The captain muttered the name again and again, as if trying to remember where he had heard it before. “Uraga!” he said suddenly. “Where Commodore Perry arrived! He came here knocking on Japan’s door around a hundred and fifty years ago …”
The camera’s focal length extended to two thousand millimeters, and the magnification zoomed all the way in. A street filled the seventeen-inch screen. Viewed from straight above, it was easy to make out the details.
Tiled roofs. White-walled Western-style houses. Roofing tiles broken here and there. In some places, the grass had grown a couple of feet high. Most of the houses’ doors and windows were closed, though dark, empty openings could also be seen here and there. On telephone poles, one could see faded signs advertising pawn shops. In the street, grass grew from broken spots in the asphalt, and cars that had turned to rusted, reddened scrap lay where they had crashed into fences and telephone poles, or simply sat where they had been abandoned in the middle of the road.
Only the sun shone cheerfully, warmly, mockingly, above the ruined street, pouring down radiance like warm bathwater. The yards and vacant lots were wild and overgrown, filled with spring flowers in bloom. At one corner of a four-way intersection, Yoshizumi noticed a small tricycle, dark red with rust, left untouched where it had stopped. His chest constricted involuntarily—beside the tricycle was something that looked like a white scrap of cloth, lying flat against the earth. Straining his eyes, he finally realized that he was looking at bleached bones wearing tattered clothes. The legs were bent and the arms stretched forward, as though the skeleton were trying to crawl northward. Once Yoshizumi recognized the skeleton for what it was, it became clear that there were bleached bones scattered everywhere: collapsed beside a house’s front door, half stuck in a drainage ditch, lying in heaps at an intersection. The upper half of one skeleton was leaning out of a second-story window, its head long since fallen off. The bones had been exposed to wind and rain, and no animals had carried them away, since the dogs and cats had been reduced to bleached skeletons as well. What had until two and a half years ago been tens of thousands of busy residents in a lively old harbor town were now motionless white bones shining brightly in the sunlight of an early spring day, lying silent and voiceless.
Yoshizumi caught a glimpse of something small and yellow moving. A butterfly, fluttering among the bones.
Enough of this! Yoshizumi screamed inside. Enough! I’ve seen too much already! But wait a minute—a butterfly! Insects are . . .
The comm buzzer sounded, and the captain answered the call.
“We’re finished,” said the voice of Professor de la Tour, the man in charge of atmospheric analysis. “The results are in.”
“And?” the captain asked with a quick glance in Yoshizumi’s direction.
“It is … as expected,” the voice of the professor answered mechanically. “Around 2.8 delta per cubic centimeter, I suppose. Similar enough to previous samples that there’s no need to grow a culture. It is alive and kicking.”
“Well, then, I guess that’s that,” said the captain. “Lower the snorkel and bring in the balloon.”
“Captain,” de la Tour said hastily. “I wonder if you might permit me to carry out an experiment?”
“What kind of experiment?”
“I want to expose a sample to radiation.” There was a supplicating tone in the professor’s disembodied voice. “Using an electromagnetic manipulator, we can cover a sample with insulation and then insert it into a small steel capsule. Then weld it shut and take it out.”
“What’s inside would die when it passed through the heating hole, wouldn’t it?” McCloud said.
“I think it would be all right. Five hundred degrees inside the heater is not too much; I’ll just heat it for a shorter time than usual.”
“Aren’t you the one who wrote the regulations for handling samples?”
“Captain, please listen to me. I’ll use the manipulator to burn the capsule’s outer surface with a blowtorch. Surface heating is effective, and it won’t make the inside too hot.”
“Well, what will you do with it, then?”
“I want to jam it inside the reactor somewhere.” The professor’s voice was brimming with scholarly passion now. “Near the furnace—or not far from the cooling system would be fine. There are alpha particles, beta particles, neutrons, and gamma waves there. We’ll measure the strength of each of these, and—”
“I’m sorry, Professor,” the captain said, his voice curt. “Surely you’re aware that the engines on nuclear vessels come with a two-year seal. As a general rule, even the engine room is off-limits, never mind the container.”
