Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Vintage Contemporaries) (15 page)

There were a number of casualties in Marine City that day.

Many resulted from falls on stairs, sloping roads, sloping entrances to buildings, and so on. Some women and elderly citizens were in critical condition after suffering blows to the head as they fell. Several infants playing on a south-facing slide at a nursery school suffered broken teeth and other injuries when they collided with the ground after sliding down at abnormally high speed. As luck would have it, those with the most serious injuries were all taken to different hospitals, where they were assumed to have sustained their injuries through carelessness. As a result, no one was able to grasp the unusually large scale of casualties in the City as a whole.

Meanwhile, many others who lived in Marine City but worked in the metropolis started to complain of headaches, ringing ears, and dizziness caused by abnormality in the semicircular canals of their inner ears soon after they started work, and sought treatment at clinics near their respective workplaces. Rod Le Mesurier also had a headache, again. Calculating the pain level as 5.2 kiltago, he took himself to a clinic near his office during the lunch break. In all cases, the symptoms soon disappeared when the functions of locomotive analysis in three-dimensional space returned to normal. But when evening came, the sufferers all returned to Marine City, which was of course tilting at an angle of more than three degrees, and this restored the abnormality in their semicircular canals.

“You know, it’s just as I thought – the whole island’s tilting!” Rod Le Mesurier felt compelled to announce that evening, knowing only too well how his wife would react.

Caprice Le Mesurier glared at her husband with eyes glinting yellow, like a leopard’s. “You’re going to start on about that again, are you. Well, you know that if the rumour spreads, they’ll all say it’s your fault. Then I’ll be sacked, and we’ll have to leave Marine City.”

“Haven’t you got a headache? Well anyway, you know those things builders use, spirit levels? I’m going to try and bring one home tomorrow, you see.” It was the first time Rod hadn’t been silenced merely by the look on his wife’s face. He worked for a company that made nothing but measuring instruments for stationery, construction tools, medical instruments and the like. He belonged to the Development Division in the company’s laboratory.

To her credit, Caprice gave it a moment’s thought. After all, there’d also been the altercation with Stubber Nasamule earlier in the day. Of course, the central thrust of her “thought” was self-protection and self-advancement, as always. “If I’m the first to discover that Marine City is tilting and report it to the Mayor, I could get promoted. But what if it’s all a pack of lies?”

“Actually, it was Professor McLogick who first discovered it.”

“No,” and she glared at him again. “Once the tilt has become undeniable, I will be the first to discover it and report it to the Mayor – officially, not as a malicious rumour. Do you understand?”

Unable to follow his wife’s logic, Rod changed the subject. “The North No. 2 Block was tilting a bit more when I looked this morning. Well, I’m going to get our company to make a lot of spirit levels and distribute them to stationers all over Marine City. We’ll make a lot of money when everyone starts noticing the tilt, I should think.”

Caprice smiled wryly. “That’s about the best you can come up with, isn’t it. Look what happened last time, when you thought of that, what was it called, that funny thing. You made yourself a laughing stock.”

“You mean the painometer. There was nothing funny about it. The Director merely said it would be difficult to commercialize.” When it came to matters technological, Rod had no thoughts for anything else. “I figured they might need them in hospitals and the like. That’s why I worked out the units of pain. Look!” He slapped himself hard on the cheek. “Whenever you do that to me, the pain level is one kiltago. Of course, pain thresholds differ from person to person. It’s like the average body temperature. The painometer calculates the degree of pain based on the heat emitted from the affected area, the sensation in the tactile region of the brain, the pulse and so on. The first models will be very primitive, but they’ll gradually increase in precision, and then I think everyone will be interested and want to buy one.”

Caprice stared blankly at Rod as he continued his discourse. Not that she was listening to a word he said. No, she was thinking, “Oh dear. Why did I have to marry this man? He’s so brainless, unrefined
and cack-handed, slow on the uptake, so dull that he can only think of one thing. But, well… maybe he’s just right for me.”

