Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

“Because of the typhoon,” one of the villagers replied.

“That’s right. With the waves this high, if he tries to berth he could be smashed against the jetty and capsize,” the village headman explained.

“Don’t be ridiculous!” I screamed. “I’m at the end of my tether, I tell you! I can’t wait any longer! All right – if the boat can’t berth, I’ll swim out to it!” I took off my jacket.

“Impossible!” The village headman and the other villagers hastily tried to hold me back. “Don’t do it! You’ll drown! No, before you drown, you’ll be smashed against the jetty and die of heart failure!”

“What do I care?! My heart can do what it likes! I need that medicine!” I shook myself free of their grasp and plunged deep down into the angrily billowing waves.

And that was when my crazy adventure started. I abandoned my family, packed in my job, crossed seven seas and traversed five continents in pursuit of a single package of medicine. I swam the English Channel naked, ran the Sahara Desert barefoot, fought off natives blowing poisoned darts in dense tropical jungle, grappled with a polar bear on the Arctic ice, and was caught in a gunfight between international agents trying to snatch my medicine on the Trans-Siberian Railway. Because that, you see, was my only way of staying alive.

I still haven’t found my medicine.

Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

It was Yohachi, the odd-job man, who brought the Team Leader’s message. He wanted us all to attend an emergency meeting because Dr Shimazaki, an authority on botany and the only woman in our Research Team, was pregnant.

I looked up from my microscope. “Why must we have a meeting just because she’s pregnant?” I asked.

“How should I know?” Lingering for a moment near the door of the lab, Yohachi opened his gap-toothed mouth and laughed coarsely. He was surely about the same age as me, but looked more than ten years older.

“Tell him I’ll be right over,” I said, turning my attention back to the eyepiece.

“He said if you didn’t come straight away, I was to drag you there myself,” Yohachi announced in his thick, rude voice.

“God! He must be in a hurry,” I said, and reluctantly left my seat.

My ecosystems research lab, which also served as my living quarters, was a small makeshift structure near the edge of the Research Base. The Base was at the foot of Mount Mona, where up to ten similar buildings lay scattered about. In the middle of them stood the Research Centre, a two-storey building measuring about forty by forty feet. It was in fact a hastily erected affair that consisted only of the Team Leader’s living quarters and a Meeting Room. Mount Mona, so named by the first expedition to reach the planet, was a low-lying mountain formed primarily of andesite. When a stiff wind blew at night, the hollows and crevices on the mountainsides made a noise that sounded like a woman moaning – hence the name.

I locked the door of the lab and went outside with Yohachi. Not that there were any burglars up there – but with so many freakish plants and creatures around, one couldn’t be too careful.

“Who’s the father then?” I asked Yohachi as we walked along.

Short enough already, Yohachi made himself shorter by hunching his back as he walked. He looked up at me with a sideways glance and grinned. “Who knows? Maybe it’s you, mate.”

“Not me,” I answered straight-faced, then thought for a minute. Yes, I was fairly sure.

A little orange sun began to set behind Mount Mona. It was the season when night and day alternated every two hours on this planet called “Nakamura” in the Kabuki solar system. Both the planet and the solar system had been discovered by Peter Nakamura, a second-generation Japanese who was a big fan of Kabuki theatre. There again, back on Earth it was more commonly known as “Planet Porno,” for which it was famous. The planet was inhabited by humanoid natives who lived in a country called Newdopia, about fifty miles west of the Base. They looked exactly the same as humans, with one major difference – they went around permanently naked.

It suddenly came to me. “It must be you,” I said. “You’ve been sleeping with Dr Shimazaki!”

Whereupon Yohachi’s expression was transformed. Lewd furrows appeared in the corners of his eyes, his mouth grotesquely distorted with lecherous imaginings. It was horribly distressing to see.

“I wish I could, mate!” he replied with an air of deepest torment. “I fancy her all right. God I wish I could.” He made a writhing motion, licked his lips – along with the saliva that flowed over them – and seemed on the verge of tears. “God I wish I could.”

Yohachi’s lechery was renowned throughout the Base. He would have nosebleeds if he didn’t have sex at least twice a day. In fact, he was sharing his quarters with a middle-aged woman he’d brought with him from earth. I’d always assumed she was his wife, but that appeared not to be the case.

Yohachi sighed once more. “I wish I could.”

“So it’s not you then.”

“I wish it was, mate.”

If it wasn’t Yohachi, who on earth could have impregnated that thirty-two-year-old, gentle, fair-skinned, unmarried, well-rounded beauty of a woman, Dr Suiko Shimazaki? Still without a clue, I opened the door to the Research Centre. Yohachi, for some reason, bounded off towards his quarters.

“I was about to crack the feeding habits of the false-eared rabbit!” I complained to the Team Leader on entering the Meeting Room. “Do we really have to debate the ins and outs of private sex acts by Team members here in the Centre?”

With the others yet to arrive, the Team Leader sat alone in the Chairman’s chair, his shoulders hunched around his thick neck as usual. “Firstly, this is no private matter,” he started. “Secondly, we don’t yet know whether it could rightly be called a sex act.”

I stood open-mouthed.

Before I could ask whether it was possible for a woman to become pregnant without engaging in a sex act, in walked Dr Fukada, the physician, and Dr Mogamigawa, the bacteriologist.

“There’s something there all right. It can’t be a phantom pregnancy,” reported Dr Fukada. “But it’s impossible to tell with radiology alone what exactly it is. She’s in her fourth month.”

“She’s been pregnant four months without knowing it? What sort of woman is she?!” I said, almost shouting. “Or perhaps she was deliberately hiding it?”

Ignoring my outburst, Dr Mogamigawa, an utterly humourless, solemn, stubborn old man who refused to recognize anything other than natural science, grimaced as he produced a weed that resembled a type of fern and placed it on the table. “This obscene plant was mixed up among the samples collected by Dr Shimazaki. I found it in her collecting case.”

I jumped up. “What? Widow’s incubus?! What’s that doing in these parts? It’s only supposed to grow west of Newdopia!”

“Correction. West of Lake Turpitude,” Mogamigawa said, glaring at me. “Dr Shimazaki went to the lake to collect plants, but failed to notice that she’d collected the widow’s incubus along with the other samples. The microspores of the widow’s incubus must have penetrated her body. As you know, the androspores of this obscene plant stimulate the ovarian cells of higher vertebrates, and independently cause the growth of new individuals in utero.”

“But Dr Shimazaki is not a widow,” said the Team Leader.

Mogamigawa simply turned away in disdain, as if to say, What has that to do with anything. Dr Fukada took over instead.

“It was tentatively called widow’s incubus by a member of the First Expedition,” he explained. “Actually, it doesn’t matter if the host is a widow or not. It will attempt parthenogenesis with any woman, as long as she isn’t a virgin. Parthenogenesis literally means virgin generation, but in this case perhaps we should call it non-virgin generation. Ahaha. We don’t yet know why it fails to stimulate the ovarian cells of virgins, but it may have something to do with the quantity of estrogenic hormones secreted. And of course it should be no surprise that Dr Shimazaki is not a virgin,” he said with a smile. “After all, she is thirty-two. It would be harsh to cast aspersions on her just because she isn’t a virgin.”

“Hold on, I’m not casting anything on her,” said the Team Leader, stirring in his seat. “Well, there are only