Inter Ice Age 4

by Kono Abe

  “They’re removing the artificial placenta.”

  Opening the door of the box, they extracted a plastic bag. The bag changed into a great sphere before our very eyes. It was filled with a dirty, reddish liquid. One of the men inserted a hoselike instrument that came from a gauge into the sphere and turned the cock.

  “They’re exhausting the liquid inside. When you take the placenta away, breathing with the gills begins as a reflex, so this operation must be performed very quickly.”

  The sphere constricted, adhering closely to the form within; it was a small pig. The piglet wriggled about, moving its legs. The other man inserted a knife into the front of the bag and stripped it off quickly as if it were no more than a shirt. Although I had not noticed him, the little man had taken up a long pole, and standing over the now useless bag, fished it out and with a single experienced movement tossed it into a drum in the corner. This was the origin of the pungent odor I had smelled a little while ago.

  The unsteadily writhing pig was seized by its front feet and made to exude what looked like a flesh-colored mist. The assisting man attached a brush over the nozzle of the hose and wiped the waste material from the body and then vacuumed it up. If they didn’t do this, the water in the pool would doubtless get thoroughly polluted. The pig squirmed as it was given a shot of something in the ears with a metal hypodermic instrument.

  “The eardrum is useless and besides it easily gets inflamed, so they stuff it in advance with plastic as you have just seen.”

  “As it matures . . .” Tanomogi began, but at once fell silent again. Perhaps he felt that what he was going to say would interfere with my own question.

  “That’s all right. You go first,” I said.

  “My question’s a simple one,” he continued. “I was wondering whether the stoppers don’t come loose as the pigs get older.”

  “They would, but this plastic has some interesting qualities. It’s unaffected by gravity and flows in the direction of greater heat. It spreads over areas directly affected by body warmth. That point has been neatly solved. Now your question, Dr. Katsumi?”

  “Well, it has to do with sound. What about the problem of sound under water?”

  “There are still a number of unresolved points in this instance. In the case of fish, the ear is very serviceable even though covered by bone, so perhaps sound can be heard through the plastic stoppers.”

  “Do you mean that water animals are not deaf?”

  “Of course I do. Aquatic dogs especially are sensitive to even very faint noise.”

  “They’re always calling the sea a world of silence, but it doesn’t appear to be all that quiet, does it,” said Tanomogi knowingly.

  “Absurd!” exclaimed the little man, squeezing in between us. “There’s no more noisy place than the sea, if you just have the ears to hear with. Fish go screeching about like birds in the woods.”

  “The question,” said Professor Yamamoto, cocking his head and running a big finger down the length of his nose, “lies rather in the production of sound than in the hearing of it. There’s no question with gill breathers of using vocal cords, and we have been much troubled with this problem. A dog that can produce no sound won’t make a watchdog. Of course, with dogs we have managed to train them too.”

  “You mean train them to bark?”

  “No, no. We teach them to gnash their teeth rather than use their voice. We took the idea from certain kinds of fish, and it’s rather a point of pride with us that the notion was so good.”

  The man, who had finished with the cleaning, in a single thrust came floating close to the surface of the water, holding out the little pig clasped in his arms for us to see. It was light pink and covered with white hairs, and its gills, resembling folds of skin, were busily opening and closing. It looked up at us from the water in goggle-eyed wonderment.

  “Are the eyes already open?”

  “Yes, did you notice?” said Professor Yamamoto, laughing in amusement. “I said that outside the organs of respiration no other change occurred, but if we go into detail there are actually a number of differences. It’s not so much that the eyes are open but rather that the eyelids have atrophied.”

  The man in the water shifted the pig to under his arm and adjusted his faded blue rubberized tights, which had become twisted. Then he cut across the pool and vanished as if sucked through the window on the opposite side. In his wake remained a white belt of dissipating silver bubbles.

  “Where did he go?”

  “To the suckling farm. Glasses!” he said to the man next to him as he went around to the side with windows. “I intend to show you an anatomical chart later, but a certain degree of influence remains, of course, in a number of organs under the control of hormones coming from the atrophied gills. Most conspicuous is the disappearance of the outer secretory glands such as the tear, salivary, and sweat glands. Besides that, the vocal organs are shed and the eyelids atrophy. Then there’s the matter of lungs in aquatic mammals. Since they have gills, the lungs remain, although the windpipe vanishes completely and the bronchial tubes open directly onto the alimentary canal. They’re not lungs in the usual sense; it would probably be more fitting to say that they’re shaped like an uncommonly developed fish’s air bladder. I suppose it’s a mystery of nature, but the lack of tear or salivary glands is no hindrance to any creature living in the water.”

  “Well then, that would mean they can’t laugh or cry,” I said.

  “Do you expect animals to laugh or cry?”

  The other man, who was still in the water, climbed up the iron ladder. Apparently he was going to alternate with the little man outside. The latter came carrying on his shoulder a long, slender tube that looked about six feet long and was painted white enamel. As soon as he had handed it to us, he withdrew again and began changing into a dark-blue water suit. Professor Yamamoto lowered the key-shaped extremity of the pipe into the water, and directing the lens end toward the window, peered into it through the eyepiece above the water. It was a reversed periscope, if you will.

