Salmonella Men on Planet Porno

The World Is Tilting

Marine City started tilting at the end of a particularly blustery autumn one year. A typhoon in September sent waves of almost tsunami-like proportions into the bay, where the City rested on an artificial island. The waves breached one of the bulkheads on the ballast tanks used to stabilize Marine City, causing its centre of gravity to shift south-southwestwards.

The entrance to the bay was on the south-southwest, and just after the middle of October, Marine City gradually started tilting towards the Pacific Ocean. But the angle could have been no more than about two degrees, and nobody noticed it at the time. Nor did it cause any inconvenience. Rod Le Mesurier first became aware of the tilt when an old university professor, Proven McLogick, spoke to him at a bus stop. They were both waiting for a bus to take them over Marine Bridge into the metropolis.

“Look you there, Master Le Mesurier,” said the Professor. “Look at the northeastern wall of yon North No. 2 Block. The wall is supposed to be vertical, is it not. But try lining up the perpendicular of the corner with the perpendicular of the wall on that thirty-six-storey building – oh, what is it called? Yes, the Notatall Building, over there in the distance. Do you not see? Their tops are askew of one another.”

Unlike the City’s women, Rod was always most deferential to Professor McLogick, and perhaps because of this the Professor often spoke to him. Rod looked out in the direction indicated by the old man’s leaden-grey, spindly finger, and saw that the top of the multistorey building across the water in the metropolis was indeed tilting by about half an inch to the right, as his eye saw it, from the fifth floor of an apartment block on the northern edge of the City.

“So it is. It’s sticking out a bit, isn’t it. The Notatall Building must be tilting to the northeast.”

“No, young man. The North No. 2 Block is tilting to the southwest. Look from over here. It’s parallel to the perpendicular of North No. 1 Block, is it not.”

Their conversation, which concluded somewhat sonorously that the whole of Marine City must therefore be tilting to the southwest, was overheard by Miss Loyalty, an office worker with proper and orderly features, who happened to be waiting at the same bus stop. Later that morning, she used her office telephone to report the conversation to the Mayor. The Mayor of Marine City, still in her first year of office, was a fifty-eight-year-old woman named Fedora Last. She’d always been on bad terms with Professor McLogick anyway. It was she who’d called for the creation of a “marine city” in the first place, and this distinction had led to her being elected the City’s first Mayor. She loved Marine City to an almost obscene degree.

Fedora Last took the call from Miss Loyalty in her private office. She’d never entertained any particular opinion or feeling about Le Mesurier, though she knew him to be a salaried worker, since she was acquainted with his wife Caprice, an employee of the City. But she reacted quite strongly when she heard the name of Professor McLogick.

The Mayor ordered Rory O’Storm, the Chief of Police, to investigate the Professor, on the grounds that his observation was an uncivil act designed to spread malicious rumours, based on his spiteful intent to cause anxiety among the citizens. Later that day, Professor McLogick was called to the telephone in his university laboratory, and answered it with calm composure.

“Another order from Old Fat Arse,” he said with a chuckle. Old Fat Arse was his nickname for Fedora Last, that being an anagram of her name. He was certainly fond of annoying her.

Marine City had an official news journal as befitting any large town, and at the beginning of April six prominent citizens, including the Mayor, had gathered in the Community Hall for an editorial round-table discussion. During the discussion, there was a heated confrontation between Fedora Last and Professor McLogick. Asked what Marine City needed most of all at the present time, the Mayor answered “A narrative”. The other five interpreted this “narrative” as they wished, and so voiced their agreement. In fact, Fedora Last was thinking of a “Marine City Creation Story” in which her own name would go down in legend, along the lines of Joan of Arc. Professor McLogick, on the other hand, took the “narrative” to be a modern concept. The “narrative” as a postmodern term dates way back to 1979, when Jean-François Lyotard used it in his book La Condition Postmoderne. Here, “narrative” as a modern concept was used for the first time, for example in the sense that “the narrative of democracy is over”. But then people started using the term to mean just what they wanted it to mean. Very few people interpreted the word correctly and used it in its original sense, as Professor McLogick did. So it would be fair to say that Fedora Last and Professor McLogick stood at opposite ends of the spectrum in their interpretation of the word “narrative”. And it was therefore inevitable that they would not see eye to eye.

