Salmonella Men on Planet Porno (Vintage Contemporaries) (22 page)

“Oh, you mean
that
Dr Kawashita?” answered the faint voice of a man at the other end, when he’d at last understood what I was saying. “Dr Kawashita the doctor? Yes, he’s with the police right now.”

“The police? Why’s he with the police?”

“Haven’t you seen the papers? A woman was horribly murdered here last night. Three doctors who were attending the conference, including Dr Kawashita, are helping the police as key witnesses. So I can’t really say when they’ll be coming back, I’m afraid.”

Without access to television or newspapers, I was completely unaware that such an incident had happened. If the doctor was being questioned by the police, this would be no time to discuss medicines, even if I did make contact. I abandoned the idea and replaced the receiver.

There was no sign of my trunk the following day either. Or the day after that. Ten days had passed since the trunk was sent. That day, the village headman’s wife called to inform me, in a roundabout way, that the whole village was starting to notice my wife’s immodest behaviour with the students.

Another five days passed. I was completely neglecting my work, spending whole days making long-distance phone calls here and there. Having finally lost patience with me and my complaining, whining and moaning, my wife took our child and returned to the mainland. Together with the five students. On the ferry.

Each time I argued violently with this person or that on the telephone, I thought I was going to die. I had palpitations eight times and stopped breathing four times. On three occasions, I was attacked by an intense heart pain that nearly made me lose consciousness. Each time, I fell and writhed on the floor in fear of imminent death.

At last, on the seventeenth day, there was a call from the Shimizu Branch to say the trunk had arrived. I’d asked them to call me as soon as it turned up.

“So, will it be here today?”

“Today’s ferry has already left, hasn’t it. So it’ll be on tomorrow’s,” said the gravelly voice.

“Why has it taken so long?”

“Because it came by road.”

“Why wasn’t it sent by rail?”

“How should I know,” he said, hanging up abruptly again.

The next day, I was waiting at the ferry landing stage a good hour before the ferry was due to arrive. A typhoon had passed from Kyushu to the Korean Peninsula, and the seas were rough. It wasn’t raining, but the wind continued to gather force as I waited.

At last, some thirty minutes behind schedule, the ferry came into view.

“It’s here!” I danced for joy at the end of the jetty. “That’s the one! That’s the boat that’s carrying my medicine!”

“But he can’t possibly berth here!” said the village headman, who’d come to stand behind me with several other villagers in their concern over the stormy weather.

“W-why’s that?” I asked in surprise.

“Because of the typhoon,” one of the villagers replied.

“That’s right. With the waves this high, if he tries to berth he could be smashed against the jetty and capsize,” the village headman explained.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I screamed. “I’m at the end of my tether, I tell you! I can’t wait any longer! All right – if the boat can’t berth, I’ll swim out to it!” I took off my jacket.

“Impossible!” The village headman and the other villagers hastily tried to hold me back. “Don’t do it! You’ll drown! No, before you drown, you’ll be smashed against the jetty and die of heart failure!”

“What do I care?! My heart can do what it likes! I need that medicine!” I shook myself free of their grasp and plunged deep down into the angrily billowing waves.

And that was when my crazy adventure started. I abandoned my family, packed in my job, crossed seven seas and traversed five continents in pursuit of a single package of medicine. I swam the English Channel naked, ran the Sahara Desert barefoot, fought off natives blowing poisoned darts in dense tropical jungle, grappled with a polar bear on the Arctic ice, and was caught in a gunfight between international agents trying to snatch my medicine on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Because that, you see, was my only way of staying alive.

I still haven’t found my medicine.

It was Yohachi, the odd-job man, who brought the Team Leader’s message. He wanted us all to attend an emergency meeting because Dr Shimazaki, an authority on botany and the only woman in our Research Team, was pregnant.

I looked up from my microscope. “Why must we have a meeting just because she’s pregnant?” I asked.

“How should I know?” Lingering for a moment near the door of the lab, Yohachi opened his gap-toothed mouth and laughed coarsely. He was surely about the same age as me, but looked more than ten years older.