At around the same time, the pianist Histe Rica was giving a recital in Marine City Hall, a 200-seater venue. Soon after she started performing Bartók’s
Improvisations for Piano
, her grand piano started to edge, little by little, across the stage towards the auditorium. The first to notice this was a young lighting technician whose job was to train the fresnel lens spotlight on the artiste. Ms Rica herself failed to notice the movement, as her chair was shifting along with the piano. Moreover, since the purpose of a fresnel lens is to soften the edges of the light, the piano’s right leg was only a few inches from the edge of the stage when the lighting technician realized what was happening. As he was desperately wondering how to inform the artiste, the piano plunged into the auditorium with a deafening roar, performed a half-turn with its three legs pointing upwards, then described another half turn that broke its legs and pedals, hurling them into the air, scattering the hammers and keys, and causing the strings to fly out. The momentum sent Histe Rica sprawling, exposing her fleshy white thighs and lemon-yellow underwear, and leaving her upside down at the foot of the stage. Three women in the front row were either struck by the lid of the piano or crushed under it. They suffered ruptured organs, skull fractures, and smashed faces, and all died instantly. Another woman was decapitated by a snapped piano wire, while twelve others nearby suffered non-fatal injuries of varying degrees. Panic broke out in the Hall, which was virtually full for this recital. After all, Histe Rica had a music school in Marine City, and a large number of protégés. The Hall was soon surrounded by police cars and ambulances, and it wasn’t until the following morning that the situation was brought under control.

At first, the families of the victims rushed to point the finger at Histe Rica’s over-enthusiastic performance as the cause of the accident, but it was quickly discovered that this was not the case. For the results of the university survey had already reached Rory O’Storm, and it was immediately proved that the southwest-facing stage was tilting at an angle of three degrees – even before Stubber
Nasamule, who lived near the Hall and heard the commotion, could race up with spirit level in hand as if to say “I told you so!”

Fedora Last first heard of the incident when Rory O’Storm called her at seven o’clock the following morning. She immediately considered sacking both O’Storm and Caprice Le Mesurier, he for withholding his report on the conversation with Professor McLogick, she for turning Nasamule away. But then she had better thoughts, realizing that the incident was ultimately due to the spiteful vengeance of pachinko balls. Instead, she turned her anger partly towards self-reproach, partly towards her former husband.

As she had consolidated her position inside the party, so Fedora Last’s anti-pachinko movement had gathered momentum, until finally, after twenty years of struggle, the Pachinko Parlour Prohibition Bill that she herself had proposed was passed by the National Assembly. Of course, that wasn’t her only achievement. If it had been, it would merely have been disregarded as “an idiotic Bill proposed by a silly old cow who hates pachinko”. No, by this time the concept of Marine City as a feminist paradise had already started to take shape, more or less through the single-minded determination of Fedora Last alone.

As a result of the new law, some 10,102 pachinko parlours across the country had been closed down and 2,926,461 pachinko consoles destroyed. As these figures were taken from a survey of police stations and tax offices in 2019, they may not have been strictly accurate. But since 4,000 pachinko balls had been used for each pachinko console, this would suggest the astronomical quantity of 11,705,844,000 pachinko balls. The next problem had been how to dispose of them. Fedora Last, who had assumed personal responsibility for this undertaking, had the idea of using them as ballast for her Marine City. The Construction Ministry had not approved the plan, pointing out that pachinko balls were too unstable to be used for this purpose. But Fedora Last, now the party’s leading woman, already had a large number of supporters. A member of her self-styled Brain Trust, partly out of an unconscious desire to flatter, had proposed that bulkheads be built in chessboard formation to contain the ballast balls. Fedora had jumped at this proposal and insisted on it to the end.

Work had started on building the foundations of Marine City. Well, “foundations” might not be the word, since the City was floating on sea water. But work had started on installing the ballast tanks that would be equivalent to its foundations. There had been some corruption at this point, a case of bribery that also involved Caprice Le Mesurier. The construction company had falsified the bulkhead specifications to increase the amount of the bribe, but had used bulkheads made of slightly thinner walls and offering lower resistance than those stated in the specifications or drawings.

