Weapons of choice

Lieutenant Moertopo was rather put out at being hauled off the geisha girl and forced into his pants. Apart from the few hours a day when Hidaka demanded his presence, to explain some worthless piece of equipment, Moertopo had spent most of his de facto captivity luxuriating atop a series of pliant Japanese whores.

At first his new friends had sent him a lot of painted ice maidens who seemed interested in little more than calligraphy and flower arrangement. It wasn't long before the Japanese realized that Moertopo's appetites ran to a less refined sort of female company. Since then he'd hardly had his pants on, which went a great way toward reconciling him to the entire situation. Most of his men felt the same way. Given a choice among fighting homicidal jihadis, being imprisoned by the Japs, and plunging into some giggling trollop, who wouldn't pick the latter?

The pleasant haze of sex and sake abruptly deserted him when his "bodyguard" reported that a personal appointment with Yamamoto was in the offing. Moertopo possessed enough rat cunning to know that any variation in routine was threatening. And no matter what angle you came at it, swapping a happy prostitute for an irritated admiral was never going to rate as the first step up the happy staircase to Paradise.

So fear rendered him quite sober as he waited outside Yamamoto's stateroom.

Hidaka soon arrived with the German, Major Brasch, in tow. Brasch didn't look like a Hollywood Nazi at all. To Moertopo he looked more like a farmer with a drinking problem. They exchanged a greeting in English, their one common language, after which an aide led them into Yamamoto's presence.

Inside Hidaka bowed deeply and Moertopo saluted as crisply as he could. Brasch saluted but without much vigor or sincerity. Yamamoto seemed to ignore the insult.

The Japanese admiral also spoke in English.

"Lieutenant Moertopo, I hope our hospitality has not strained you greatly."

Moertopo was never quite sure where he stood with these fascists, but he took the ribald grins of Yamamoto and Hidaka as a sign of good humor.

"I fear Miss Okuni's hospitality will soon put me in the hospital," he replied.

"Excellent, excellent. Now, please sit down, gentlemen. If only we had more time for such affairs, yes? But time itself weighs on my thinking. Major, how goes your work? Will you soon be finished?"

"No," said Brasch. "Even with the help of Lieutenant Moertopo's men, there is an impossible amount of information to synthesize. It's not just the workings of a particular technology I am confounded by, but the principles that gave rise to it, and the context in which it should be employed. And the production methods used to fabricate its components, and imagining the industrial base that employs those methods, and the precursor technology that evolved into that base. I'm trying to make intuitive leaps backward, if you will. It's like an archaeologist excavating the future."

If Brasch expected Yamamoto to be angered by the response, the great bull-necked warrior disappointed him by merely nodding. "And you Hidaka, what say you?"

Hidaka glanced at Brasch, with frustration written across his face. It was always like this with the German. He seemed more taken with the puzzle than the answers.

"Moertopo has been of some use in helping us understand the rocket technology," he said. "He tells me the missile batteries of his ships are not nearly so powerful as those of the Americans he came with, but still they offer great advantage if used wisely. And radar, which we had dismissed as an irrelevance, is found here developed to an unbelievable degree. Radar-controlled gunfire potentially guarantees a direct hit with every shell fired. You can imagine the implications for the side possessing supremacy in this area alone."

"But can we build radar like this?"

"No," answered Brasch, before Hidaka could reply. He held up a flexipad that he had taken as his own. "These machines they all carry, we know of their capabilities now. But even the casing on such a machine is beyond the current limits of our production facilities. You are looking at eighty years' worth of developments in materials science, just for the shell that contains this device.

"Correct me if I am wrong, Moertopo, but the strange rubbery material of this electrical information block-"

"A flexipad, Major."

"A flexipad, yes. The casing itself is integral to the unit, because it helps power the machine, correct?"

"Exactly," he said. "It's made of solarskin plastic, which draws power from the light in this room. The warmth of your hands provides a power source, too."