“Tell him I’ll be right over,” I said, turning my attention back to the eyepiece.

“He said if you didn’t come straight away, I was to drag you there myself,” Yohachi announced in his thick, rude voice.

“God! He must be in a hurry,” I said, and reluctantly left my seat.

My ecosystems research lab, which also served as my living quarters, was a small makeshift structure near the edge of the Research Base. The Base was at the foot of Mount Mona, where up to ten similar buildings lay scattered about. In the middle of them stood the Research Centre, a two-storey building measuring about forty by forty feet. It was in fact a hastily erected affair that consisted only of the Team Leader’s living quarters and a Meeting Room. Mount Mona, so named by the first expedition to reach the planet, was a low-lying mountain formed primarily of andesite. When a stiff wind blew at night, the hollows and crevices on the
mountainsides made a noise that sounded like a woman moaning – hence the name.

I locked the door of the lab and went outside with Yohachi. Not that there were any burglars up there – but with so many freakish plants and creatures around, one couldn’t be too careful.

“Who’s the father then?” I asked Yohachi as we walked along.

Short enough already, Yohachi made himself shorter by hunching his back as he walked. He looked up at me with a sideways glance and grinned. “Who knows? Maybe it’s you, mate.”

“Not me,” I answered straight-faced, then thought for a minute. Yes, I was fairly sure.

A little orange sun began to set behind Mount Mona. It was the season when night and day alternated every two hours on this planet called “Nakamura” in the Kabuki solar system. Both the planet and the solar system had been discovered by Peter Nakamura, a second-generation Japanese who was a big fan of Kabuki theatre. There again, back on Earth it was more commonly known as “Planet Porno,” for which it was famous. The planet was inhabited by humanoid natives who lived in a country called Newdopia, about fifty miles west of the Base. They looked exactly the same as humans, with one major difference – they went around permanently naked.

It suddenly came to me. “It must be you,” I said. “You’ve been sleeping with Dr Shimazaki!”

Whereupon Yohachi’s expression was transformed. Lewd furrows appeared in the corners of his eyes, his mouth grotesquely distorted with lecherous imaginings. It was horribly distressing to see.

“I wish I could, mate!” he replied with an air of deepest torment. “I fancy her all right. God I wish I could.” He made a writhing motion, licked his lips – along with the saliva that flowed over them – and seemed on the verge of tears. “
God
I wish I could.”

Yohachi’s lechery was renowned throughout the Base. He would have nosebleeds if he didn’t have sex at least twice a day. In fact, he was sharing his quarters with a middle-aged woman he’d brought with him from earth. I’d always assumed she was his wife, but that appeared not to be the case.

Yohachi sighed once more. “I wish I could.”

“So it’s not you then.”

“I wish it was, mate.”

If it wasn’t Yohachi, who on earth could have impregnated that thirty-two-year-old, gentle, fair-skinned, unmarried, well-rounded beauty of a woman, Dr Suiko Shimazaki? Still without a clue, I opened the door to the Research Centre. Yohachi, for some reason, bounded off towards his quarters.

“I was about to crack the feeding habits of the false-eared rabbit!” I complained to the Team Leader on entering the Meeting Room. “Do we really have to debate the ins and outs of private sex acts by Team members here in the Centre?”

With the others yet to arrive, the Team Leader sat alone in the Chairman’s chair, his shoulders hunched around his thick neck as usual. “Firstly, this is no private matter,” he started. “Secondly, we don’t yet know whether it could rightly be called a sex act.”

I stood open-mouthed.

Before I could ask whether it was possible for a woman to become pregnant without engaging in a sex act, in walked Dr Fukada, the physician, and Dr Mogamigawa, the bacteriologist.

“There’s something there all right. It can’t be a phantom pregnancy,” reported Dr Fukada. “But it’s impossible to tell with radiology alone what exactly it is. She’s in her fourth month.”

“She’s been pregnant four months without knowing it? What sort of woman is she?!” I said, almost shouting. “Or perhaps she was deliberately hiding it?”

