Inter Ice Age 4 Page 14

  I rose, searching for where the sound of a vacuum cleaner was coming from. It originated in my study on the second floor.

  “Did I bother you?” said my wife, neither raising her face nor stopping her work.

  “Not particularly. I want to ask you something.”

  “For heaven’s sake, what were you doing yesterday?”

  “Working.”

  “You were so late in getting back I called the office.”

  “I was working someplace else!” I said, growing irritated and beginning to feel that now I had the right to get really angry. Just as I was on the point of cutting loose in earnest, the telephone rang. I was relieved at the interruption.

  The call came from a newspaper office. Moscow n had predicted the activization of a volcanic cluster on the Pacific floor; and since they wanted to pursue the relationship of that event to the recent unusual temperatures, they were requesting, they said, the co-operation of competent people in Japan. But it was a question of whether the ICT forecaster would or would not respond to this proposal. As usual I refused to comment, saying that anything that concerned the news had to go through the committee attached to the Bureau of Statistics. The feeling of humiliation I experienced every time I received such calls was even stronger today and seemed to have a special meaning.

  Outside the window a brightly shining globular cloud, changing its shape, dissolved away before my eyes. Beneath it I could see leafy branches, the roof of the house next door, and the garden. Until just yesterday I had believed this everyday sense of continuity to be supremely trustworthy. But it was different now. If what I had seen last night was actual fact, I should have to admit, I suppose, that this everyday sense of mine was rather a lie that closely resembled reality. Everything was inside out.

  It seemed to be my own stupidity somehow that I should be convinced that by having the forecasting machine the world would become more and more closely linked together, more placid, more translucent, like inorganic crystals. The right meaning of the verb to know was to observe chaos, not order and regularity.

  “It’s really something very important. It’s about the clinic you were forced to go to yesterday, you remember? I’d like you to think back on just what sort of place it was.”

  My wife looked at me suspiciously and made no answer. Of course, I couldn’t expect her to realize how important the question was, and she was quite incapable of imagining that I was involved. Yet unable to offer any explanation to her, I became impatient and irritated. There had been no arbitrary pressure exerted on me to observe the secret strictly, yet it would only make matters all the more complicated to let my wife know the truth. I was depressed just imagining her reaction if she knew, as I did, the whereabouts of our child that had been aborted and purchased.

  But I must find out one way or another. Couldn’t I concoct something or other?

  “Do you think it was really an obstetrical clinic?”

  “Why do you ask?” she replied, faintly disturbed.

  “Oh, to tell the truth, I wondered if someone weren’t being spiteful.”

  “In what way?”

  “There was that old doctor friend of mine, the obstetrician who went insane.”

  This was a patent lie that under ordinary circumstances I could not have related without laughing, but as I had told it with a straight face, the results were instantaneous. My wife’s expression hardened before my eyes. For a woman nothing could be more contemptible. If what I had said were true, she had been put to bed and had the fetus snatched from her half in fun.

  “Well, now I do have the feeling, somehow, that it wasn’t a real hospital.”

  “What was it like?”

  ‘‘Mm,” she mused, shaking her head, which she had tilted back, left, and right, and narrowing her eyes. “It was deserted . . . and terribly dark.”

  “Was it near the seashore, do you think?”

  ‘Yes, I think so.”

  “Was the building single-storied . . . double-storied?”

  “Ah . . . there was one story.”

  “Weren’t there a lot of drums lying around the garden?”

  “Mm . . . well ... I just don’t know.”

  “How was the doctor? Was he a big man?”

  “Yes, I guess he was.”

  “What do you mean? Don’t you remember at all?”

  “Well, he had me take that strange medicine. I think I remember vaguely, but it’s as if it weren’t my own memory. Yet I very clearly recollect things that occurred before I was given the medicine. If ever I met that nurse with the mole on her cheek in the street, I’d recognize her immediately.”

  But I had come across no woman with any mole on her cheek in the Yamamoto Laboratories. There seemed but one way left me. That was to put my wife through the forecasting machine and extricate her memory. But this road was a pretty dangerous one. Halfway down it the girl Kondo Chikako had been poisoned. Was the attempt worth the danger? I wondered.

  My decision to put her on the machine was not very rational. It stemmed from the blind anger that rose within me. It was intolerable just to be made to entertain such hypotheses and such misgivings. Everything would have been fine if I had been careful and not let her out of my sight for an instant. Yet I was contemptuous of myself even thinking there might be danger.

  “Hurry up and get ready. We’re going out,” I stated.

  28

  My wife looked at me suspiciously but did not attempt to pry further. Perhaps it was that my abrupt tone permitted no question. She was obliged to comply without explanation.

  Yet, as I watched her with her stark expression going downstairs to change her clothes, I could not deny, strangely enough, a feeling of self-justification. Was I seriously trying to protect her or was I simply trying to use her as an instrument? I mused, shaking my head, my conscience guilty with such suspicions. But I could not explain, really, just why I had come to feel tins way. Perhaps it was that in my heart I was already anticipating some dreadful conclusion that must ultimately await us.