“Who will create this ‘narrative’, Mayor?”

“All of us, of course.”

“Who do you mean by ‘us’? Someone first has to create an ideology for the narrative, do they not?”

“A narrative is not an ideology. Do you mean to deny our democratic principles?”

“So your intention is not to create a narrative that will replace democracy?”

“My intention is to create a narrative.”

“What are you talking about?”

“What are you talking about?”

Professor McLogick, exasperated at the Mayor’s utter lack of comprehension, could hold back no more. “Alas, I fear it’s true. By nature, women are in all respects inferior to men.”

“I could have you arrested for that,” the Mayor retorted. “Women will respond to the physical violence of men with the violence of language. Sometimes, women’s linguistic violence will spark physical violence by men. Therefore, linguistic violence should also be punished. It was a man who said that. But now, men’s linguistic violence is a penal offence, while that of women is not. It was me who proposed this law and pushed it through. You know that very well.”

“Yes, I know. But it wasn’t me who said what I said. It was Schopenhauer.”

“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 Château” 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 negligée 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 after they started work, and sought treatment at clinics near their respective workplaces. Rod Le Mesurier also had a headache, again. Calculating the pain level as 5.2 kiltago, he took himself to a clinic near his office during the lunch break. In all cases, the symptoms soon disappeared when the functions of locomotive analysis in three-dimensional space returned to normal. But when evening came, the sufferers all returned to Marine City, which was of course tilting at an angle of more than three degrees, and this restored the abnormality in their semicircular canals.

“You know, it’s just as I thought – the whole island’s tilting!” Rod Le Mesurier felt compelled to announce that evening, knowing only too well how his wife would react.

Caprice Le Mesurier glared at her husband with eyes glinting yellow, like a leopard’s. “You’re going to start on about that again, are you. Well, you know that if the rumour spreads, they’ll all say it’s your fault. Then I’ll be sacked, and we’ll have to leave Marine City.”

“Haven’t you got a headache? Well anyway, you know those things builders use, spirit levels? I’m going to try and bring one home tomorrow, you see.” It was the first time Rod hadn’t been silenced merely by the look on his wife’s face. He worked for a company that made nothing but measuring instruments for stationery, construction tools, medical instruments and the like. He belonged to the Development Division in the company’s laboratory.

To her credit, Caprice gave it a moment’s thought. After all, there’d also been the altercation with Stubber Nasamule earlier in the day. Of course, the central thrust of her “thought” was self-protection and self-advancement, as always. “If I’m the first to discover that Marine City is tilting and report it to the Mayor, I could get promoted. But what if it’s all a pack of lies?”

“Actually, it was Professor McLogick who first discovered it.”

“No,” and she glared at him again. “Once the tilt has become undeniable, I will be the first to discover it and report it to the Mayor – officially, not as a malicious rumour. Do you understand?”

Unable to follow his wife’s logic, Rod changed the subject. “The North No. 2 Block was tilting a bit more when I looked this morning. Well, I’m going to get our company to make a lot of spirit levels and distribute them to stationers all over Marine City. We’ll make a lot of money when everyone starts noticing the tilt, I should think.”

Caprice smiled wryly. “That’s about the best you can come up with, isn’t it. Look what happened last time, when you thought of that, what was it called, that funny thing. You made yourself a laughing stock.”

“You mean the painometer. There was nothing funny about it. The Director merely said it would be difficult to commercialize.” When it came to matters technological, Rod had no thoughts for anything else. “I figured they might need them in hospitals and the like. That’s why I worked out the units of pain. Look!” He slapped himself hard on the cheek. “Whenever you do that to me, the pain level is one kiltago. Of course, pain thresholds differ from person to person. It’s like the average body temperature. The painometer calculates the degree of pain based on the heat emitted from the affected area, the sensation in the tactile region of the brain, the pulse and so on. The first models will be very primitive, but they’ll gradually increase in precision, and then I think everyone will be interested and want to buy one.”

