Caprice smiled wryly. “That’s about the best you can come up with, isn’t it. Look what happened last time, when you thought of that, what was it called, that funny thing. You made yourself a laughing stock.”
“You mean the painometer. There was nothing funny about it. The Director merely said it would be difficult to commercialize.” When it came to matters technological, Rod had no thoughts for anything else. “I figured they might need them in hospitals and the like. That’s why I worked out the units of pain. Look!” He slapped himself hard on the cheek. “Whenever you do that to me, the pain level is one kiltago. Of course, pain thresholds differ from person to person. It’s like the average body temperature. The painometer calculates the degree of pain based on the heat emitted from the affected area, the sensation in the tactile region of the brain, the pulse and so on. The first models will be very primitive, but they’ll gradually increase in precision, and then I think everyone will be interested and want to buy one.”
Caprice stared blankly at Rod as he continued his discourse. Not that she was listening to a word he said. No, she was thinking, “Oh dear. Why did I have to marry this man? He’s so brainless, unrefined and cack-handed, slow on the uptake, so dull that he can only think of one thing. But, well… maybe he’s just right for me.”
At around the same time, the pianist Histe Rica was giving a recital in Marine City Hall, a 200-seater venue. Soon after she started performing Bartók’s Improvisations for Piano, her grand piano started to edge, little by little, across the stage towards the auditorium. The first to notice this was a young lighting technician whose job was to train the fresnel lens spotlight on the artiste. Ms Rica herself failed to notice the movement, as her chair was shifting along with the piano. Moreover, since the purpose of a fresnel lens is to soften the edges of the light, the piano’s right leg was only a few inches from the edge of the stage when the lighting technician realized what was happening. As he was desperately wondering how to inform the artiste, the piano plunged into the auditorium with a deafening roar, performed a half-turn with its three legs pointing upwards, then described another half turn that broke its legs and pedals, hurling them into the air, scattering the hammers and keys, and causing the strings to fly out. The momentum sent Histe Rica sprawling, exposing her fleshy white thighs and lemon-yellow underwear, and leaving her upside down at the foot of the stage. Three women in the front row were either struck by the lid of the piano or crushed under it. They suffered ruptured organs, skull fractures, and smashed faces, and all died instantly. Another woman was decapitated by a snapped piano wire, while twelve others nearby suffered non-fatal injuries of varying degrees. Panic broke out in the Hall, which was virtually full for this recital. After all, Histe Rica had a music school in 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 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.
&nb
sp; 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 wheelchairs rolled down the slope in front of a hospital and were hit by moving cars on the road outside, and nine incidents in which people collided with each other after slipping and falling from stairs, resulting in contusions, fractures, badly bitten tongues, and other injuries. Some were drowned and others went missing when six anglers, including children and seniors, slid into the sea from a seafront angling arena. And so on, and so on, and so on.
The meeting continued until late afternoon. At one point, Fedora Last – at the stern insistence of Rory O’Storm – reluctantly issued an order prohibiting the use of escalators. However, she forcibly deferred measures designed to prevent other kinds of accidents, saying it was “too early to tell”. The meeting ended with the following resolutions.
1. All residents of Marine City will sooner or later come to know of the City’s tilt. As such, no special steps shall be taken to report it.
2. As for accidents caused by the tilt, measures shall only be taken in serious cases. The others shall be ignored as they are too insignificant.
3. Until the damage at the bottom of Marine City is repaired, City employees shall not officially admit to the existence of the tilt in word or deed.
4. Marine City employees shall not be permitted to move home or evacuate outside the City.
5. City employee Caprice Le Mesurier, currently under police investigation on suspicion of corruption, is to be released immediately, since her services are needed in responding to this emergency.
At the conclusion of the meeting, Rory O’Storm – the only man to attend it – was utterly enraged and announced his resignation.