  It was true that I had lost my confidence in everything. I had made no real judgment. I was simply unreasonably worried, filled with one negative feeling, that of trying to escape at any cost. But I shuddered, wondering just how our child, born an aquan with gills, would ever think of us, its parents, when it grew up; I did not even know whether it was a boy or a girl. Compared with this fate, infanticide was a refined and humane act.

  Perspiration dripped from the tip of my nose. I regained my composure. For close to ten minutes I had stood blankly as I was and still had not washed my face. When I went downstairs and brushed my teeth, I felt nauseous, quite as if I had a hangover.

  The telephone rang. Was it the extortioner? One of those unpleasant calls where every one of my actions was known? I rushed to the phone without taking time to rinse my mouth. But it was Tomoyasu, of the programming committee.

  “I’ve called you about that proposal for co-operation from Moscow n.”

  I did not get angry at his cloying tone as I usually did. “It didn’t work out?” I parried casually.

  “No, no, it hasn’t fallen through. We’re waiting it out for the present.”

  It was as usual. Again the papers would take no notice of us.

  With this wait-and-see attitude we would never get in the news. General interest was lessening, perhaps because they had been very thorough lately about their propaganda that the forecasting machine was inhuman. But that was of little consequence to me now. I had no time to worry about such things. If that chicken-hearted Tomoyasu, who thought he had got the future by the throat, knew only one hundredth of what I had seen last night. . . . When I said nothing, Tomoyasu continued: “By the way, how is the work coming? I’m looking forward to the meeting day after tomorrow.”

  “I think I can make an interesting report on basic things like general character elements.”

  “And what about the murderer?”

  From the corner of my lips a white thread of sp
ittle dropped onto the back of my hand. “I’m summing up the report draft today. I’ll have Tanomogi present it,” I said, abruptly hanging up to avoid further conversation.

  The very instant I replaced the receiver, the telephone began to ring again. And this time it was unmistakably a call from the extortioner, with that voice so exactly like my own.

  “Professor Katsumi? My, you were awfully quick in answering. It almost looks as if you were expecting my call,” chuckled my voice mockingly. Without waiting for an answer it suddenly changed to a normal tone, resembling me more than ever.

  “No, it doesn’t look as though you were. You actually were expecting me to call, weren’t you? Anyway, Professor, you’re hatching something on the sly that I’d like to warn you about.”

  It was true. I had been half expecting his threatening call. Every time I was on the point of taking some action, spiteful interference hampered me. At the same time I anticipated it, I was also at a loss what to do about it. I could think of no one except Tanomogi who up to last night had shared all my activities, who would be able to foresee my plan to put my wife on the forecasting machine. Unless my house had been bugged. However, it would be unnatural for Tanomogi, who had been so ingenious up til now, to reveal suddenly that he himself was behind all this. I shuddered, sensing the presence of some unseen watcher at my very elbow.

  “You think I was waiting? It was absolutely accidental, believe me.”

  “I know. You were on the line just before I called, weren’t you?”

  I was thrown into confusion. According to the way I saw it, I only thought it at best a tape of the forecasting machine that was speaking with my voice. No matter how it might object to the state of things, I never dreamt it would respond so perfectly to my words.

  “Ah, ha. Surprised?” said the speaker, apparently aware of my confusion. A rush of air struck the mouthpiece, perhaps a laugh. “Do you have some inkling who I am now?”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who? I wonder. You still don’t know? Well then, I’ll give you another hint. The call you just received, it was Tomoyasu, of the programming committee.”

  “Ah! It’s Tanomogi! No, of course, you’re the machine, just a voice. But it must be Tanomogi pulling the strings. You’re there, I know. Come on. Answer me!”

  “You’re unreasonable. If the one speaking is me, the one listening is me too. I made this call by my own volition. Do you think a machine manipulated by someone could be so quick at repartee? You’re talking with your mouth full. You probably stopped in the act of rinsing it out and came to the phone, didn’t you? Didn’t you? If you want me to, I’ll wait while you rinse it. Oh, sorry. I wasn’t trying to make fun. But the fact is I am speaking by my own will.”

  “That’s why you should tell me who you are!”

  “Yes. Perhaps I should. But haven’t you really guessed? No, maybe not. But surely, Professor, you’ve noticed how exactly my voice resembles your own. Maybe it’s some accidental likeness to that of a total stranger, you’re thinking, Professor. No, it’s all right. Your not trying to learn, your not bending every effort to find out who I really am, and my being obliged to telephone you like this now are after all two sides of the same coin, so to speak. So ultimately the very imparting of this important matter . . .”

  “Well then, why don’t you come here and meet me face to face? If you did, it’d be a lot easier to talk with you.”

  “Do you think so? That, unfortunately, is not possible. And as far as the talking goes, it’s no more complicated by phone.”

  “Well then, let’s get to the point, shall we?”

  “Fine,” came the response rather more strongly. “You have made an irrevocable decision.”

  I realized that I must take care. That my adversary could command at will words worthy of a gangster and the expressions of a government official meant that he was not an ordinary individual, one who would have a sole end and aim. If you want to designate a profession that comes into direct contact with people, penetrating behind the mask of social position and profession, I suppose it would be a detective or a blackmailer. Perhaps by pretending to see through my very thoughts he was trying, more than I expected, to force me to make disadvantageous statements by asking loaded questions.