Caprice stared blankly at Rod as he continued his discourse. Not that she was listening to a word he said. No, she was thinking, “Oh dear. Why did I have to marry this man? He’s so brainless, unrefined and cack-handed, slow on the uptake, so dull that he can only think of one thing. But, well… maybe he’s just right for me.”

At around the same time, the pianist Histe Rica was giving a recital in Marine City Hall, a 200-seater venue. Soon after she started performing Bartók’s Improvisations for Piano, her grand piano started to edge, little by little, across the stage towards the auditorium. The first to notice this was a young lighting technician whose job was to train the fresnel lens spotlight on the artiste. Ms Rica herself failed to notice the movement, as her chair was shifting along with the piano. Moreover, since the purpose of a fresnel lens is to soften the edges of the light, the piano’s right leg was only a few inches from the edge of the stage when the lighting technician realized what was happening. As he was desperately wondering how to inform the artiste, the piano plunged into the auditorium with a deafening roar, performed a half-turn with its three legs pointing upwards, then described another half turn that broke its legs and pedals, hurling them into the air, scattering the hammers and keys, and causing the strings to fly out. The momentum sent Histe Rica sprawling, exposing her fleshy white thighs and lemon-yellow underwear, and leaving her upside down at the foot of the stage. Three women in the front row were either struck by the lid of the piano or crushed under it. They suffered ruptured organs, skull fractures, and smashed faces, and all died instantly. Another woman was decapitated by a snapped piano wire, while twelve others nearby suffered non-fatal injuries of varying degrees. Panic broke out in the Hall, which was virtually full for this recital. After all, Histe Rica had a music school in Marine City, and a large number of protégés. The Hall was soon surrounded by police cars and ambulances, and it wasn’t until the following morning that the situation was brought under control.

At first, the families of the victims rushed to point the finger at Histe Rica’s over-enthusiastic performance as the cause of the accident, but it was quickly discovered that this was not the case. For the results of the university survey had already reached Rory O’Storm, and it was immediately proved that the southwest-facing stage was tilting at an angle of three degrees – even before Stubber Nasamule, who lived near the Hall and heard the commotion, could race up with spirit level in hand as if to say “I told you so!”

Fedora Last first heard of the incident when Rory O’Storm called her at seven o’clock the following morning. She immediately considered sacking both O’Storm and Caprice Le Mesurier, he for withholding his report on the conversation with Professor McLogick, she for turning Nasamule away. But then she had better thoughts, realizing that the incident was ultimately due to the spiteful vengeance of pachinko balls. Instead, she turned her anger partly towards self-reproach, partly towards her former husband.

As she had consolidated her position inside the party, so Fedora Last’s anti-pachinko movement had gathered momentum, until finally, after twenty years of struggle, the Pachinko Parlour Prohibition Bill that she herself had proposed was passed by the National Assembly. Of course, that wasn’t her only achievement. If it had been, it would merely have been disregarded as “an idiotic Bill proposed by a silly old cow who hates pachinko”. No, by this time the concept of Marine City as a feminist paradise had already started to take shape, more or less through the single-minded determination of Fedora Last alone.

As a result of the new law, some 10,102 pachinko parlours across the country had been closed down and 2,926,461 pachinko consoles destroyed. As these figures were taken from a survey of police stations and tax offices in 2019, they may not have been strictly accurate. But since 4,000 pachinko balls had been used for each pachinko console, this would suggest the astronomical quantity of 11,705,844,000 pachinko balls. The next problem had been how to dispose of them. Fedora Last, who had assumed personal responsibility for this undertaking, had the idea of using them as ballast for her Marine City. The Construction Ministry had not approved the plan, pointing out that pachinko balls were too unstable to be used for this purpose. But Fedora Last, now the party’s leading woman, already had a large number of supporters. A member of her self-styled Brain Trust, partly out of an unconscious desire to flatter, had proposed that bulkheads be built in chessboard formation to contain the ballast balls. Fedora had jumped at this proposal and insisted on it to the end.

