Virus: The Day of Resurrection

by Sakyo Komatsu

  “Tonio … Tonio … oh, stop it … what’s wrong with you … ?”

  There were two reasons why this accident drew so much attention and left such an unusually detailed record. The first reason was the identity of the man who died. A film and television heartthrob, Antonio Sevellini had been a world-class actor, known for his cosmopolitan, playboy lifestyle and taste for luxury. As if that weren’t enough, the woman in the car with him was a call girl who had once achieved international notoriety due to her role in a NATO spying incident. Because she had been in the midst of a passionate love affair with Tonio—and because Tonio was the lover of a Middle Eastern princess whom it was rumored he would soon marry—the scandal-loving public went into overdrive at the news of his death. A call girl implicated in a spy case, a Middle Eastern princess, an international movie star—theories of conspiracy and assassination involving these three abounded, although the police authorities investigating the accident apparently viewed it as nothing more than a bad turn of luck that had nothing to do with scenarios suggested by juicy gossip.

  The second reason for all the attention was Alfa Romeo, the automaker that had built the car. Their Barca Volante was the world’s first practical two-hundred-kilo-class gas turbine sports car, and questions still lingered regarding its safety and handling. The automakers of Europe and America had all been developing concept cars for a new class of vehicles that could maintain a steady two hundred kilometers per hour. This was because they were looking ahead to the “Eurasian Highway”—a giant, two-hundred-meter-wide roadway begun on nearly a billion dollars’ credit and investments from almost every nation, to start in Paris and continue in a nearly straight line through Luxembourg, Berlin, Warsaw, and Minsk before finally terminating in Moscow. The trouble with building cars in that class had involved the endurance of the tire and axle areas and the output of the engine. In the case of the engine, a rotary design made in West Germany had been considered the favorite to develop the industry standard; as for cracking the wheel problems, the likely contenders had been the Rolls Royce hovercraft and the Curtiss-Wright aircar from America, which had brought about fundamental change in the way that cars ran.

  In the midst of all this, however, Italy’s Alfa Romeo, an automaker famous for its sports cars and racecars, had unexpectedly unveiled its Barca Volante—a gas-turbine car with a maximum speed of two hundred forty kilometers per hour. The world had caught its collective breath at the sight of its myriad new features. The first thing that caught the eye of the press was its incredibly lightweight Fiat Virgo gas turbine. In city traffic, the stream of hot, rapidly moving exhaust from the turbine blew mostly downward against the ground thanks to a turbulence plate, but out on the highway, where speeds exceeded two hundred kilometers per hour, it blew directly from the rear, giving a boost to the car’s speed, just like a turbo prop. Because the blades of the low-pressure turbine were fitted with the epoch-making changeable pitch device, the shift in output from zero to full power was truly smooth. Equipped with Goodyear’s heat and abrasion resistant, elastic fluororesin tires, internal anti-slip plates, an optional autodriver that could be used both in city traffic and during high speed travel, automatic switchover to power steering, numerous new features for protecting the driver, plus a radar alarm and night vision for foggy nights, this high-performance automobile was touted as having stability of speed and drivability equal to a motorboat at two hundred twenty kilometers per hour.

  Beaten to the punch, the other automakers were naturally on the lookout for opportunities to nitpick and criticize the new vehicle.

  Barca Volante’s fully loaded deluxe model had just been announced in early March, and only three had as yet been sold to private citizens in Europe, among whom was Tonio, who—in recognition of his international fame and the skill he had displayed in the former Le Mans auto race—had been enjoying a test drive, as it were, at half the regular price.

  PLAYBOY DRIVER IN FIRST TURBINE AUTO CRASH was the headline splashed over front pages all across Europe. The R&D and sales departments at Alfa Romeo went white in their collective face, and an investigation was launched into the cause of the accident. Had it been some flaw or defect in the automobile? Or had it all been the driver’s fault?

  Witnesses all claimed that in spite of the straight road, Tonio hadn’t been going all that fast. Ninety kilometers per hour, maybe less. The traffic accident experts who investigated the case said the same thing. The most eloquent testimony of this came from the car’s speedometer, whose needle had remained stuck at eighty-five.