“I asked the safety engineer—”
“Do it when we get home. They have a nuclear reactor at the station, you know. Not one for university experiments, true. It’s not in a pool and it doesn’t have a special exit for neutrons …”
“Captain McCloud, please—”
“Professor, I have a duty to bring everyone back from this place alive. Please leave your sample as-is inside the quarantine system. I will not allow your capsule to be brought into the ship.” When he had finished talking, McCloud shook his head and looked around the room.
“Take us into the bay slowly and get some pictures of Tokyo through the telescope,” McCloud said, placing stress on the city’s middle phoneme, as Westerners often did. “After that, we head home.”
Though the images on the screen had disappeared, Yoshizumi was still standing paralyzed before the monitor.
Keeping an eye on him, Captain McCloud stood in front of the odometer and cleared his throat. “Eighty-five thousand kilometers already, eh?” he muttered. “By the time we get back to the station, it’ll be a hundred thousand and about time for a refueling. I wonder if there are still any facilities for recharging left.”
Why had it happened? And who was responsible?
What savage presence had visited such a disaster on this lovely planet? Nereid rushed earnestly on and on, keeping a depth of fifty meters and a speed of twenty-eight knots, headed southward against an audible flow of dark brine—a huge, lonely whale swimming beneath the endless undulations of Poseidon’s rippling back. Within the hearts of the crew inside, a terrible anguish of spirit had reawakened—an anguish that until then had been faded and yellowed by the passage of four long years, hidden under a film of resignation so thick that even the warmth of its dying embers should have no longer been detectable to the crew.
Who was responsible? And why had it happened?
The answers were in a sense already known. They could be faintly perceived amid the ripples of the electromagnetic waves that had rebounded across the sky, bent across the land, and shaken the atmosphere in those days—the waves that had carried the countless shouts and screams of a world on the brink of extinction—the screams of the dying that had spread from one to another and, at last, to all the continents. In those days, when the crew could feel nothing except their hearts being torn asunder, when they could do nothing except gnash their teeth at thoughts of blood relatives expiring in places beyond their reach—even then, they already had a broad grasp of what had happened.
Then, after the last of those voices that could have answered their questions went silent from all five hundred fifty million square kilometers of the earth’s surface, the Hadean cries of those who remained had risen once more, burning with anger, analyzing, analogizing. The destruction had come on them rather quietly, without any sign or warning, descending upon a bustling generation full of noise and hope for a brighter, more prosperous future.
Without even a sound.
It was true. The flashes of light, the white-hot pillars of flame raining down from the heavens that humanity had quaked in fear of, that they had cried out against so loudly, that in the end—in the name of reason and the love of their fellow man—they had managed to hold at bay, were nothing at all like the destruction that finally came. It had been readied without the public’s knowledge, it had app
eared without warning, and by the time its danger was understood, it was too late to do anything about it. A young giant called Humanity had at last been ready to put behind him a troubled youth filled with unimaginable catastrophe and, gazing long and calm into a higher, more distant future, to take his first step forward as an adult. Yet with that very first step, he had fallen flat on his face. And there he lay. It hadn’t been such an unlikely thing, really. Viewed against the endless history of the universe, it was simply a matter of some intelligent life-forms springing up on the third planet of a certain solar system and meeting with premature death no sooner than they had appeared. Such patterns existed even in the everyday lives of humans. After all, a young man can be wise, strong, and healthy, full of hope and prospects for the future, and still meet with unexpected disaster, dying the next day, or even in the next instant. The boundless talent within him—his limitless potential and promise—is no use whatsoever in preventing such misfortunes. Why did failed species, such as the dinosaurs of the Mesozoic period, disappear so suddenly? After they were destroyed, did their great power have any meaning? Their record ends on a footnote within the history of the universe, in the history of this planet.
Which would a later age judge to have been truly superior: that thick, long branch of Mesozoic Reptilia that had given birth to Tyrannosaurus Rex and Apatosaurus, or a branch of intelligent primates with somewhat advanced cerebralization—viviparous mammals that had been building a quasi-advanced, insectlike way of life based on group-oriented division of labor from the late Quaternary period and on into the Cenozoic era?