  “You can see here. Look.”

  Thus urged, I grasped the pipe with both hands and put my eye to the eyepiece, but I could discern nothing. The whole field of vision shone with an indistinct, milky light. Thinking that perhaps the lens was foggy, I was on the point of taking out my handkerchief. “No, it’s all right as it is,” said Professor Yamamoto. “Just keep looking steadily as you are. The fogginess is just the dirtiness of the water.” When I persisted, I had the impression that perhaps I could see something.

  “Those things moving around are little pigs. The big honeycomb-like objects hanging down are artificial breasts. The sucklings can’t help letting milk escape as they drink, so the water in the nursing room is quite dirty.”

  “But why doesn’t the impure water come over here? There’s no special device to stop it, is there?”

  “In between is a curtain of water current. The nursing room itself is divided up by four water curtains. They make four different planes where the temperature goes from thirty-three degrees to sixty-four degrees Fahrenheit. With water curtains you can go back and forth through them unimpeded. We change the nursing planes from time to time and that way accustom the animals to sudden changes in temperature whether they like it or not. This also has a good effect on the development of hair, the oil glands of the skin, and subcutaneous fat.”

  My eyes were gradually growing accustomed to the gloom. Several scores of little pigs were hanging by their mouths to clusters of breast-shaped objects, each terminating in a protuberance shaped like a white nipple. They were covered with a whitish mold and seemed quite like grapes that had lain too long in a shop. The shadows of men with aqualungs on their backs threading through them now and again, swimming like rippling flags, were very probably the keepers.

  “We feed them here for about a month until they’re weaned, and then they’re sent to an aquatic sty.”

  26

  Order Sheet No. 112

&
nbsp; To: Yamamoto Laboratories

  From: Niigata M.-Sea-Bottom Farm 3

  Please send the following items at once via overland express mail:

  Item: 2 head seed Yorkshires

  Item : 2 antishark watchdogs

  Item: 5 hairy hunting dogs

  Item: 8 No. 3 improved milch cows

  Item: 200 units vaccine against marine-snow fever

  * * *

  We passed over an aquatic farm about the size of a small lake, in a boat equipped with a searchlight; the air was heavy, and it was difficult to breathe.

  “When they say ‘seed Yorkshires,’ are the characteristics you create here hereditary now?”

  “No. For the first generation that’s impossible. First-generation aquatic animals can be raised, but they have no reproductive powers. We produce the second generation too outside the womb by the same process, but they have regenerative powers. We call this second, man-made generation ‘seed pigs’ or ‘seed cows.’ Since the process is long and the price high, we’re not yet doing business on a very large scale, but the time is coming when aquatic animals able to reproduce by themselves won’t be a curiosity.”

  “But what about these Niigata Sea-Bottom Farms?”

  “They’re just what the name says: They’re farms on the ocean floor.”

  “Do they ship produce to market, then?”

  “I don’t really know whether they do or not. But orders like this began to increase sharply around the end of last year. It seems to me that the first was Boso A-Sea-Bottom Farm 1, and then so many others like the Pacific KL-Deep Sea Farms, I can’t remember them all. The number of animals we’ve produced up till now, pigs and cows together, comes to about two hundred thousand head-about five per cent of the number of head held on land in the whole country. Since the farms are very probably part of a single organization, they’re obviously a profitable enterprise.”

  “Incredible!”

  “Well, I really don’t understand it myself. Those piles on the sea bottom are probably drifts of marine snow. They say it’s excellent fodder for the pigs. If it is, their food supply is inexhaustible. You could even pasture them like sheep there. Isn’t it quite conceivable to set it up as a profitable industry? Look. Down there. That’s where they milk with vacuum milking machines.”

  “But with such a big enterprise going I really can’t believe that word hasn’t gotten about.”

  “True, it’s a solid organization,” quickly interrupted Tanomogi, who was rowing, as if trying to draw me out. Since I had not yet been able to decide whether Tanomogi was friend or enemy, I could not at once judge to which of us his remark was directed.

  I was indeed confused. Certainly by visiting here my ideas had been completely changed. On that point it was exactly as Tanomogi had said. I felt that the theory about the fetus broker, which until now I had disliked even hearing about, was really quite valid. If it were, then I must reconsider from the beginning the significance of the chain of events that had occurred within the last few days. The killing of the accountant could no longer in itself be the central event.

  At some point my original compunction to pursue the murderer had waned, and the only thing that preoccupied me now was the child that had been taken from me. As for the criminal, I even felt like compromising: I might as well issue a false statement from the forecaster to the effect that the mistress was the murderess, if by so doing I could save my machine. In a certain sense, I had come a step closer to the truth in coming here, but I also had the impression that I was farther than ever from the solution of the murder. If I was, then so be it, I did not care. I had had enough of meddling in such things. Tanomogi had said something about the police being suspicious, but even for the police, appearances are important. As a lie would be the lie of the forecasting machine, I thought it better than leaving things in the dark. Now the only thing I wanted was to get out of here as soon as I could and settle myself beside my serene and infallible forecasting machine.