  The odometer showed that the car had not yet gone fifteen hundred kilometers. Taking that into account, what could the cause have been? For it to have crashed so soon and at such a low speed—was there some fatal flaw in the steering system? And what had happened to the driver protection system they were so proud of, said to be on par with that of a Mach 3-capable jet?

  Each and every bit of information that came in seemed to be nothing but bad news for Alfa Romeo. On top of that, hearsay began to surface that sounded at first blush spectacularly bad for the company. The eyewitnesses were in agreement with one another, saying things like, “It looked like Tonio had lost control of the steering wheel.” Also, people who had seen Tonio driving from various spots along the sidewalk averred that, “Tonio had this incredibly glamorous woman sitting right beside him, but it was like he was taking the test for his driver’s license—he was clinging to the wheel without batting an eye at her.” Even the guy who had topped off his kerosene at a petrol stand in Civitavecchia said he was “driving extremely carefully.”

  From this, it did not appear that he had lost control of the vehicle due to any passion between him and “Ms. M.”

  A story underscoring that point emerged by way of Tonio’s family doctor in Milano. Some years ago, Tonio had narrowly escaped death in an accident at the Le Mans race, and he had afterward developed (and striven earnestly to conceal) a mild phobia of high speeds. “Ever since that day, he was always a careful driver,” the doctor said.

  However, when he had been approached with the offer of a half-price Barca Volante, Tonio, being possessed of quick-draw linga such as had not been seen since the days of Errol Flynn, had found himself unable to turn down this phallic totem worshipped by women the world over and had thus made a show of accepting the offer gladly, though internally he had been conflicted.

  Taking these factors into account, the only way left to learn about the circumstances of this bizarre accident was to hear them directly from the mouth of Ms. M, who was hospitalized in Rome. Doctors made a preliminary announcement that Tonio’s cause of death was cardiac arrest caused by instantaneous neural paralysis resulting from the impact of the crash—in other words, a heart attack brought on by shock—but this was a little baffling, because it was known that Tonio had been in extremely good physical and mental condition up until that point, and that his heart in particular had been in fine shape. “It was probably because of the blow he took to the solar plexus from the steering wheel,” appended the already doddering and senile forensic specialist. Yet it seemed odd that Tonio, who had never thought twice about getting into brawls even while groggy and plastered, would be done in by a single blow to the body. Besides, this was Alfa Romeo’s vaunted bendable steering wheel. And so it was that the efficacy of the safety wheel—which should retreat softly like a feather futon if the driver’s body strikes it—became a target of heavy criticism.

  Because of one thing after another, Alfa Romeo was stuck grinding its teeth for a week. On the eighth day, Ms. M had finally recovered to a point at which visits could be permitted. For all their spectacle, Ms. M’s injuries were less serious than they appeared. Even her head injuries had not damaged her brain or skull, and the sunken place in her chest was not—from the standpoint of modern medical technology—life-threatening. On the eighth day, an investigator from Alfa Romeo, having kept the hospital under siege all week, leapt up when word was given that a visit would be allowed.

&nb
sp; “Wait just a moment, please,” the attending physician said. “She’s still suffering from a strong psychological shock, you know. Please limit this visit to one person, for no more than fifteen minutes.”

  “You’ve gotta be kidding!” cried the investigator, as did all the newspaper reporters who had been thronging in with her from the start.

  “Since when is only one person allowed?”

  “Everybody, wait just a minute,” said the inspector in charge of the accident investigation. “Right now, please let the police take her statement first. It doesn’t sound like Ms. M is ready to be answering a lot of obnoxious questions yet. So first and foremost, we’ll be asking her about what happened, and that’s all. At least save the morning-after talk about her and Tonio until she can sit in a wheelchair. In exchange, I’ll let you listen to what Ms. M has to say by way of this wireless microphone. Tape it, and then do whatever you need to do.”