Ignoring my outburst, Dr Mogamigawa, an utterly humourless, solemn, stubborn old man who refused to recognize anything other than natural science, grimaced as he produced a weed that resembled a type of fern and placed it on the table. “This obscene plant was mixed up among the samples collected by Dr Shimazaki. I found it in her collecting case.”

I jumped up. “What? Widow’s incubus?! What’s that doing in these parts? It’s only supposed to grow west of Newdopia!”

“Correction. West of Lake Turpitude,” Mogamigawa said, glaring at me. “Dr Shimazaki went to the lake to collect plants, but failed
to notice that she’d collected the widow’s incubus along with the other samples. The microspores of the widow’s incubus must have penetrated her body. As you know, the androspores of this obscene plant stimulate the ovarian cells of higher vertebrates, and independently cause the growth of new individuals in utero.”

“But Dr Shimazaki is not a widow,” said the Team Leader.

Mogamigawa simply turned away in disdain, as if to say, W
hat has that to do with anything
. Dr Fukada took over instead.

“It was tentatively called widow’s incubus by a member of the First Expedition,” he explained. “Actually, it doesn’t matter if the host is a widow or not. It will attempt parthenogenesis with any woman, as long as she isn’t a virgin. Parthenogenesis literally means virgin generation, but in this case perhaps we should call it non-virgin generation. Ahaha. We don’t yet know why it fails to stimulate the ovarian cells of virgins, but it may have something to do with the quantity of estrogenic hormones secreted. And of course it should be no surprise that Dr Shimazaki is not a virgin,” he said with a smile. “After all, she
is
thirty-two. It would be harsh to cast aspersions on her just because she isn’t a virgin.”

“Hold on, I’m not casting anything on her,” said the Team Leader, stirring in his seat. “Well, there are only four of us – but let’s start the meeting anyway. Dr Shimazaki herself has declined to attend, on the grounds of embarrassment. Well, that’s only natural, considering how shy and demure she is. The geo-mineralogists are out surveying that obscene cloystone at the Hokomaka Pass on Mount Arasate.”

“As the matter demands immediate action, we should act right away. Ah! I appear to have said much the same thing twice. How embarrassing,” said Fukada, who, having written some thirty tedious novels as a hobby, posed as a man of letters. “Ahem. Proceeding to the main issue, pregnancy caused by widow’s incubus reaches full term in ten earth days. So, to amend the statement made by Dr Sona just now, Dr Shimazaki was pregnant for only four
days
without knowing it. In the two previous cases involving earth women, a member of the First Expedition miscarried on the seventh day, and a female doctor attached to the Base Construction
Team rather recklessly aborted her own pregnancy by curettage on the third day. But in Dr Shimazaki’s case, curettage is already out of the question, and we have no way of knowing whether she can miscarry or not. There is every chance that she will in fact give birth. However, Dr Shimazaki herself says that she does not want to.”

“Well, she would say that, wouldn’t she. Having a child fathered by a weed called widow’s incubus would bring disgrace to her long family line of notable scientists.”

“May we keep this discussion on a scientific level?,” said Mogamigawa, glaring at me again. “It is inconceivable that the androspores of widow’s incubus, having entered the body through the respiratory organs, would then proceed directly from there to the uterus. Rather, they merely give some kind of acid stimulus to the woman’s unfertilized ovum, and thereby induce the growth of a new individual. As such, the widow’s incubus has not directly fertilized Dr Shimazaki per se, and therefore cannot be said to have ‘fathered’ anything. All will be revealed when she gives birth, but I feel sure that the new individual will only have chromosomes from the mother’s side. It’s normal for human individuals born by parthenogenesis to lack a reproductive capacity, as Professor Yoishonovitch Sano states in his
History of Transparent Embryogeny in Humans
.”

