by Kōbō Abe
“What shall I do?” The girl, still lying curled on the chaise longue, looked up at me with a troubled expression.
“Can you swim? I think probably we’ll be diving underwater.”
“No, I can’t. And I can’t hold my beer very well, either—unlike him.”
“Then you shouldn’t come. You’d just end up an encumbrance.” As I went by, I gave her bottom a light slap. Without a flicker of expression, she sighed and said:
“You know, you’ve got to hide your feelings better than that.”
“Was it so obvious?”
“Just like a dog looking for a pat on the head.”
“You’ve got to be kidding.”
“I think he wants to start a new life. But don’t forget, he has only six months to live.”
From down below, mixed with the sound of someone passing water, came the noise of voices quarreling. Then a queer voice, with laughter in it. A pause, and then the roar of the toilet being flushed, like a subway train thundering by in the middle of the night.
“He seems nicer than he looks.”
“He’s a fairly complicated person,” she answered thoughtfully. “That may be the very reason why he acts so simpleminded.”
“Has he ever used violence on you?”
She put a hand on her hip where I had slapped her, and said nothing. From below, the shill’s voice boomed out, echoing through the hold.
“C’mon, Captain, let’s go!”
14
THE SHILL WENT FIRST,
CROSS BOW IN HIS ARMS
The shill went first, clutching the loaded crossbow in his arms, and I followed, holding a trigger-operated tear gas cylinder. Kicking aside the sprung trap, we cut across the work hold, our footsteps resounding. From habit I tried to muffle mine, but the shill strode boldly ahead, apparently eager to cover ground. Each step we took created its own echo. The sum effect was a loud pattering like the noise of falling raindrops.
“If we make this much noise they’ll hear us coming,” I said. “You know, whoever it was that got away before might have doubled back, and be waiting in ambush up ahead.”
“That’s okay,” he said. “As long as the enemy isn’t planning an all-out attack, it’s safer to make a lot of noise as you approach, whether it’s a bear you’re up against, or anything else.”
By the time we reached the top of the lift, I was panting. I stopped to lean against the wall and catch my breath, but the shill signaled me to hurry, indicating his watch. After a few more yards we reached a room of medium size (still easily as big as a school auditorium), with a split-level floor. Light from the work hold provided soft, indirect illumination, covering the walls with a thick velvety sheen. I planned to set up a periscope here someday for outdoor observation. For the present, taking advantage of the room’s soundproof structure, I used it to test-fire converted guns and mock bullets.
“We’re up so high now, the ground must be just overhead,” said the shill, switching on his cap light. His breathing remained unaffected by his exertion. He must have a liver the size of a cow’s, I thought, able to convert beer directly into water. It was hard to believe the man had only six months to live.
“Even so, there’s a good thirteen feet of solid rock up there, at the minimum,” I answered. “So the law says.”
“This is where the smell starts to get worse, notice?” he said.
Besides the passageway through which we had come, two other ceiling-high openings extended on right and left, separated by a wall of rock. The shill headed for the one on the right.
“You got through there with no difficulty before, did you?” I asked.
“Yes—why?”
“There’s another booby trap planted in there.”
This was one route I had figured an invader would be sure to take, and so, without begrudging the effort required to replace the laminated batteries once a month, I had installed a rather nasty device: a cylinder of cockroach spray, activated by an infrared sensor.
“Oh, yeah? I didn’t see anything.” He paused just before entering the passageway. “There was a trap where we just came through, I know, but that’s all. I swear I never saw anything else.”
He was telling the truth. The safety mechanism was intact—and that wasn’t all: the working part of the cylinder had been hardened with spray coagulant, so skillfully that the eye could scarcely detect anything amiss. This was the work of someone who knew all my secrets, I feared. How long had I been under surveillance? There was no denying that Sengoku was in a position to know or surmise a great deal about my traps, having had access to the list of goods I ordered.
“I wonder if all my traps have been tampered with,” I said.
“Looks that way,” said the shill as we pushed forward, our only source of light the beams emanating from our helmets. “If there were any traps in working order, they’d have caught the intruders, and there’d be nothing to fear. It all goes to show our coming on board wasn’t such a bad idea, after all. Am I right?”
Several yards ahead, the ceiling suddenly rose. On the left was a gentle flight of stairs, and straight ahead, an array of small, irregular cubicles like ancient cave dwellers’ homes. The results of numerous test bores here had apparently been uniformly disappointing, each soon abandoned.
“If the rubble were cleared away,” I said, “I thought this would make a good living area. All private rooms.”
“Great idea.” He turned around and grinned. “Put up steel bars and it would make a good isolation ward for violent patients.”
“You know, I’m sorry,” I apologized.
“What for?” We started down the stone staircase.
“I should have leveled with you from the start. There was never any question of how I planned to use this quarry. It’s got to do with the tickets to survival. You see, this will be a bomb shelter in case of nuclear war.”