  Some called this a high-handed abuse of authority, and as a result there was some brief trouble, but in the end it was agreed that the detective would go as representative, while the Alfa Romeo investigator and the members of the press remained glued to the speakers in the waiting room.

  The inspector’s voice came from the speaker: “Are you feeling better, Ms. M?”

  “Yes, thank you,” replied an unexpectedly strong, if coquettish-sounding voice. “I’m very … well. But my face. I wonder if these wounds will heal completely.”

  The doctor’s voice sounded over the speakers. “If you wish, we can make you even more beautiful than before. Though you’re lovely enough already.”

  “Do you feel well enough to talk for a few minutes?” asked the inspector. “I’d like you to tell me about what was going on in the car at the time of the accident. A simple explanation will be fine. Just so we can understand the circumstances a little better. And in particular, so we can establish for sure that the truck driver was not responsible.”

  “The man in the trailer was not to blame,” Ms. M said crisply. “It was all Tonio’s fault.” Suddenly, she began to cry bitterly. “It was terrifying … truly terrifying. Nothing like that had ever happened to me before.”

  “Easy, now,” the attending physician said. “It’s all right. You’re completely safe now.”

  “What did Tonio do?”

  “Well, I want to say up front, there’s nothing between Tonio and me … it’s true,” Ms. M said through her tears. “We first met last winter in Lausanne, and then by coincidence I ran into him again. It was about a month ago. After that, we went to Monaco, and Tonio and I both won quite a bit of money. He called me his goddess of luck. We were together as far as Genoa. I was in Livorno when Tonio went to pick up the new car. Later, he called and said he’d drive me to Rome …”

  “Nothing between them, eh?” sneered a reporter from Paris Match. “Hah! A whole month wandering around together on the Ligurian coast? Any way you shake it, that falls into ‘hot and heavy’ territory.”

  “That’s enough about Tonio,” said the inspector, her voice patient. “Please tell us about the accident.”

  “Yes, well … when we left Civitavecchia, Tonio was feeling perfectly well. He’d gone to bed early the night before.”

  This elicited a snort of laughter from somewhere in the press corps. The news that Tonio had been well had the Alfa Romeo investigator biting the frills on her hat. “Hey, look at that …” said one of the reporters, nudging another who stood nearby. “How much you wanna bet she eats that Borsalino before she’s done talking?”

  “… the new car was so amazing that the boy at the petrol stand had his mouth hanging open for a full minute. Even so, Tonio drove like he was afraid of it. He went at a crawl in the city, and when we came out onto the highway, he made sure his seatbelt was on tight and would hardly speed up at all. I told him I’d heard these cars could do over two hundred, and maybe I shouldn’t have, but I told him to go faster. But that man—he would only go up to around fifty or sixty on average, and other cars kept passing us. For a man who said he was a Le Mans racer, I thought he would be a little more masculine. Finally, Tonio said he’d open her up once we got onto a long, straight stretch of road. No, he didn’t in the least look like he was particularly frightened. He seemed relaxed, and he was even singing a song. But he never once turned to look at me, and he didn’t reach out to touch me either. I was a little irritated and was sitting pretty far away from Tonio in the seat.”

  “He may have had a body like a Volante,” someone murmured, “but when it came to engine performance …”

  “Still, he seems to have been fine up to about a hundred,” said someone else.

  “Sssh!”

  “Pretty soon we got on a straight road. Tonio said, ‘Here we go!’and stepped on the pedal. He was leaning over the steering wheel just a little. It was a truly incredible car, and we were doing over eighty in no time. And that’s when …” Suddenly, her voice grew a little shrill and trailed off. For a time, there was only the sound of her sucking in air as she breathed.

  “I saw the truck coming from far away … and that’s when Tonio gave a kind of little shout, and then just suddenly hung his head and his body slumped against the steering wheel, and slipped … and we swerved so sharply I thought I would be thrown from the car … and then the truck was right in front of my eyes … this huge tractor trailer the size of a mountain was … I screamed, ‘Tonio! Tonio! What’s wrong with you? Stop it!’ ”

  There was an earsplitting shout from the speaker.

