“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.”

“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.