“Maybe they’re just being good bureaucrats and calling ‘dibs’ while they can,” Taguchi murmured with a frown. “Considering politics these days, there’s also the fact that our politicians will be viewed as incompetent unless they keep coming up with new symbolic accomplishments and hammering out new goals one after another. They need to lead and pull the world along behind them. They’ve got to find ways to show people that Japan ranks high on the world stage. That’s why we’re finally launching a tiny little satellite with a tiny little rocket more than a dozen years after the Soviets launched Sputnik. This time, you all get to be the flag they wave around.”
“That’s a pretty cynical way of looking at it,” Yoshizumi said with a laugh. When he smiled, he had dimples in his snow-tanned cheeks, and white teeth peeked out from between his lips. He looked much younger than his thirty years when he laughed. “But really,” he said, “we should be grateful for this boom, don’t you think? We should be smart and take whatever we can get while we can get it—save it for when this boom is over.”
“Well, that’s true after all.” Major Taguchi took out the pipe he had just put away but didn’t put it in his mouth. He just played with it, enjoying the feel of its bowl in the palm of his hand. “Booms have their good side too. They can be much ado about nothing, but they do leave us with substantial benefits, and with that we can progress little by little. Even this ship”—he clapped his hand against her rails lovingly—“she’s the offspring of the second atomic power boom. This may have been before your time, but in 1966, around Showa 30, Japan had its first boom in atomic power for peaceful purposes.”
“Yes, I remember.” Yoshizumi nodded. “I was still in junior high.”
“And two or three years later, the flame had completely fizzled out. But still, during that time, nuclear energy really soaked into the world of industry. Then, from the year after the Tokyo Olympics—around 1965—the second boom started. After the Olympics, the politicians wheeled out space development and nuclear energy as their latest symbols for Japan. And thanks to our climbing aboard that bandwagon, the nuclear ships they said we’d never have until at least the ’70s we had in almost no time. The Maritime Safety Agency announced the plan in 1964, which included a new polar research ship—”
Suddenly the Shiretoko’s siren began to wail, and they could feel the reverberations in their stomachs. Twenty-two hundred hours: the signal that one hour remained until departure. From New Showa Station, another siren sounded as if in answer. A group of adelie penguins, inured to the noise of helicopter rotors though they were, took off waddling as though surprised by the sirens. One by one, they awkwardly jumped into the water through the tracks of the icebreaker. At the sight of their excited flapping about, the two men burst out laughing in spite of themselves.
“The nuclear energy boom probably had something to do with the reductions in weapons production, and the US and Soviet Union unloading their excess enriched uranium on the market.” Yoshizumi waited for the siren to stop wailing before he continued. “Lately, there’s a tendency for a lot of booms to stick. Even in Antarctica, there’s a huge nuclear energy boom. Leaving aside the old hands at it like McMurdo and Mirny Stations, there’s not a country represented here that doesn’t have a small nuclear power plant set up somewhere.”
“And now the space boom is starting to stick,” said Major Taguchi. “Is there anything to that story about NASA bringing a rocket down here?”
“Apparently so. They’ll be ready to start serious testing later this year, after they finish the gantry foundation and do a little terrestrial testing of the Centaur engines.”
They watched as the queer form of the Samson helicopter, resembling a crane fly on stilts, took off from the station and began to come nearer. To Yoshizumi, the helicopter looked like nothing so much as a tall, four-legged table flying through the air as it lifted off. The Samson pulled the five-ton container it was carrying into the sky like a bee with a grain of pollen.
“Well, then,” said Major Taguchi. “It’s just about time to say goodbye.”
“Hey, Taguchi …” Yoshizumi murmured unexpectedly. His voice was oddly hushed. His expression had grown more serious as he stared off into the distant polar mountains. When he made that kind of face, he looked as unworldly as a young boy.
That’s a look peculiar to the people of this generation, Major Taguchi thought. In other words, it was the face of one unharmed by the great upheavals of the world.
“What do you think will happen to the world from here on out?”
“Who know?” said Taguchi, a bit at a loss for words at the unexpected question. “What’ll happen? Things won’t change much at all, right? Already, the wars and the panics aren’t—”
In sudden surprise, he left his sentence unfinished. That was it! Already, a fairly long period of time had passed without anything much really happening. So many times, the alarms had been raised for impending crises, and so many times, disaster had been averted at the very last moment. There had even been a moment when it was feared that the economic bankruptcy of the great nations would overturn the world marketplace, but in the end, that had been dodged in the form of a rather long period of recession. This was only a rumor, but there was even a story going around that the Soviet Union had—behind the scenes of the world economic stage—bailed America out of its economic crisis. To put it in nautical terms, “restorability” was the thing that was growing stronger and stronger in the world now. And from now on …
“Well, even with a few oscillations,” Taguchi said, “civilization as a whole will keep on slowly inching forward, eh? Why do you ask?”
“Oh, no reason, really,” Yoshizumi said with a bashful little smile. “Do you think that war is … a thing of the past now?”