“Well yes, that would be the normal way of thinking,” Fukada started in counter-argument. “But things aren’t always normal on this planet, or to be more exact,
things tend to veer from the normal towards the obscene
, if anything. There is every possibility that the spores of widow’s incubus could reach the uterus via the respiratory, digestive or circulatory organs, or what have you – without biodegrading, mind – and then find some means of infiltrating the uterus. Parthenogenesis is a perfectly normal method of reproduction in the animal kingdom, even on earth. So it wouldn’t be unthinkable for something as preposterous as embryonic fertilization by plant spores to occur on this infamous ‘Planet Porno’. When I said there was ‘something’ inside Dr Shimazaki’s uterus, what I meant was that it doesn’t necessarily have to be a human embryo.”

Mogamigawa’s face was still set in a grimace. “In principle, I agree with you when you call this an obscene planet. But I heard that the foetus miscarried by the female in the First Expedition did indeed appear to be human.”

“However—”

“The problem, however,” I intervened, hoping to speed the discussion along, “is neither the nature of Dr Shimazaki’s pregnancy, nor the identity of her foetus. Surely, it is how to prevent it from reaching full term.”

“Well, on that subject,” the Team Leader said with a nod in my direction, “I think there are two methods available. One is to remove whatever it is from her womb by Caesarean section.”

“We have no equipment for that,” groaned Fukada. “Of course, it can still be done, but I don’t like doing it. And the burden of opening Dr Shimazaki’s abdomen would be too great to bear.”

Fukada was attempting to shirk responsibility as usual. Mogamigawa cast a contemptuous eye in his direction, then turned to me. “Would you happen to know how the Newdopians prevent pregnancies caused by widow’s incubus?” he asked. “Or what measures they take when a pregnancy occurs? They must surely fall victim to it.”

“Yes, I think they do. The vegetation around Newdopia is characterized as having communities, or plant divisions, or anyway very large quantities of widow’s incubus. But since humans cannot enter Newdopia, we don’t yet know how the natives deal with such cases.”

The Team Leader leant forwards. “Then again, the second method I was considering was, in fact, for someone to go to Newdopia and somehow find out about it from the natives. It would also have value as scientific research, so it would be like killing two birds with one stone, as they say.”

“But they won’t let us in,” I said with a shake of the head, remembering how we were flatly refused permission to enter on a previous research mission. “Unless it’s someone who shares their mentality, that is. They’re pretty good at reading our minds, you know.” I turned to face Dr Fukada. “The quickest way would be for you to perform a Caesarean section, after all.”

Fukada immediately started to panic. “Well, yes, in the barbarian era they did such operations very crudely by hand, but now, well, it’s only performed under fully automated conditions using computer systems, and so, that is I mean, as a doctor, I don’t particularly, well, they don’t teach such things at medical school, and…”

Mogamigawa looked up at the ceiling as if to say,
So you can’t do it then
. I was equally disappointed.

“According to one report, some members of the First Expedition entered Newdopia and saw what it was like,” said the Team Leader to revive the discussion. “How did they manage that?”

“Because it was the first time the natives had seen human beings, I suppose. They didn’t realize that we were such an obscene race, and just let them in without thinking. By that, of course, I mean obscene from their point of view.”

“Obscene? They’re the obscene ones!” Mogamigawa said, wrinkling his cheeks in annoyance. “As far as I’ve heard, they openly have carnal relations with each other, outdoors in broad daylight, and they don’t much care who the partner is! Nor do they care where they do it – in the street, public squares, community halls, anywhere, great numbers of them together at the same time!”

“That’s exactly my point,” I replied, popping up a finger at Dr Mogamigawa. “It’s that very attitude, the attitude that sex acts are obscene and should be hidden from the eyes of others, that appears obscene to them. Looking at it from their point of view, I suppose they would feel distracted or inhibited if we watched their acts with that kind of attitude.”

“Are you saying you don’t find such things obscene?” Mogamigawa gave me a look laden with antipathy.

I blushed slightly. “No, I don’t find such things obscene.”

“In that case, why can’t you get in there?”

“Because I am obscene. Well no, in my case, I find it interesting and enjoyable to watch such things as an onlooker, call it voyeurism, peeping or whatever. But if you asked me to do such things in front of people, I suppose I would feel embarrassed, unnatural, self-conscious, and I wouldn’t be able to go through with it. They can
see right through my mental framework, and that’s why I would be refused entry.”