Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,58
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