Such considerations held little interest for the survivors, however, whose crushing anguish continued without end. Why had something like this happened? How? They realized the vanity of asking. What could come of knowing the cause after it had already happened? Those who were dead would not come back. And yet still they continued to seek out the source of the disaster. Peering at an indistinct outline drawn of guesswork, it felt like they could catch a fleeting glimpse of it. All men die, of course, and the times and extents of disasters cannot be predicted. Humans sought a cause all the more, however, even after the end of everything—by that time more out of spite than reason. But humanity was the only form of life that ever sought reasons for death. The dead could go to their appointed places at the end of their natural life spans. If they were destroyed by a cometary impact, a sudden change in the land, or even in the nature of the universe itself, well … if something like that happened, it was all right too. But in the case of cometary impacts … in the case of simple old age … death was caused by something, wasn’t it?
So who had caused this disaster? Some solitary madman? Had the very organization of human society been responsible? Had it been caused by someone’s mistake? It was already known that somebody and something caused it. It was even known that that “somebody” referred to several—or several hundred—specific individuals … that that “something” was an agent of the political landscape of those times—or rather of the twentieth century. But beyond that, everything faded into the fog of destruction. Which was exactly why people went on seeking the names of those responsible.
Why had it happened? And who was responsible?
Poseidon’s beloved daughter earnestly continued in her course southward, ever southward, through swimming curtains of fish, crossing one latitudinal line after another. The North Star had descended into the waters at her back, and rising up ahead of her were the stars of the Southern Cross. In her straightforward progression, however, she never raised her periscope to check those stars, instead relying on compass and odometer to keep her bow pointed southward.
At last the dark blue water grew clearer, and the midday sun spilled its vertical rays down onto white sandy seafloor, revealing in the bow’s camera eye vistas of a tropical sea—forests of dazzling coral where brilliantly hued fish danced like butterflies. Volcanic islands jutted up from the seafloor, upon which rested masses of coral and swaying seaweed, and—that’s right! There used to be people up there—cheerful people with bodies that shone like bronze. They had lived in the dark green of tropical islands … among shadows of deep purple cast by palm fronds onto the white sands … singing of their joy for the sea’s bounty, for the goodness of the sun from generation to generation—singing out in answer to the roar of the crashing tide, unchanged since ancient times. Within silvery-white rings blocking the fierce waves of the dark open sea, ultramarine water must be brimming, as blue as if turquoise had been dissolved in it. The strong rays of direct sunlight must be nearly blinding on the blue coral and white foam of the surf that gnawed against the atoll … But now, there was no way to get even a fleeting glimpse of what it must look like up there. Smiling maidens of the southern seas, their glowing amber skin clothed in primary colors … large, sweetly fragrant flowers thrust into hair as black as lacquer … teeth so white they had seemed to sparkle … coal-black eyes …
They had crossed the equator without realizing it. The display on the shipboard monitors had indicated their crossing, but in the gloomy stares of the crewmen, not a single shadow had lifted, and in the end no one even suggested holding one of the cheerful equator-crossing parties that had been all but mandatory until a few years ago. As Nereid entered the southern latitudes it turned its bow slightly toward the southeast, then continued on again. Already, there was no work left for which they should surface. The captain stayed shut up in his cabin, spending day after day absorbed in the Bible. The ship had been switched over to automatic rudder and was now continually feeling its way forward completely free of human assistance, measuring the depth of the seafloor with an ultrasound depth finder and using undersea radar and sonar to avoid reefs and guyots. Within a steel-plated pressure vessel ten inches thick, uranium fuel rods quietly continued to radiate heat, and contra-rotating propellers at the stern whirled on and on. The bright, air-conditioned interior was like a graveyard, filled with gloomy air. All of the crew avoided looking at one another’s faces, spoke seldom, and busied themselves with reading and contemplation. Nobody reached for the records, played so many times that everyone was sick of them, and the canasta and mah-jongg tables in the recreation room had acquired a faint coating of dust. Only the cold, clear cracks of billiard balls resounded through the hallways on occasion, when one of the engineering crew went to play alone during his off hours.