  “Ms. M!” cried the doctor’s voice. “Get an injection ready.”

  “Ms. M!” urged the inspector again and again. “Hang on, Ms. M!”

  The reporters all looked at one another.

  “Well, sounds like that’s it for today,” said one. “But at any rate, it’s clear now that the cause of the crash had something to do with Tonio.”

  “It was probably cerebral anemia,” another reporter opined. “Caused by freaking out in a car that was just too awesome. Alfa Romeo will be relieved to hear their car wasn’t defective.”

  They were all already moving away from the speaker. Rather odd noises had emanated from it for a few moments, but now they stopped. Presently, the inspector returned from the direction of the intensive care ward with an oddly stiff, sullen expression on his face. Everyone crowded in around him.

  “Hey, Inspector!” called one of the reporters. “Ms. M was in hysterics! Has she calmed down any?”

  The inspector glared back at all of them silently.

  “How about it? Can we get a direct interview tomorrow?”

  “That won’t be possible,” the inspector said through twisted lips. “Ms. M is dead.”

  “What?” Reflexively, the reporters all looked at one another. “But the doctor said she was completely safe now.”

  “But just now, she died.” The inspector’s face was shaded with gloom. “It wasn’t due to her injuries, though; she suffered a heart attack.”

  This was the first case to appear in the public record of what appeared to be it. There may have been other prior instances that were ruled simple heart attacks or written off as sudden deaths whose causes were unclear, but it is nearly certain that this case of March 13 was the first that can be pointed to as being unmistakably it. This is because a written record of the investigation remains at Alfa Romeo—intended by the investigator from that company to be the last word on the matter—in which she contended that Antonio Sevellini was already dead before the accident. The fact that Tonio had few external injuries, and the results of the autopsy showed no internal effects of the shock that could be pointed out as a clear cause of death, hinted at this possibility. If the driver protection system that the company had labored so diligently over had proven to be useless at less than ninety kilometers per hour, it would have had a negative effect on sales from that point on. When the pathologist’s statement came, it was unusually late, unusually vague, and speckled with wiggle words and obfuscations. Because of this,
the company investigator decided to try to contact him to clarify some points.

  She never got the chance. It appeared clear that the elderly doctor had harbored doubts about the cause of Tonio’s death from the moment he had inserted his scalpel. It was learned from his assistant that the doctor had taken samples from Tonio’s brain and medulla oblongata. However, before the doctor could share his thoughts with his assistant in detail, he left for Switzerland on urgent business.

  Because she had another investigation to deal with herself in England, she decided to give up and retreat for a while. Several days later, she sent another telegram from her destination to Rome, requesting a meeting at his convenience. From Rome, she received an extremely simple reply.

  DR. D. DIED THREE DAYS AGO.

  2. The First Week of April

  April—it was spring in the northern hemisphere, autumn in the southern hemisphere, and in Antarctica preparations were already under way for wintering.

  “So who’s your money on?” asked Tatsuno, the engine technician, clapping Yoshizumi on the shoulder in the passageway leading to Dome 3.

  “For what?” Yoshizumi asked.

  “The pennant race. The season’s about to start.”

  “Toei in the Pacific League. And in the Central League, Hanshin.”

  Tatsuno grinned wryly as he wrote Yoshizumi’s picks down on a list. He was editor-in-chief of the Showa Station News, but he also doubled as its entertainment and sports columnist. He had his ham radio operator’s license, so he was able to get news from Japan early. “I don’t know about Hanshin,” said Tatsuno, with a shrug of his shoulders. “I think the Giants are gonna go all the way this year.”

  Yoshizumi didn’t really know much about baseball, or care. He was only thinking about all the machines that needed to be set up before they were snowed in for the winter—the instruments he would use to take readings of the earth’s crust. Seismometers were to be set up here and there on the exposed bedrock. Equipped with transistor radios and mercury batteries, they would provide him with readings throughout the winter. He needed to decide on the setup points soon and get them installed.