“You’re weird, you know that?” He turned to look back at me without slowing his pace. For a moment the light on his helmet blinded me.
“The danger is real—and imminent, let me tell you,” I said. “Even if everybody goes around looking as if nothing were the matter.”
“You’re not telling me anything I don’t already know,” he said. “I mean, really—tickets for survival, qualifications to board a ship, man-powered generators, air filters … what could it be but a bomb shelter?”
“So you knew.”
“Naturally. You are weird.”
“Then what made you suggest dumb ideas like vegetable storage, or a hotel for escaped criminals?”
“Well, you’ve already managed some pretty good businesses on the side, haven’t you, Captain? Disposing of fetuses, illegal dumping of toxic wastes …”
“That’s different,” I protested. “I can call it quits anytime I want, without repercussions. But fugitives and loony birds are human. Once I let them on the ship, I couldn’t just toss them overboard whenever I felt like it.”
“Like you will us.” The shill swallowed noisily, a sign of nerves. “Let me ask you one question. As captain, what sort of people have you got in mind for your crew? So far I get the idea you’re after people with more respectable backgrounds than us—but you know, respectability isn’t everything. It could be boring as hell. Besides, we don’t know beans about who you really are, either, do we? There’s no point in putting on airs.”
“I’m not putting on airs. But when the time comes, this ship’s crew will form the gene pool for future generations, don’t forget. That leaves me with a heavy responsibility.”
“Let me make one thing clear,” he said firmly. “As long as she stays, I’m not setting foot out of here, either.”
We came upon a third large room. This one was no simple rectangular shape but fairly convoluted, rooms within rooms extending along diagonal lines, high and low, each one supported by pillars. The effect was one of haunting solemnity, as in some ancient cathedral. Or perhaps it would be truer to say that ancient cathedrals are a practic
al application of that effect.
The shill lowered his voice. “Just between the two of us, she’s a very sick woman.”
“She is? What’s wrong with her?”
“Cancer. The bone marrow has lost its blood-making function. The doctors give her six months to live.”
I started to smile, and couldn’t breathe. The air had turned hard as glass. One of them was lying, or both. They hadn’t checked their stories out with each other, and ended by dropping separate fishlines. There was also the (admittedly small) possibility that both were telling the truth. Perhaps they had met by chance in some hospital waiting room. It wasn’t inconceivable. But I hadn’t the courage to ask. Two cancer patients, each ignorant of the truth about himself/herself, each protecting the other: to take away their tickets to survival would be too cruel.
In the wall facing us, at roughly three-foot intervals, were three tunnel entrances. The one on the right had tracks and headed downhill; the center one was a dead end; and the one on the left was a gentle ascent, up stone steps. The shill cocked his head.
“That’s funny. Which one was it?”
“If you went to the river, it’s got to be the one on the left.”
“I’m damned if I remember this—three passageways lined up side by side. I guess it’s because we were running so fast. I almost caught up with him here, too.”
“The one on the right is another dead end. It leads to a cave-in.”
“You know your way around, don’t you?”
“It’s part of my daily routine: morning exercises, and then two hours surveying or more. I’ve never missed a day yet.”
The way leveled off, then went sharply downhill. We took the stairs by the wall. A wind blew up at us, caused by the difference in temperatures. Mixed with the smell of water and seaweed was the sharp odor of metallic ions.
“Does that river empty into the sea?” he asked.
“I think in part it leads into a spring at a Shinto shrine. There are a couple of noodle stands that serve rainbow trout.”
“No effects as yet from the chromium?”
“None that I know of.”
“Later on, let me have a look at your surveyor’s map,” he said. “You’ve got one, haven’t you?”
“There’s a rough sketch hanging on the wall of the conference room,” I said, unable to bring myself to say “operational headquarters.”
“But you did do some surveying, didn’t you?” he said. “You must have some record of your work.”
So I did. In fact, I had kept detailed records: sixteen ichnographic projection drawings that had taken a full six months to complete. But for some reason, when I tried to convert them to orthographic projections I ran into trouble. When I forced myself to visualize a perspective drawing of the quarry interior, landslides and cave-ins took place in my head. Doubtless there were flaws in my surveying techniques and drawing ability. But a bigger source of the problem, I believed, lay in the slipshod, hit-or-miss operations of the stone-quarrying authorities themselves, or their workmen. No straight line was in fact straight, no right angle was in fact ninety degrees. Errors accumulated little by little until finally southwest was skewed around to southeast, and the floor that should have been below a flight of stairs came out on top.
Yet the degree of complexity involved could not be attributed solely to haphazard, trial-and-error procedures. Four companies had leapfrogged through the mountain in fierce competition, ignoring all agreements. If Company A crawled under the belly of Company B and tied up its legs, Company B swung ahead of Company C and pinned down its head; Company C poked holes in Company D’s arse, while Company D slammed Company A in the ribs. Unreported cave-ins—even bloodshed—had apparently been everyday affairs.