Work had started on building the foundations of Marine City. Well, “foundations” might not be the word, since the City was floating on sea water. But work had started on installing the ballast tanks that would be equivalent to its foundations. There had been some corruption at this point, a case of bribery that also involved Caprice Le Mesurier. The construction company had falsified the bulkhead specifications to increase the amount of the bribe, but had used bulkheads made of slightly thinner walls and offering lower resistance than those stated in the specifications or drawings.

Since it was now clear that the tilt in Marine City was due to some abnormality in the ballast tanks, three surveyors were sent down a manhole into the City’s sewers on the afternoon after the incident with the piano. From there they descended further, through an opening used for repair work, into the ballast tanks at the bottom of Marine City. The surveyors walked across the tops of the bulkheads that divided the blocks into their chessboard formation, each block containing a fixed weight of pachinko balls, and eventually located the damage. A hole had formed in one of the bulkhead walls, and the pachinko balls that should have been in the block to the northeast of it had all flowed into the block to the southwest, disturbing the general equilibrium. Considering the overall tilt of Marine City, it seemed unlikely that this would be the only breach point. Nevertheless, the surveyors climbed down the bulkhead wall along a rope ladder, quickly reaching the bottom of the block some three metres below, where they started to survey the state of the damage.

As luck would have it, another earthquake struck a little more than twenty minutes after the survey started. Pachinko balls flooded back into the northeastern block and trapped one of the surveyors there before returning to the southwestern block. The impetus breached another bulkhead, through which the balls flowed into the next block on the southwestern side. Unable to rescue their colleague owing to the obvious danger, the other two surveyors hurried back to the surface, where they called for help from the police and fire services.

With this, a great commotion broke out. Nearly all police and fire service personnel were mobilized, and Rory O’Storm even had to ask for support from the metropolis, since there weren’t enough personnel in Marine City alone. The trapped surveyor was rescued but was in a critical condition, with bruises all over his body. An aftershock during the rescue operation caused further damage to the bulkheads, seriously injuring two of the rescuers and lightly injuring three more, while another died of asphyxiation when his bronchial tubes were filled with pachinko balls.

It wasn’t until the following morning – when Caprice Le Mesurier, learning of the commotion in a memo from the City offices but not thinking for a moment that an investigation into the corruption would start that very same day, was in the middle of berating her husband for not hitting on his spirit-level idea a day earlier – that it was discovered that there were more than a hundred breach points in the bulkhead walls, and that the walls used for the bulkheads were thinner than specified on the design drawings.

The angle of tilt in the city’s elevation was now four degrees. Readers may like to equip themselves with protractors from this point on. At an angle of four degrees, danger is imminent, and in fact, this was when serious accidents started occurring all over the City.

The roads of Marine City were mostly made of concrete, laid horizontally. That morning, Justa Plagiarist went out for a stroll and, as usual, saw a boy going to school on his skateboard. Justa was still unaware of the tilt and, astonished by the unusually high speed at which the boy was travelling, inadvertently called out:

“Oy! You’ll have an accident! Stop!”

The boy turned to look at him. “I can’t!” he cried.

Justa closed his eyes. A lorry approached from the opposite direction. When he looked again, he could see the boy disappearing under the lorry, still squatting on his skateboard. Thank goodness it was a high-floored vehicle, thought a relieved Justa, before turning back to have another look. The boy, who’d now emerged from under the lorry and was sliding into the distance on his skateboard, was headless. He’d been cleanly decapitated by something protruding under the lorry’s chassis.

With the sirens of police cars and ambulances wailing from early evening until well into the night, most people in Marine City had by now realized that something was afoot. In spite of this, Mayor Fedora Last ordered that the true situation should not be announced until the end of an Emergency Meeting, which started in the early morning. As a result, life went on as usual in various parts of the City, and this led to numerous accidents.

