Page 16 of Daikon
EIGHT
THERE WAS TENSION ON THE third floor of the War Ministry the next morning.
An incident had occurred in the Matériel Section, where Colonel Shingen Sagara was now heading, involving a sub-section chief, an officer named Haga, who was setting a negative tone.
He had been reported as making demoralizing comments and had struck a captain in the face who spoke up against him.
“Haga-shosa,” Colonel Sagara said, intercepting the disheveled officer before he could spread his defeatism further. “Could I have a word?”
He took Haga by the arm and guided him to a secluded corner.
The man had clearly been drinking, atrocious conduct while on duty but not uncommon these days.
When Sagara left him some minutes later, the blood was drained from Haga’s face and his fleshy lips were tightly pressed together—hopefully a permanent condition.
It was the second sharp reminder Colonel Sagara had had to deliver during the previous few days.
He had known there were officers like Haga inhabiting the warren of offices lining the Ministry hallways, weak men promoted beyond their capabilities who were apt to break under pressure.
Now, with the war situation becoming increasingly challenging, they were revealing themselves.
But the Ministry, and the Imperial Army, must not be seen to falter.
The Minister of War, General Korechika Anami, could be relied on to stand firm against the traitors on the Supreme War Council and in Prime Minister Suzuki’s cabinet, thwarting their scarcely disguised aim to surrender.
But Anami, for all his ability, could not monitor the conduct of every officer on staff.
It was up to stalwarts like Colonel Sagara to step forward to keep creatures like Haga in check.
He returned to his office, annoyed at having had to spend his precious time herding cows.
The work, as usual, lay heaped on his desk.
On top of it all was the cable received the previous evening from Keizo Kan in Hikari, containing his preliminary assessment that the object appeared to be what the colonel had suspected.
And beside it, Colonel Sagara’s notes from the return telephone call he had just made.
The static-filled conversation, the scientist struggling to speak in clouded terms, had yielded a crucial additional piece of information.
There were numerous signatures and inscriptions written on the outside of the “object,” and Keizo Kan believed he recognized one of the names.
The colonel reached for the telephone and put a call through to the Riken. The young woman, Miss Yokoyama, answered again. No, she informed the colonel, Dr. Nishina had not yet returned. She expected him back tomorrow.
“All right,” said Sagara, keeping his irritation in check. “I want to know about the library there. Was it destroyed back in April?”
“Oh no, colonel,” replied Miss Yokoyama, her voice brightening. “The library is still here in the building. It survived almost entirely.”
“All right. That’s excellent. Now listen.
I want you to go through the journals relating to physics.
Relating to physics, understand? From 19—” He paused to consider.
“From 1936 to the most recent you have. Look for the name Stanley J. Rothstein.” He carefully spelled it out.
“Anything he might have written. Or any reference to him.”
Sagara ended the call and made another, this time to the Imperial Japanese Army’s Ninth Technical Research Institute in Tama district. He repeated his instructions after confirming that the Institute’s library was largely intact.
“Stanley J. Rothstein,” he concluded. “Do you have it?”
“Yes, Colonel,” came the voice from the other end. “I understand.”
Colonel Sagara’s patience lasted until ten o’clock in the morning.
Then he could wait no longer. He telephoned the Ninth Technical Research Institute again, only to learn that their collection of foreign journals had been boxed up and sent to a secure location and therefore could not be easily searched.
The colonel hung up in disgust while the clerk was still stammering his apologies.
He was about to place a follow-up call to the Riken when the telephone rang under his hand. It was Miss Yokoyama.
“I found the name,” she reported, breathless. “Stanley J. Rothstein. There was only one reference.”
Colonel Sagara picked up a pencil. “Read it to me.”
“The whole paper? But my English isn’t—”
“The title! The title!”
A rustle of paper and Miss Yokoyama began in halting English. “?‘A Classical Model for Nuclear Fission.’ American Physics Review, March 1941. By Stanley J. Rothstein.”
Sagara finished writing. “Anything else?”