Since it was now clear that the tilt in Marine City was due to some abnormality in the ballast tanks, three surveyors were sent down a manhole into the City’s sewers on the afternoon after the incident with the piano. From there they descended further, through an opening used for repair work, into the ballast tanks at the bottom of Marine City. The surveyors walked across the tops of the bulkheads that divided the blocks into their chessboard formation, each block containing a fixed weight of pachinko balls, and eventually located the damage. A hole had formed in one of the bulkhead walls, and the pachinko balls that should have been in the block to the northeast of it had all flowed into the block to the southwest, disturbing the general equilibrium. Considering the overall tilt of Marine City, it seemed unlikely that this would be the only breach point. Nevertheless, the surveyors climbed down the bulkhead wall along a rope ladder, quickly reaching the bottom of the block some three metres below, where they started to survey the state of the damage.

As luck would have it, another earthquake struck a little more than twenty minutes after the survey started. Pachinko balls flooded back into the northeastern block and trapped one of the surveyors there before returning to the southwestern block. The impetus breached another bulkhead, through which the balls flowed into the next block on the southwestern side. Unable to rescue their colleague owing to the obvious danger, the other two surveyors hurried back to the surface, where they called for help from the police and fire services.

With this, a great commotion broke out. Nearly all police and fire service personnel were mobilized, and Rory O’Storm even had to ask for support from the metropolis, since there weren’t enough
personnel in Marine City alone. The trapped surveyor was rescued but was in a critical condition, with bruises all over his body. An aftershock during the rescue operation caused further damage to the bulkheads, seriously injuring two of the rescuers and lightly injuring three more, while another died of asphyxiation when his bronchial tubes were filled with pachinko balls.

It wasn’t until the following morning – when Caprice Le Mesurier, learning of the commotion in a memo from the City offices but not thinking for a moment that an investigation into the corruption would start that very same day, was in the middle of berating her husband for not hitting on his spirit-level idea a day earlier – that it was discovered that there were more than a hundred breach points in the bulkhead walls, and that the walls used for the bulkheads were thinner than specified on the design drawings.

The angle of tilt in the city’s elevation was now four degrees. Readers may like to equip themselves with protractors from this point on. At an angle of four degrees, danger is imminent, and in fact, this was when serious accidents started occurring all over the City.

The roads of Marine City were mostly made of concrete, laid horizontally. That morning, Justa Plagiarist went out for a stroll and, as usual, saw a boy going to school on his skateboard. Justa was still unaware of the tilt and, astonished by the unusually high speed at which the boy was travelling, inadvertently called out:

“Oy! You’ll have an accident! Stop!”

The boy turned to look at him. “I can’t!” he cried.

Justa closed his eyes. A lorry approached from the opposite direction. When he looked again, he could see the boy disappearing under the lorry, still squatting on his skateboard.
Thank goodness it was a high-floored vehicle
, thought a relieved Justa, before turning back to have another look. The boy, who’d now emerged from under the lorry and was sliding into the distance on his skateboard, was headless. He’d been cleanly decapitated by something protruding under the lorry’s chassis.

With the sirens of police cars and ambulances wailing from early evening until well into the night, most people in Marine City had by now realized that something was afoot. In spite of this, Mayor
Fedora Last ordered that the true situation should not be announced until the end of an Emergency Meeting, which started in the early morning. As a result, life went on as usual in various parts of the City, and this led to numerous accidents.

The supermarket operated by Kapital Interest opened for business at ten o’clock. Customers who’d been enticed by newspaper advertisements rushed onto escalators to reach the bargain sale counters. The south-facing escalators, originally inclined at an angle of thirty degrees, had now tilted to thirty-four degrees, while the steps themselves were inclined at four degrees. An obese middle-aged woman at the head of the throng, stepping off the upwards escalator on the first floor, slipped on the grooved cleat and fell flat on her backside. This set off a landslide, as two shoppers on each step behind her toppled backwards in a domino effect. Shrieking like exotic birds, scores of women became piled up in clumps at various points of the escalator, which continued to travel upwards. As it did, the women on top of each pile were hurled over the handrails and down onto the ground floor below. Some fell into glass showcases. Store personnel managed to stop the escalator, but the impetus of this set off another collapse among the clumps of shoppers, leaving scores of them with major injuries on the ground floor. It was a disaster.