dials, repositioning the copper wands, stopping only to cough in a tubercular way. In a hoarse voice, he said, “Perhaps that’s all for tonight.”
Yamamoto said, “Doctor, would you please try one more time? It’s so important.”
Ito seemed to gather inner strength. “One more.”
He pulled on rubber gauntlets as he moved to an oversize switch. At his lead, everyone in the room pulled on goggles with smoked lenses, and Ito seemed to wait until the entire room had stopped breathing. Harry thought that only an audience brought up on Kabuki’s overheated posing would swallow Ito for a minute.
“Take your positions.”
There was a general shuffling onto a rubber mat. Before Harry figured out what that was about, Ito slapped the switch handle down and the tank water turned a vivid blue. As Ito turned up the voltage, white bolts of electricity ran up the two arms of the wands, flickered back and forth, joined hands from wand to wand, then arced the tank and shot up to the overhead sphere so that tank and table were domed by an electrical jellyfish that sizzled and popped and smelled of singed wool. Gen and Harry threw up their arms to shade their eyes from light that flooded the cubicle they were in. Ito cranked a transformer, and the protoplasm threatened to spread tentacles and float from the table. It was a view of the forces of the universe, an electrical cauldron, a glimpse of Creation itself. Waves rolled on an oscilloscope screen. Ito circled the tank with a small neon tube that lit, faded, glowed again. His long hair stood on end and twisted and wrestled first toward one wand and then the other. Electricity lapped like fire up his arms, yet Ito moved with the assurance of a sorcerer. When he threw the switch off, Harry felt half blinded. Those who had been in the room with the tank looked as shaken as survivors of a lightning bolt.
“Not bad,” Harry said. “Electrical arcs, sparks, everything but a hunchback running around with a bucket of brains.”
Yamamoto stepped off the mat and approached the tank. He laid on his hands, minus the two fingers he’d lost pursuing Russians. Yamamoto again ready to risk all. As if his touch were a signal, a bottle stirred. It leaned, lifted clear and steadily rose to the surface, where Ito caught it, snipped its wire and set it by a rack of test tubes. Of course, Ito didn’t unstop the bottle himself.
“Professor Mishima, you are such an eminent scientist. Would you do me the honor?”
The smaller, rounder civilian huffed. “This is ridiculous, this is not science.”
“Please,” Yamamoto said.
Mishima broke the wax seal with a penknife and poured the contents into a tube, reserving a last drop to roll around his fingertip and taste.
“What is it?” Ito asked as if they were the closest of colleagues.
The professor wiped his mouth. “Oil.”