On the same day, Rod Le Mesurier toured stationery shops and builders’ merchants in the City to accept their many orders for spirit levels, protractors, set squares, T-squares, and other sundry instruments, then returned to his office to order them from the company warehouse. One week later, the warehouse had no stock left at all. By the time the City’s residents knew of the tilt and were falling over themselves to buy these items because they needed to stop their furniture moving – as a result of which the products were soon sold out – the tilt had already become so severe that such measuring instruments were utterly useless. Even without earthquakes or tidal waves, the weight of the pachinko balls leaning to the southwest was enough to set off a chain reaction of breaches in the bulkhead walls. It was far too dangerous to even attempt repair work. With no contractors willing to accept the work, the progressive destruction of the ballast tanks was allowed to continue. The angle of inclination increased to eleven degrees. There was a series of accidents involving overturned vehicles, and the number of cars crossing from the metropolis decreased. But Mayor Fedora Last took no measures to cope with these accidents. Her reasoning was that it was perfectly normal to have sloping roads.
It was the punctilious Miss Loyalty who was most annoyed by the tilt in her home, which put her in a state of nervous exhaustion. Though not actually an employee of the City, she was a member of the women’s group, and had pledged allegiance to Fedora Last as an external member of the Mayor’s Brain Trust. As such, she wouldn’t even dream of leaving Marine City. She fastened down all her furniture like a woman possessed, adjusted her picture frames, and fixed them at an angle to match the overall tilt of her apartment. Then she started walking with her body inclined at an angle of precisely eleven degrees to the southwest, or, to be more exact, to the south-southwest-by-west, ensuring that she remained perpendicular to the ground. The same was true when she stood still. In this way, Miss Loyalty could demonstrate that Marine City was not tilting, as she was still standing perpendicular to the ground, enabling her also to confirm her loyalty to Fedora Last. What’s more, she maintained this eleven-degree inclination when she commuted into the metropolis to work every day. Thus she was able to assert that it was not Marine City that was tilting, but the rest of the world.
Soon, others who worked in the metropolis started to copy Miss Loyalty, and tried to find spiritual balance by tilting their bodies. As a result, many people could now be seen in the metropolis walking with their bodies tilted eleven degrees to the southwest. Not only did this mark them out as residents of Marine City, but the direction in which they tilted was also a useful aid to judging compass bearings.
Early on Sunday – the day the tilt increased from eleven to twelve degrees – Professor McLogick prepared to move out of the City. He didn’t keep many books at home anyway, and his furniture easily fitted into a single removal van. He’d nearly finished loading the furniture, with the help of two removal men and two of his students, when they were spotted by some local housewives who’d just got up and now came to surround them. Most of them were sympathizers of the Mayor, and had already tried various tricks to stop people escaping. This time, however, their adversary was Profe
ssor McLogick. They knew that their persuasion would be to no avail, that the tables would only be turned and he’d start lecturing them, and that, if anything, they’d end up wishing he would just leave. So all they did, at first, was to surround the truck from a distance and loudly hurl abuse.
“So you’re running away then!”
“Coward! Call yourself a man?!”
“Frightened of a little slope, are we?”
But Professor McLogick wouldn’t be Professor McLogick if he didn’t have his say at this point. “Ladies,” he called out loudly. “You’d better leave quickly too. The buildings will start falling soon. After all, it stands to reason that they haven’t been built properly, with all this bribery and corruption.”
From among the housewives stepped one woman. She strode forwards, stopped in front of the Professor, and slapped him hard on the face.
It was Miss Loyalty. The sound of the slap rang out through the fresh morning air.
“What do you think you’re doing?!” screamed one of the students, full of youthful vigour. He ran straight up to Miss Loyalty and punched her to the ground.
All hell broke loose. The house was in the middle of an estate. One look from their upper floor balconies told the other residents what was happening right away. Housewives came swarming in like wasps from all directions.
The Professor jumped onto the loading platform at the back of the van. “Get in quick! Get in quick!” he yelled at the students, who were fighting with the women over some boxes that hadn’t been loaded yet. “I don’t need those. Get in quick. If we’re caught by the police, we’ll all be executed!”
“Jesus!”
“Move it!”
The removal men, shaken at the thought of execution, started up the van in a panic. The students managed to free themselves from the women, and jumped onto the platform in the nick of time. The housewives, being women, declined to chase the van in a bid to stop it leaving. And so, Professor McLogick made his escape from Marine City.