  “Of course,” said the speaker, reacting to my silence. He was seized with a fit of muffled coughing. “It’s not unreasonable for me to be suspected like But it’s clear to me. You’re on the point now of going out with your wife. I’m right, am I not? Oh no, don’t imagine I’ve got binoculars trained on you from some nearby house. Yet the fact is that at this very moment someone is standing watch in front of your house. Oh, just take a look from the window at the end of the corridor. But quick!”

  Thus pressed, I left the receiver and did as I was told. I glimpsed my shadower just as he was going by from left to right, a bored expression on his face. The receiver emitted a sound. I returned, making no noise, and gently picked it up.

  “Well?” Despite the fact that I had remained silent, it knew somehow that I had returned. “It’s the lad you came to blows with the other day. He’s a competent specialist in assassination.”

  “Where are you calling from, for God’s sake?”

  Patiently enduring a stiffness in my back that had spread to my neck, I tried to pinpoint in my mind’s eye those houses that had windows from which I could be seen telephoning.

  “No, no. I told you I’m not calling from any place nearby. Here, a fire engine’s going by. I’ll open the window. Hear it? But you can’t at your place.”

  “A trick like that would be easy with a tape recorder.”

  “Quite right. Well then, shall I tell you my number? When you know the exchange and number, your doubts will be gone. Hang up and redial this number. Al right?”

  “That’s enough. Drop it.”

  “Oh no, I can’t,” said the voice, suddenly adopting a warning tone. “This is the crucial point. I can see everything.”

  “And so?”

  “Mm. You don’t get it, do you.” The threatening voice gave a deep sigh. There was something so poignant about the tone that I was not bothered by the form of address, which had changed to one of equality with me. “Even though I’ve said this much, you still don’t have any idea? This isn’t me. It’s you yourself. I am you!”

  29

  For some time I remained motionless. Not only my body but my thoughts too stood stark still. It was not a simple feeling of surprise. How shall I say? It was an extraordinary sensation, a mixture of calm and confusion, as if I had known all along, and yet as if I were ready to go insane. I might compare the calm to the humorous and ridiculous, as when one notices that someone one took to be an acquaintance was in fact one’s very self reflected in a mirror. And the confusion was comparable to a disagreeably bitter sense of despair as if in a dream I had become a dead soul, hovering near the ceiling, looking down at my own corpse.

  With difficulty I gropingly assembled my words.

  “Then . . . you’re a composite of myself, constructed by the forecasting machine.”

  “You could say that, but it’s not so simple. No ordinary composite could talk back and forth like this, could it?” Without thinking, I nodded back at the invisible speaker. “But you’re definitely not capable of perception, are you?”

  “Heavens no,” said the voice, sniffing indistinctly. “I have no actual body. Just as you supposed, I’m merely a prerecorded tape. Of course I wouldn’t have anything so fine as perception. But I possess reliability and certainty that go beyond perception. I know what’s going on in your thoughts long before you think them. No matter how you may try to behave independently, you can’t take a single step outside the prearranged program in me.”

  “And who drew up the draft of what you’re saying?”

  “No one. Someone who inevitably came into existence out of yourself.”

  “Well then . . .”

  “Well, I have the value of a second prediction which, th
rough a first prediction, foretells your future. In short, I am you. I am a you that knows everything about you.”

  Suddenly I felt a long way away, a small, indistinct object. The place I had been until now was bulky and ponderous, and a slick pain went round and round with the irritating speed of a barber pole.

  “But it was someone like Tanomogi who caused this you to make the call, wasn’t it?”

  “You’re still saying things like that. Evidently you haven’t yet fully grasped the situation. My volition is your volition. But you still haven’t realized it. I am only doing as you probably would if you knew your own future.”

  “How does a recording machine take action?”

  “Don’t be fatuous. Of course it depends on someone. As you guessed, it’s Tanomogi who lends a hand. But don’t think this is some machination of his. All his actions up till now have been at my request. And my commands are nothing more than your commands. If you’re suspicious of Tanomogi, you might as well be suspicious of yourself.”

  “Al right, have it your way. But why did you try to throw me into confusion by making those threatening calls?”

  “I wasn’t trying to confuse you. I was warning you.”

  “There was no need to be so roundabout. Since you know my future, you also know my enemies, don’t you? Wasn’t there a more straightforward way of going about it?”

  “Enemies . . . your usual remark. The enemy’s inside. This very way of thinking of things is in fact our enemy. I was just trying to save you from catastrophe. Oh yes, just in time. Your wife Sadako’s there. No, no matter how much I may be you, I suppose it’s offensive for me to talk like this. She’s ready and waiting by the door. She seems to be listening with all her ears to strange call. I’d like to ask her something. Call her over and put her on the line, will you?”

  “I certainly will not.”

  “Hm. I thought you’d say that. If we tell her something, we’ve got to tell her everything. But you don’t have the courage for that. Actually, you haven’t yet told her your reason for going out, have you? Of course, at point there’s no need to go out any more.”