“Not hardly,” said Major Taguchi. “Across the board disarmament will take a long time, and NATO is like a car manufacturer that keeps putting out a new model every year—new armaments, new positioning, and new strategy, all standard. File that question under ‘Not hardly.’ The strategic nuclear framework between the East and the West will take shape within the next three or four years. The American president and the Soviet premier will meet this summer, and that’s when things will become more definite, right?”
“So even though one part of the world keeps on changing steadily,” Yoshizumi said vacantly, “there’s another part that’s hardly changed at all. Disarmament. A lot of time has passed since the first voices calling for it started to be heard.”
“But the part that’s changing a lot and the part that’s been so gridlocked are both changing now, don’t you think?” said Taguchi in a somewhat ambiguous tone. “The world today is still riding on a lot of inertia from the 1950s. Making it change direction is incredibly difficult. Hey, it’s about time for you to go …”
Yoshizumi continued slowly pulling at the Meerschaum pipe, however. The thin smoke rose slowly up into the whitish night sky of the Antarctic summer. The wind was blowing from the east. Way over on the other side of the Prince Olav coast, the area around Hinode Cape had grown dark. After he had smoked the very last of the tobacco, Yoshizumi tapped the pipe lightly against the top of his palm.
Yoshizumi held the pipe out for Major Taguchi to take back, to which Taguchi replied, “You can have it.”
Yoshizumi’s face lit up instantly. “You don’t mind?” he asked. “In that case, lend it to me until you come later. I’ll take good care of it.”
“No,” Taguchi said. “Don’t worry about it. I don’t mind. I’m not coming next year.”
“Why not?”
“When I get back to Japan, I’ll be assigned new duties right away. Training courses,” Major Taguchi said, sounding a little forlorn. “I’m to be placed aboard a foreign ship for one year. I’ll probably never ride on Shiretoko again.”
“Then … this really is goodbye, isn’t it?” said Yoshizumi regretfully. The two men, ten years apart in age, had first gotten to know one another thanks to a pipe. From t
he start, they had gotten on unusually well and had been as inseparable as brothers throughout the sea voyage. “But we may meet again in Japan,” he added. “I go back home once every four years.”
Taguchi extended his hand. “If we can’t meet then, let’s meet in an old folks’ home in the twenty-first century. I heard on the morning news that they’re close to a new wonder drug for cancer. Sounds like I’ll live to be a hundred after I retire.”
“Well then,” Yoshizumi said with a smile as he put out his hand. “Until the twenty-first century …”
They gripped one another’s hands firmly. Then Yoshizumi turned away and hurried off toward a helicopter that was lifting a container to its underbelly, its rear wheels already starting to rise off the ground a little. When its four wheels separated from the deck, Major Taguchi caught a glimpse of something white in its window. Yoshizumi was waving, that Meerschaum pipe in his hand. Taguchi waved back at him and then walked off toward his cabin, crossing the rear deck, which was as crowded as it had been during the preparation for departure.
Clouds were roiling up far beyond the Prince Olav coast. He could feel in his skin the start of a sudden drop in pressure as the cold became more severe. Before he entered his cabin, he looked back across the icy plain and saw above the station the brilliant flag of the Rising Sun flapping in strong beams of light from its lamps. From the cluster of white bubble-domes, he could see three snowmobiles approaching—burdened heavily with people who had come to see them off—going over puddle after puddle. When he listened closely to the voices barking and reverberating from the speakers on top of the vehicles, he could make out the melody of “Auld Lang Syne.” Major Taguchi grimaced slightly and returned to his cabin.
Shiretoko’s steam whistle roared again, this time signaling the thirty-minute mark before she would put out to sea again.
3. Seven Degrees, Twenty-four Minutes East
It happened around the time that Shiretoko was setting out from the waters of Ongul Island, heading back through the packed ice along the trail it had broken earlier.
A night train emerged into Italy, having departed from France and traveled through the Mont Cenis Tunnel beneath the snow-ravaged Alps. The assistant driver saw the bright flash of an explosion in the northern mountains on the near side of Torino. Immediately, he used the onboard telephone to report it to the Torino police.
An investigation was made after the winds had died down the following day. The crash site was on an Alpine slope about thirty kilometers west of Torino. It was surmised that the airplane had been flying blind in the middle of the snowstorm, and because the wind had suddenly begun to blow from the southwest during the night, its pilot had misjudged his course and been blown northward, to finally crash in a difficult Alpine crossing. The blackened bodies of the passengers—three in number—were discovered in the wreckage of the cockpit. Two engines and various fragments were scattered across a kilometer of snowy slope, but the airframe itself had cleanly burned. From the few fragments of its body that remained, investigators learned that it had had a fully wooden airframe, and this caught the attention of one assistant inspector who had in the past had dealings with Interpol.
A request went out to all the nations of Europe for information regarding the downed airplane, but when no plane was found that matched its description and its nationality remained unknown, the incident began to draw suspicion. An information officer attached to NATO arrived, and it became apparent that the black paint on the fragments was made for confusing radar waves, which generated a buzz of interest among the spy and intelligence agencies of all the European nations.