As they lay in their assigned bunks, experiencing neither day nor night, listening intently to the faint sound of water swishing past the triple-partitioned bulkhead, it began to feel as if at some point this six-thousand-ton submarine had become just like the Bateau Ivre, having no destination at all, merely drifting along on the currents of the sea.
… dispersant gouvernail et grappin.
Yoshizumi, however, had heard from the communications officer that such gloomy return voyages were typical of all survey missions. Each year, they were visited by the sights of those grassy, decaying graveyards, and afterward returned to a harsh and unforgiving land. What kind of cheer could be expected in such circumstances?
Within this giant steel tube that knew neither day nor night, Yoshizumi was collating the results of his investigations into irregular shifts in geomagnetism, geoelectric fields, and gravity—anomalies concentrated on the seafloor off the Pacific coast of North America. He had first started this project after the ship encountered a rather powerful undersea earthquake in waters off what had once been Anchorage. When he had lowered his instruments into the sea in order to test a theory of his, he had been shocked by the results. Since then, he had made corrections for the electromagnetic deviation caused by Nereid’s hull and attached remote-controlled sensors he had cobbled together himself to the bottom of the ship. Afterward, he had asked the captain to have the ship run a considerable distance along the Pacific coast of North America.
Despite the fact that the measurements were quite rough, he was logging geomagnetic and gravitational fluctuations of surprising magnitude on his charts. Even when compared
against the measurements that Professor Kasty of Palermo University had made on last year’s survey mission—using less precise instruments and simply taking measurements at rough points—the fluctuations were still too great. Once they had gone as far south as California, they had turned around and headed back toward Alaskan waters. In barely a week’s time, the breadth of the fluctuations at the first observation point had become even greater.
As much as was possible, Yoshizumi tried to organize the results of his observations and do a number of preparatory projects while still at sea. As for the rest, he would have to use the computers at headquarters after they returned to the station; there was no way he could do it by hand. Yet even by simply collating the data, he could see a blurry outline of the thing these fluctuations were pointing to. He had grown just a little anxious at the thought, but eventually the pointlessness of such worry had dragged him back down. Even if such a thing were to occur, there was nobody left to bear the brunt of the effects …
Between his periods of arranging data and calculating numbers, he lay in his bunk as visions of his former homeland swam behind his eyelids, and he sank into a hot, languid anger and inexpressible sadness. He could see the lively, cheerful atmosphere of his going-away party from several years ago and superimposed on top of it the ruined corpse of his motherland as he had seen it just a few days ago. It didn’t look as if there was going to be any way to separate the two …
When Nereid was in Tokyo Bay, Yoshizumi had gotten permission to put on an aqualung and go outside into the water. However, this indulgence had been granted only on the condition that Vankirk accompany him. There had been no particular observations he and Vankirk needed to make; that little excursion had been allowed purely out of affection on the part of the captain. “The captain likes you,” Vankirk had said. “You’d better watch out!”
The water in Tokyo Bay had been clear. A great hush hung over deep black silt that lay undisturbed on the bottom. Countless schools of fish—when had they started to return?—swam all around, and cold, fresh water poured in from the mouth of the Sumida River. It was if Tokyo Bay had somehow recovered a vestige of its older days, when its name had been Edo Bay. All that bore witness to what had once been Greater Tokyo, however, were the many sediment-covered wrecks of barges and tugboats and the giant cylindrical pillars that supported Marine City’s bristling forest of towers, which were built on the sea across from Harumi Wharf on the outskirts of Chuuou Ward. Innumerable white bones were scattered across the inlet of the Arakawa drainage overflow, buried in reddish clay and resembling shards of broken porcelain. Near New Tokyo Harbor, the bottom of a large boat was visible overhead, its underside thick with barnacles casting countless long, black, ovoid shadows across it. Its screw and rudder were covered with slimy sea algae, and tiny crustaceans moved to and fro like flecks of dust. A large school of both large and small fish gathered to hunt them. Yoshizumi watched as a black sea bream more than a foot in length swam past and suddenly remembered an uncle of his who had loved fishing.
Virus: The Day of Resurrection Page 2