“Shoppinghour?! Bring him here. Where is the man with such a ridiculous name?”
“He died about 180 years ago,” answered the Professor.
Fedora Last was speechless. As she later divulged to her subordinate Caprice Le Mesurier, she’d been momentarily stunned by the thought that, if he knew someone who’d died about 180 years ago, Professor McLogick must himself be more than 200 years old.
Also at the meeting were the entrepreneur Kapital Interest, the poetess Stille Hungova, and the writer Justa Plagiarist. The round-table meeting was somehow brought to a conclusion through their mediation. But from that time on, Fedora Last remained wary of Professor McLogick. This argument was followed by a series of trifling incidents between the pair, which would be quite risible to record in detail – for example, the incident concerning the assessment of municipal tax, the quarrel in the French restaurant “Le Chateau” that had to be broken up by a waiter, the students who were incited to set off fireworks and use abusive language in front of the Mayor’s official residence – and so on, and so on.
On returning home from work that day, Rod Le Mesurier was surprised to find his wife Caprice at home before him. She immediately began to attack him.
“You started the rumour that Marine City’s tilting, didn’t you.”
“It’s not a rumour, it’s true.”
Rod made abundant use of voice impressions, hand gestures and other signals to explain his conversation with Professor McLogick at the bus stop that morning, along with their various observations and conclusions.
“Look, you can see it from here. All the blocks in that estate are tilting, but not the Notatall Building.”
Caprice made no attempt at all to look across to the dusk-smothered metropolis to which Rod pointed from their 11th floor window. Instead, she spat out with venom: “You’re a fool.”
“Am I?”
Rod’s eyes widened. He fixed a stare on his wife, who stood there in her negligee with arms folded.
“Didn’t you think it might just be the Notatall Building that’s tilting to the north-northeast? That’s why I say you’re a fool.”
“Actually, that’s what I thought at first.”
“You were completely taken in by that old goat. How many times must I tell you not to talk to idiots like him?”
Rod Le Mesurier found himself struck lightly on the head with a bottle opener, fashioned from a kangaroo’s paw, that lay on the dining table. He calculated the pain level at 3.6 kiltago. “I’m a fool, yes I am,” he said in utter dejection.
“Yes, you’re a fool. Come over here, then.”
Miss Loyalty arrived home at about the same time. Noting that the angle of the Chagall print on her wall was wrong, she adjusted the frame with an abnormal degree of precision that amply explained why she was still single. Despite her realization that this was already the third time she’d corrected the angle, she failed to make the connection between this and the conversation she’d reported earlier in the day.
The next day, Professor McLogick proceeded to the police station with drawings showing the tilt of Marine City, which he’d ordered a student in the Engineering Department to survey the previous afternoon. To the detective who came to take his statement he roared, “This is a serious matter, you won’t do, get me the Chief of Police!” He showed the drawings to Rory O’Storm when the Chief at last came out, and explained that the tilt of Marine City was neither false rumour nor malicious gossip, but was, in fact, fact.
“And what do you think is the cause of the tilt?” asked O’Storm as if seeking guidance, unable to contradict the proof he’d been shown.
“The typhoon in September, and the fact that the ballast is unstable, I should say.”
By “the ballast is unstable,” he meant that it was made of pachinko balls.
“But what about the bulkheads?”
“One of them has been breached. And it’s possible that others might also be breached in future, by way of a chain reaction.”
“So you’re saying the tilt could get worse?”
“That’s right. I’m glad you’re so quick to understand.” Professor McLogick smiled. “It’s a good job the Chief of Police isn’t a woman, at least.”
Rory O’Storm thought he might just go ahead and commission the university to do a detailed survey for the police. He could report it to the Mayor later. It was not beyond him to understand that Fedora Last would never trust the drawings and other data that Professor McLogick had brought with him. If he reported them heedlessly, she might turn her anger on the Chief of Police himself.
That night, a magnitude 4 earthquake awoke Fedora Last as she slept in her private room at the Mayor’s official residence. She herself had proudly proclaimed that Marine City could never be struck by an earthquake, as it rested on a floating artificial island. But she’d recently learnt that violent upheavals of sea water could also shake the island to a perceptible degree. Fedora couldn’t sleep. Was it just her imagination, or had she heard the faint sound of thousands of pachinko balls rolling coarsely along the bottom of the city’s foundations just a moment ago? It was a sound that held such loathsome memories for Fedora Last, who somewhat regretted using these, of all things, as ballast for an artificial island.
Though it was now thirty-five years ago, Fedora Last’s husband, who used to work in a paper factory, had been an avid gambler. He would waste his whole monthly salary on pachinko, a pinball game that used hundreds of metal balls. As if that weren’t enough, he mounted up debts as well. Losing a small amount on pachinko in one day would turn into a monumental loss over the year. And though he might win a small sum every few days, he would merely spend the winnings on drink, and the cash would vanish before he got home. With no spending money and a child to care for, Fedora was unable to find a side job. So, when her husband was sacked for skipping work and taking excessive advances on his salary, Fedora took the opportunity to divorce him, and from that time on devoted all her energy to a women’s group in the lower echelons of a political party.
Due to the ensuing tsunami rather than the earthquake itself, Marine City was tilting just over three degrees to the south-southwest by the following morning. The poetess Stille Hungova awoke with a terrific headache that day. At first, she thought she must be still hungover, but her head failed to clear by lunchtime, and in the afternoon she decided to go to the nearby Toximere Clinic. In the Clinic’s waiting room she found many other women with the same complaint. Her conversations with them merely told her that many of their husbands also had the same headache, that all of them were also suffering from vertigo, and so on. They did not inform her, however, that they’d all slept with their heads turned to the south the previous night and that none of them had slept facing north, which was generally considered unlucky.
The first to confirm the tilt in Marine City’s elevation, now more than three degrees, was Stubber Nasamule, head of the public works contractor Nasamule Engineering. He was in the process of putting up a sales kiosk in Marineland Park, under commission from the Parks Department. At first, on surveying the half-completed kiosk with a spirit level and finding that the floor was tilting by three degrees, he started to panic, thinking he’d botched the job. But when he placed his spirit level at various points inside and outside the park just to be sure, he discovered that every point he surveyed was tilting a little more than three degrees to the south-southwest. He went to City Hall to report this fact, and was received there by Caprice Le Mesurier. She disliked his old-fashioned, chauvinistic tone of voice, started to argue with him in the middle of his report, and handed him over to security when he began to shout back. To make matters worse, she deliberately omitted to pass the report to Fedora Last. This was partly because she was afraid of further aggravating the Mayor, who, for some reason, had been in a bad mood since the morning. But it was also because she had a premonition that the tilt in Marine City’s elevation would have inauspicious consequences for her.
There were a number of casualties in Marine City that day.
Many resulted from falls on stairs, sloping roads, sloping entrances to buildings, and so on. Some women and elderly citizens were in critical condition after suffering blows to the head as they fell. Several infants playing on a south-facing slide at a nursery school suffered broken teeth and other injuries when they collided with the ground after sliding down at abnormally high speed. As luck would have it, those with the most serious injuries were all taken to different hospitals, where they were assumed to have sustained their injuries through carelessness. As a result, no one was able to grasp the unusually large scale of casualties in the City as a whole.
Meanwhile, many others who lived in Marine City but worked in the metropolis started to complain of headaches, ringing ears, and dizziness caused by abnormality in the semicircular canals of their inner ears soon
