Salmonella men on Planet Porno: stories - By Yasutaka Tsutsui Page 0,83

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