Bushido

Bushido

By Ben Bova

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 thig he tried was a flower, a graceful chrysanthemum that was donated byy 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. Than 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 theses experiments for the sleeping hours betweenn 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 incovenience 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 fromm 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 tonge. 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.

Bushido. Photo by Elena

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.

Still, he scanned the news media and the educational channels of hundreds of TV stations all around the world that he orbited. Nothing appeard out of place. All was normal. His experiment had not changed anything. He still had the wasting immunodeficiency disease that his mother had bequeathed him. His body was still rotting away.

He thought of bringing the puppy back and killing it with a painless gas, to see what effect the change would make on history. Bu he feared to tamper with the space-time coninuum until he actually had Yamamoto in his grasp. He wondered idly if he could kill the puppy, then told himself angrily that of course he could; the dog must be long dead by now, anyway