“This information is given under his name.” Miss Yokoyama resumed her slow phonetic pronunciation. “Norman Bridge Laboratory of Physics, California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, California.”
Colonel Sagara ended the call and directed a shout at the door of his office. “Sugiura! English translation dictionary!”
A muffled “Hai!” from the colonel’s clerk haunting the outer office. The door opened and the young man scuttled in with the book.
It took a moment for Sagara to clarify the term “classical model.” “Norman Bridge” remained elusive. Why the connection between a physics laboratory and a bridge? Then he realized it must be a man’s name, a commemorative name applied to the lab.
Stanley J. Rothstein. A physics researcher at the California Institute of Technology with enough knowledge of nuclear fission to publish a paper.
Just the sort of man the Americans would recruit into a project to build a uranium bomb.
And the same name was written on the bomb recovered from the crash site of the B-29, code V680.
The evidence was mounting. And with it a vision of possibilities was beginning to dawn, almost too dazzling to look at. Sagara’s imagination ran free for a moment, then his faced darkened.
The object was in the possession of the Imperial Navy. That could not stand.
A part of the colonel’s mind remained on the problem as he returned to working through the papers on his desk.
He was reading a report from Tachiarai Airfield on northern Kyushu, revealing that stockpiling there was more than a month behind schedule.
The next report concerned a bottleneck at a factory producing artillery shells, possibly a solvable problem.
He put a telephone call through to the manager there.
Eleven-thirty. He set the receiver down after another call and started into the next file.
He was finding it difficult to focus, his vision growing bleary.
He stretched and tried to release the tension from his neck and shoulders, then leaned back in his chair and closed his eyes for a moment, the darkness spasming and jerking behind his eyelids.
An indigo sky, fading to violet and a band of orange on the horizon, a sea of lavender clouds soft underneath. They had climbed the sacred mountain in the night to watch the sunrise…
The colonel’s head jerked up. He had drifted off for a moment.
He leaned forward, planting his elbows on his desk, intending to return to his work. But the sunrise lingered in his brain, and with it a memory.
It was of a class trip. He had been sixteen years old. Odd how that had crawled out of the depths of his brain.
They had made the ascent in the night, five hard hours from the Fifth Station, a physical test for their supple young bodies, followed by the spiritual reward of sunrise at the top.
And then the long, leg-wearying slog back to the bottom, the dull gray trail zigzagging its way into the mist, the route at first utterly barren, then a return to stunted shrubs clinging precariously to the volcanic soil.
And then they were running. In high spirits from their conquest, they were running, racing to be first to the next rest station, Shingen Sagara and his friend Masao taking the lead.
Running down Mount Fuji was not a wise course of action, Shingen’s father would have told him.
You’re apt to lose your footing. You might fall.
And he did.
He tumbled for what seemed like a very long distance, head over heels, heels over head, arms and legs flailing, the camera around his neck striking his face and cutting him deep in the lip.
He fortunately encountered no rocks before coming to rest on his back.
He was badly shaken and lay still for a moment, taking a groggy inventory of the state of his body as he stared glassily up into the fog.
Masao was the first to arrive. He knelt down and began feeling Shingen’s limbs with trembling hands, confirming that no bones had been broken. Then, with a rush, the others were there, whispering in horror to Masao, “Is he dead?”
“I’m not dead,” said Shingen, closing his eyes as Masao administered to the cut on his face, gently washing away the soil with a trickle of water from his canteen. It hurt slightly. It was a precious moment. Shingen didn’t want it to end.
The moment passed. Their ashen-faced teacher arrived.
Ashen-faced. Like Haga’s face from earlier that morning. Is that what had stirred the memory?
The bleeding was stanched. Shingen was raised to his feet, Baba-sensei so relieved that he had not lost one of his students that he was dabbing tears from his eyes.
And Shingen’s classmates—they were hooting and carrying on like a pack of wild apes, fright and relief giving way to celebration and pleasure at having just survived this unexpected new adventure.
“Yah!” they exclaimed, brushing Shingen off and straightening him up to complete the descent. “Look at that cut! What a beauty! You’ll have a scar now. Just like a soldier!”