Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,59

of the damage.

As luck would have it, another earthquake struck a little more than twenty minutes after the survey started. Pachinko balls flooded back into the northeastern block and trapped one of the surveyors there before returning to the southwestern block. The impetus breached another bulkhead, through which the balls flowed into the next block on the southwestern side. Unable to rescue their colleague owing to the obvious danger, the other two surveyors hurried back to the surface, where they called for help from the police and fire services.

With this, a great commotion broke out. Nearly all police and fire service personnel were mobilized, and Rory O’Storm even had to ask for support from the metropolis, since there weren’t enough personnel in Marine City alone. The trapped surveyor was rescued but was in a critical condition, with bruises all over his body. An aftershock during the rescue operation caused further damage to the bulkheads, seriously injuring two of the rescuers and lightly injuring three more, while another died of asphyxiation when his bronchial tubes were filled with pachinko balls.

It wasn’t until the following morning – when Caprice Le Mesurier, learning of the commotion in a memo from the City offices but not thinking for a moment that an investigation into the corruption would start that very same day, was in the middle of berating her husband for not hitting on his spirit-level idea a day earlier – that it was discovered that there were more than a hundred breach points in the bulkhead walls, and that the walls used for the bulkheads were thinner than specified on the design drawings.

The angle of tilt in the city’s elevation was now four degrees. Readers may like to equip themselves with protractors from this point on. At an angle of four degrees, danger is imminent, and in fact, this was when serious accidents started occurring all over the City.

The roads of Marine City were mostly made of concrete, laid horizontally. That morning, Justa Plagiarist went out for a stroll and, as usual, saw a boy going to school on his skateboard. Justa was still unaware of the tilt and, astonished by the unusually high speed at which the boy was travelling, inadvertently called out:

“Oy! You’ll have an accident! Stop!”

The boy turned to look at him. “I can’t!” he cried.

Justa closed his eyes. A lorry approached from the opposite direction. When he looked again, he could see the boy disappearing under the lorry, still squatting on his skateboard. Thank goodness it was a high-floored vehicle, thought a relieved Justa, before turning back to have another look. The boy, who’d now emerged from under the lorry and was sliding into the distance on his skateboard, was headless. He’d been cleanly decapitated by something protruding under the lorry’s chassis.

With the sirens of police cars and ambulances wailing from early evening until well into the night, most people in Marine City had by now realized that something was afoot. In spite of this, Mayor Fedora Last ordered that the true situation should not be announced until the end of an Emergency Meeting, which started in the early morning. As a result, life went on as usual in various parts of the City, and this led to numerous accidents.

The supermarket operated by Kapital Interest opened for business at ten o’clock. Customers who’d been enticed by newspaper advertisements rushed onto escalators to reach the bargain sale counters. The south-facing escalators, originally inclined at an angle of thirty degrees, had now tilted to thirty-four degrees, while the steps themselves were inclined at four degrees. An obese middle-aged woman at the head of the throng, stepping off the upwards escalator on the first floor, slipped on the grooved cleat and fell flat on her backside. This set off a landslide, as two shoppers on each step behind her toppled backwards in a domino effect. Shrieking like exotic birds, scores of women became piled up in clumps at various points of the escalator, which continued to travel upwards. As it did, the women on top of each pile were hurled over the handrails and down onto the ground floor below. Some fell into glass showcases. Store personnel managed to stop the escalator, but the impetus of this set off another collapse among the clumps of shoppers, leaving scores of them with major injuries on the ground floor. It was a disaster.

Reports of accidents came flying in as the Emergency Meeting continued. Besides the escalator catastrophe, there were two incidents in which runaway