  But there was one more thing I must do before that: find this child of mine, who had been spirited away, and cut short its life before it was transformed into some aquan. When I had done that, I would wash my hands of the whole business. The next time I would get a really ordinary person and start everything over again from the beginning. Yes, it seems I remember Wada saying she wanted to be forecast. She would be lovely as a sample case. But when she got older, even she would no longer be lovely. At the very least a peaceful, quiet future would be unraveled, one knit of little pleasures and little pains. There was no interest in her, and yet as a sample case, she had the least possibility of error.

  “But why do we have to be so secretive?” Tanomogi broke the silence as if he could no longer stand it. Just at that moment the boat arrived at the opposite shore. Professor Yamamoto jumped out with an agility that belied his large frame and stretched out his hand to me.

  “Because this work of ours is too revolutionary,” he said quietly, not in the slightest vexed by the question. “There would be great repercussions both nationally and internationally. But say we do push on with it, even the governing body of the organization has no clear picture of the outcome.”

  “Why are you doing something the prospects of which you can’t foresee?” I asked.

  “Well, in the view of the big men in the financial world, we’ve got to open up artificial colonies like this. Just as in the past, backward countries to trade with are going to become nonexistent, and then it’s a better investment than war at least. If the forecasting at your Institute was kept absolutely secret and not spread all over the papers, the big ones would be right there to have the future of these aquatic colonies projected. It’s a pleasure just to think what answer you would give. The Moscow machine predicted that Communism was the wave of the future, but that’s because submarine colonies never even occurred to it.”

  “We’ve decided not to make any political predictions.”

  “Of course. It’d be against the spirit of liberalism to bind society down with predictions, wouldn’t it?”

  A high concrete wall ran along the side of the aquatic farm. There was a door, and inside was another indoor pool. It was somewhat larger than the one we had just seen and had holes on four sides, provided with gratings. Just then a trainer wearing an aqualung was putting a dog through his paces. It glistened darkly as if it were wearing armor.

  “This is the long-haired hunting dog mentioned on the order blank you saw a while ago. The long hair is stiffened with a special pomade; it protects the skin. It has to crawl into all kinds of places, you see. Look, it has rubber flippers attached to its paws. When it gets used to handling them, it’s fully trained. Tomorrow it goes out. It’s going through its paces for the last time now.”

  Suddenly the dog stretched out its neck, and lowering its head, dodged to the side; its body formed a straight line as it leapt at one of the grills and swung back. The next instant it held a fish in its mouth.

  “It’s a trick not to kill it by biting,” added Tanomogi.

  “Since the dog can’t breathe while it has something in its mouth,” continued Professor Yamamoto, “it has to force the sea water from its nose through its gills. Only a dog trained like this can do it.”

  The dog put his mouth into the bag which the trainer held, waited until the man closed the opening, then released the fish. It was true, the fish swam about on the inside quite alive.

  “Sir,” said Tanomogi as if the thought had just occurred to him, “do you know how they send such animals overland? It’s very interesting. You know the trucks used to transport gasoline, the ones that drag a chain after them . . . ? They send them in those. Clever, isn’t it? I’m always amazed when I see five or six of them going by.”

  “But aren’t you trying to pretend you know everything?” gibed Professor Yamamoto.

  “Not at all,” answered Tanomogi, flurried, and the two laughed as if it were amusing.

  But for me there was nothing to laugh about. I didn’t even
have the spirit to force one. I had the sensation that in concert with their laughter my tired eyes had gradually sunk to the size of a thumb.

  27

  Since the car that brought us back was one sent by the laboratory, we were on our guard with the driver and said nothing. I wanted to say only one thing to Tanomogi. And that was all. He seemed tired too and had lapsed into silence. At length I fell sound asleep. We were in front of my house when Tanomogi shook me awake. I had a dreadful headache. “I’m going to sleep tomorrow until noon.”

  “Tomorrow? It’s already four o’clock in the morning.” Tanomogi laughed weakly, and out of the corner of my eye I vaguely saw him waving his hand through the window as I staggered into the house. I barely managed to stand upright. My wife said nothing, but I could not bring myself to worry about that. I reached out for the whisky beside my pillow, but before my hand touched the glass I was sound asleep.

  In my dreams I was taken back again and again to the Yamamoto Laboratories. I would get in a car and set out but each time arrive at a different Yamamoto Laboratories. It was as if I were standing in a room of mirrors; all roads led endlessly in the direction of the Yamamoto Laboratories. Inside the gate lived something frightening. I couldn’t explain exactly how it was frightening, but it was so much so I couldn’t stand it. I was late for the beginning of work, and I was going to be punished. On the other side of the gate the indictment was beginning against me. With every beat of my heart the accusation became more harsh. I had to hurry; I had to escape. At last I no longer knew whether I was escaping or advancing. And then again, right there, the gate of the Yamamoto Laboratories was waiting.

  It was after ten. I gave a sigh of relief, realizing I was in my own bed. I thought it funny to be relieved and began to laugh in spite of myself. I used to have dreams like this on nights in my youth when I could come home having drunk too much. I tried to go to sleep again, but something suddenly began to trouble me, and this time sleep was quite impossible.