“What was in the bottle originally?”
“Water.”
“Your conclusion?” Yamamoto asked.
“It’s preposterous. You cannot change water to oil with a little lightning, or else the oceans would be oil.”
Ito was unperturbed. “That is salt water. This is very different water.”
“You cannot defy the laws of nature.”
“We are rewriting the laws of nature.”
“Impossible…” The professor tried, but he had lost, trumped by a card from his own hand.
“Perhaps this is the Yamato spirit we have heard so much about,” Yamamoto said. “But, Dr. Ito, only one bottle out of six seems to have changed.”
“Yes, we need more research.”
The doctor went out of Harry’s range of vision for a minute and returned with a new bottle of water. With great scruple, he turned his back while a vice admiral wrote on a cork. Then Ito took the cork back, immediately stopped the bottle and lit a sealing candle, the flame a tiny footlight to his face while he turned the bottle to catch the dropping wax.
“We need production,” Yamamoto said.
“First research.”
“With a deadline,” the admiral insisted.
Ito excused himself to cough, and Harry saw the spots of red bloom in the doctor’s handkerchief. Ito was sickly enough to begin with, and all at once he seemed exhausted, as if the lightning had been drawn from his own being. A chair was found for him to sit on, while coughs racked his body. Yamamoto was forced to relent, but he raised his eyes directly toward the glass that Harry watched through.
“What do you think?” asked Gen.
“Wonderful,” Harry said. “Lightning bolts, levitation, transmigration. I loved it.”
GEN BROUGHT DIAGRAMS to the Happy Paris at noon the following day. Michiko sorted records and watched sullenly, like a cat jealous of attention.
“You and Harry went with geishas again last night?” she asked Gen.
“I told you,” Harry said. “The first was a card game.”
“And last night?”
“A con.” Harry spread the plans across a table. “No, more than that, it’s the most beautiful con I’ve ever seen. This is the mother lode, this is magic.”
“That’s all you’re going to say?” Michiko asked.
“My lips are sealed.”
“I’m going out, Harry. I’m going to go spend all your money and then find a better lover.”
“Hope he has a dick that rings like a bell.”
“I’m not coming back.”
“Have fun.”
Gen shuddered as the door slammed behind her. “Kind of tough.”
“No Shirley Temple,” Harry said. “Have you slept?”
“I had coffee.” True enough, the officers of the Japanese navy started each day with coffee and scrambled eggs. Harry’s sympathy dried up.
Besides the diagrams, Gen had had the water and oil tested. The water was two parts hydrogen, one part oxygen, and the oil was the equivalent of Rising Sun crude.
“Imagine if we could produce that,” Gen said. “If we could get past the experimental stage. There were six bottles. Five bottles failed to change.”
“Failure is important. Adds mystery and stalls for time. The navy might want to move to production, but production would entail real amounts of oil and a staff of genuine technicians. No, a con is much happier with endless, expensive research. How much is this costing the navy now?”
“With gold water filters and electrical gear, ten thousand yen a week.”
“That’s worth stringing out. And anytime the navy presses for results, Ito can play Camille and start to cough to death. If I were you, I would have the doctor’s handkerchief searched for a little vial of red liquid.”
“You’re sure this is a hoax? He’s fooling real scientists.”
“Well, I’ve been to the Universal back lot, and it looks like the doctor bought half of Frankenstein’s lab. The wands are called Jacob’s ladders, and the sphere is a Van de Graaff generator, wonderful for effects. The electricity is all static, perfectly harmless as long as you aren’t grounded. You better tell me more about Ito.”
Ito had been born in Kyoto, but his family moved first to Malaya and then London, where he claimed to have studied chemistry and physics at university level and done research with British Petroleum. Who could say? Records from England were unavailable, burned by the Luftwaffe. Ito had recently returned to his homeland to study in solitude at Cape Sata, the southern tip of Japan. There, on a cliff overlooking the restless sea, he had achieved insight into the very nature of atomic structure. Man could split the atom. New elements were being created all the time. Water and oil were different states of electrons in flux. Rather than take the slow, cautious route of academic publication, he offered his services directly to the nation. And the navy ate it up. How could they not? Harry thought. With a reliable source of oil, they could rule the Pacific. Without oil, the Combined Fleet would sooner or later sit in port, steel hulks covered in gull shit.
“There are plenty of magicians in Asakusa. I’ll ask around,” Harry said.
“No. This is secret, we’re not even supposed to mention his name.”
“Then let me ask about the trick. I won’t mention oil.”
Gen laid his arm across the table. “No, these are for you alone. No one else can see anything.”
Harry knew that meant that no one else should know he was involved with a navy project.
“Just you,” Gen insisted. “You think Ito is not a real scientist?”
“I think I’ve seen him. It was years ago, at the Olympic Bar in Shanghai. I just noticed him out of the corner of my eye. He was working the tables. He was a close-up artist, card tricks, disappearing coins, and he was bald and dressed like a monk and looked completely different.”
“That’s it? Someone you barely noticed in a bar years ago? Who looked different?”
“And the cough and the bloody handkerchief when the British grabbed him for lifting wallets.”
“Well, I think we have to be more exact than that.”
Gen had listed the preparations of the experiment: the elaborate filling of the bottles with water, how witnesses marked the corks with private words or numbers that Ito didn’t even see before he inserted electrical wire, sealed the cork with molten wax and set the bottle in the tank of water. Gen had listed each of Ito’s steps: safety procedures of the goggles and mat, positioning of the copper wands and dialing in voltage at each to “orchestrate the electrical field.”
“Does the transformation usually take one jolt?” Harry asked.
“No, it might take days before it takes effect, but once the bottles are in the tank, they can’t be touched. In fact, you’d be electrocuted if you tried. Besides, guards are in the examining room around the clock.”
“Why blue bottles?” They looked like medicine bottles to Harry.
“Ito says they filter harmful rays.”
“But you can’t see whether the contents are oil or water.”
“Yes, you can. That’s when the bottle rises.”
“Well, there’s your answer.”
“You don’t believe any of it?”
“Neither do you, or you wouldn’t have brought me in. Yamamoto can’t be fooled, not really.”
“But-”
“I know.” Harry had to smile. “It’s like the old joke. A woman brings her husband to the psychiatrist. She says, ‘Doctor, my husband is crazy. He thinks he’s a chicken.’ The psychiatrist says, ‘Leave him with me, I’ll cure him in a week.’ She says, ‘But we need the eggs.’ That’s the navy. You know this is crazy, but you need the oil.”
It occurred to Harry that Yamamoto had an especially good chance of coming out of the affair looking like a fruitcake. Since he was the sanest man in the navy, and the strongest opponent to war, the army would seize on anything to discredit him. Harry was not surprised that he’d had no more direct contact with the admiral. That was the beauty of using a gaijin; he could always be disavowed.