Was this a spy surveillance craft, like the infamous U2? they wondered.
In the end, however, it became clear that they would not be finding any clues.
Right around that time, Professor Gregor Karlsky, who had been working for the military in secret, was discovered at the Brighton home of his sister-in-law, where he had committed suicide by cutting the artery in his left wrist. MI6 came out to investigate. Nobody, however, thought to connect an airplane crash in the Alps to the suicide of a professor five hundred kilometers away. However, MI6—which was in terms of implacability on par with the Israeli Mossad—slowly, steadily began to reel in the threads it was eyeing so suspiciously.
Beside the wreckage of the crashed airplane, smashed against exposed boulders, its lid blown off, its body torn apart and twisted, there lay the scattered remains of a duralumin trunk. Though it appeared as though all of its contents had burned up in the explosion, a dozen or so meters away, a thin metal plate lay in the snow. Its blue plastic coating was mostly destroyed, and it retained only a faint hint of its former cylindrical shape. In the snow nearby was a boulder on which broken shards of silver-plated glass lay scattered about, sparkling in the sunshine. The tiny glass shards occasionally crunched under the shoes of the investigators and bystanders who had gathered. Under their weight, the sparkling bits of glass were ground into a fine powder. What bits remained stuck were mostly tracked around among the snow and the rocks when the investigators and onlookers went back down the mountain.
In almost no time afterward, the final cold wave of that year hit. The wreckage of that strange wooden airplane had been carried away for the investigation, but the bits of powdered glass remained where they were, under a layer of snow that just barely covered them.
Then …
When Old Man Winter’s onslaught had finally subsided, the number of sunny days over the Alps began to increase. The snow dividing Italy and France, which lay between the two high peaks of Mont Blanc and Mont Viso, began to melt slightly, and that water was gathered into the Fiume Po which runs west to east across the fertile Lombardia Plain and empties into the Adriatic Sea to the south of Venice.
The railway that passes by Italy’s northern entry point of Torino ran west by way of Milan, passing through Venice, Trieste, Beograd, and Sofia on the way to Istanbul, gateway to Asia, then turning southwest, past Genoa and the eastern coast of Italy on the way to Rome and Napoli. To the east, it ran through Lyon and Dijon to Paris, heading into the very heart of Europe. From Milan, there was also a line that ran through the famous Simplon Tunnel to arrive at Lausanne and Geneva in Switzerland. All of middle and eastern Europe was bound together in a net of railways. In the great cities of Europe—Rome, Paris, Geneva—there were international airports where streams of people flew down from the sky and back up into it, flowing like great rivers …
It was yet a little early for the snow to thaw. This aged planet spun round and round through the blackness of space, its axis tilted to about twenty-three point five degrees as it continued on the recursive journey it had made billions of times already, its axis of rotation gradually nearing the point of the spring equinox.
SPRING
1.March
Around two o’clock in the afternoon on March 13, on the road leading from Civitavecchia to Rome, a fancy sports car was involved in an accident.
The car was an Alfa Romeo gas turbine “Barca Volante.” A tractor trailer hit the edge of its bumper, barely avoiding a head-on collision, and pushed it into a guard rail. According to the testimony of the truck driver, the sports car had been doing about ninety kilometers per hour on a straight road when it had suddenly started weaving as though the driver were drunk. It had run right over the centerline, and panicking, the truck driver had swerved to avoid a collision and then slammed on the brakes. Thanks to the fact that the bumpers had caught on one another, the sports car had managed to avoid going over the guard rail. Two or three eyewitnesses corroborated the trucker’s testimony.
This was an unusual accident because there were as yet very few turbo cars on the road. The scene was quite terrible. The rear part of the Fiat engine had been ripped open by the shock of plowing into the guard rail. The turbine blades that had flown out of it were stuck in the back of the trailer and in the asphalt like silver needles. However, the two passengers had been separated from the engine by a protective steel p
late set behind it, and had thus managed to avoid being skewered. By the time the driver of the truck had run to the other car, its driver was already dead. To lower the likelihood of dying in an accident, flexible steering columns were installed in almost any high-performance automobile and were assisted by numerous driver-protection and shock-absorption features that activated at the slightest bending of the wheel. At first glance, the driver of the sports car had appeared to be uninjured, aside from his right ankle, which was stuck in the bent body of the car.
Even so, the man was unmistakably dead. His leaden face hung low, and there was no longer any pulse in his forward-thrust arms. The glamorous platinum blonde in the side seat appeared to have sustained far worse injuries. She had not been wearing her seatbelt, and her face was covered in blood from where her forehead had struck the windshield. Her clothing was torn here and there, exposing a terrible laceration, and her chest was visibly collapsed from where it had struck the guardrail. A ruptured lung was blowing out bubbles of blood.
Even so, the woman was alive. An ambulance raced to the scene, and when the emergency crew rescued the woman from the twisted, warped body of the car, she was dripping blood from her mouth, continuing to mutter all the while:
Virus: The Day of Resurrection Page 5