“Right now I’m working on a new system of surveying,” I said. “By correlating temperature, humidity, and wind velocity, it seems to me you should be able to make a contour map, or a map of air pressure distribution, the kind they use in weather forecasts.”
“Have you got something against it?”
“Against what?”
“Showing me your surveying maps. Why are you holding back? Is there some reason you can’t show them to me?”
“They wouldn’t do you any good.”
“I’m the one to decide that.”
I did not like the way he was talking. It was like hitting someone and then complaining that he’d hurt your fist.
“Listen—there’s the sound of running water.”
“Yeah. It’s not far now.”
At the bottom of the slope the footing was suddenly precarious. The walls were rougher too. The floor was littered with fragments of scaled-off stone. Casually I turned and shone my flashlight on the point where the terrain changed. Along with the terrain, the color of the rock changed as well: the shift from dark green to a paler hue, the color of dried mugwort leaves, was clearly delineated in a slanting line. That line was dotted with a number of holes, hollows in the wall where rock had scaled off. Second hollow from the top … Outwardly it appeared no different from the others, but to me it bore a special significance: here was where I had set a charge of dynamite. When the time came, one flick of the switch would blow it up. This very spot would mark the division between the interior and exterior of the ship. The area from this point on would, in effect, cease to exist. All I had to do was take a few steps back, pull the switch, and the shill too would be trapped in that nonexistent space, unable to move either forward or backward.
If he thought he could hijack my ship with the aid of a simple map, he was dead wrong. He underestimated me. This wasn’t the only place where I had set dynamite: in all there were nine hidden charges. Wires connecting the detonators led to a single spot where I could set off all the explosives at one stroke. (For safety’s sake, I had used two separate systems of wiring.) The trigger switch also set off the infrared sensors for lighting in the captain’s cabin. The manipulation of the switches on the board I carried with me was barely more complex than turning on the lights. This was simultaneously the signal for the ark to set sail. Vibrating from the blasts, the ship would be cut off from the outside world in an instant, and a siren would sound the alarm, calling all hands to their posts. And then, for however long, this would be all that remained of the world.
At first I hesitated over where to set the explosives. I thought the bigger the ship’s tonnage, the better. Eight years before, when the stone-quarrying companies ceased operations, they had sealed off all mine shafts and tunnels, according to regulations. The city council and government offices alike were of the official view that no aperture remained. True, apart from this passage to the tangerine grove, and the one leading to the boiler room of the city hall, there were no apertures large enough for a person to squeeze though. But a nuclear bomb is a different matter. No opening, however small, can be safely overlooked. Unfortunately, my investigations showed that the entire quarry was riddled with holes—apertures for wiring, plumbing, water supply, ventilation, and so on. The more I checked, the more I found. The only thing to do was to alter my approach. If I couldn’t cut off the mountain from an outer world contaminated by radiation or radioactive substances, the only recourse was to abandon the bulk of the mountain that was vulnerable. I decided to set dynamite in those places that seemed most likely to cave in. Pulverized rock would make an excellent filter.
Of course, being neither a geologist nor a civil engineer, I can’t say exactly what will happen in the blasts. All I know is what area I think will withstand them safely. Starting with the work hold in the middle, it should be safe as far as the second hold out from there. I can’t offer a professional guarantee, but I am sure it’s more than wishful thinking. Waterstone, as its name implies, is highly compatible with water; as its moisture content increases, its characteristic green grows deeper and it becomes harder, stronger, and so fine-grained that it polishes to a high luster. I settled on the present work hold as the heart of the ark by taking into account the distribution of that
hue. For the rest of it, people will just have to take my word. Should the explosions set off a chain reaction that ultimately destroys the ark, so be it. The important thing, after all, is not really survival per se, but the ability to go on hoping, even in one’s final moments. And we would certainly be guaranteed a gigantic tomb, at least the size of the pyramids!
“The going gets tricky here.”
Piles of stones blocked the way—pieces of rubble great and small, less hewn than smashed. Some were heaped up like cairns built to guide the souls of dead children to paradise. The tunnel ended there. Beyond was a steep cliff, thirty-five feet down or more. In my mind this was the boundary.
“Shall we take a leak?” he asked.
“Might as well.”
He seemed fairly tense, now that we were about to plunge into enemy territory. After all that beer, it was hardly surprising that he should want to relieve himself. Side by side, we urinated across the heaps of stones, into empty space. The sound echoed from so far away that I grew uneasy, leaned backward instinctively, and ended up wetting my trousers. The light from my helmet did not reach the bottom. Heavy fog at the base of the cliff also cut off visibility.
“That’s funny. There wasn’t any fog before.” Setting foot on the top rung of a steel ladder in the left corner on the edge of the precipice, the shill peered fearfully down.