The supermarket operated by Kapital Interest opened for business at ten o’clock. Customers who’d been enticed by newspaper advertisements rushed onto escalators to reach the bargain sale counters. The south-facing escalators, originally inclined at an angle of thirty degrees, had now tilted to thirty-four degrees, while the steps themselves were inclined at four degrees. An obese middle-aged woman at the head of the throng, stepping off the upwards escalator on the first floor, slipped on the grooved cleat and fell flat on her backside. This set off a landslide, as two shoppers on each step behind her toppled backwards in a domino effect. Shrieking like exotic birds, scores of women became piled up in clumps at various points of the escalator, which continued to travel upwards. As it did, the women on top of each pile were hurled over the handrails and down onto the ground floor below. Some fell into glass showcases. Store personnel managed to stop the escalator, but the impetus of this set off another collapse among the clumps of shoppers, leaving scores of them with major injuries on the ground floor. It was a disaster.

Reports of accidents came flying in as the Emergency Meeting continued. Besides the escalator catastrophe, there were two incidents in which runaway wheelchairs rolled down the slope in front of a hospital and were hit by moving cars on the road outside, and nine incidents in which people collided with each other after slipping and falling from stairs, resulting in contusions, fractures, badly bitten tongues, and other injuries. Some were drowned and others went missing when six anglers, including children and seniors, slid into the sea from a seafront angling arena. And so on, and so on, and so on.

The meeting continued until late afternoon. At one point, Fedora Last – at the stern insistence of Rory O’Storm – reluctantly issued an order prohibiting the use of escalators. However, she forcibly deferred measures designed to prevent other kinds of accidents, saying it was “too early to tell”. The meeting ended with the following resolutions.

1. All residents of Marine City will sooner or later come to know of the City’s tilt. As such, no special steps shall be taken to report it.

2. As for accidents caused by the tilt, measures shall only be taken in serious cases. The others shall be ignored as they are too insignificant.

3. Until the damage at the bottom of Marine City is repaired, City employees shall not officially admit to the existence of the tilt in word or deed.

4. Marine City employees shall not be permitted to move home or evacuate outside the City.

5. City employee Caprice Le Mesurier, currently under police investigation on suspicion of corruption, is to be released immediately, since her services are needed in responding to this emergency.

At the conclusion of the meeting, Rory O’Storm – the only man to attend it – was utterly enraged and announced his resignation.

On the same day, Rod Le Mesurier toured stationery shops and builders’ merchants in the City to accept their many orders for spirit levels, protractors, set squares, T-squares, and other sundry instruments, then returned to his office to order them from the company warehouse. One week later, the warehouse had no stock left at all. By the time the City’s residents knew of the tilt and were falling over themselves to buy these items because they needed to stop their furniture moving – as a result of which the products were soon sold out – the tilt had already become so severe that such measuring instruments were utterly useless. Even without earthquakes or tidal waves, the weight of the pachinko balls leaning to the southwest was enough to set off a chain reaction of breaches in the bulkhead walls. It was far too dangerous to even attempt repair work. With no contractors willing to accept the work, the progressive destruction of the ballast tanks was allowed to continue. The angle of inclination increased to eleven degrees. There was a series of accidents involving overturned vehicles, and the number of cars crossing from the metropolis decreased. But Mayor Fedora Last took no measures to cope with these accidents. Her reasoning was that it was perfectly normal to have sloping roads.

It was the punctilious Miss Loyalty who was most annoyed by the tilt in her home, which put her in a state of nervous exhaustion. Though not actually an employee of the City, she was a member of the women’s group, and had pledged allegiance to Fedora Last as an external member of the Mayor’s Brain Trust. As such, she wouldn’t even dream of leaving Marine City. She fastened down all her furniture like a woman possessed, adjusted her picture frames, and fixed them at an angle to match the overall tilt of her apartment. Then she started walking with her body inclined at an angle of precisely eleven degrees to the southwest, or, to be more exact, to the south-southwest-by-west, ensuring that she remained perpendicular to the ground. The same was true when she stood still. In this way, Miss Loyalty could demonstrate that Marine City was not tilting, as she was still standing perpendicular to the ground, enabling her also to confirm her loyalty to Fedora Last. What’s more, she maintained this eleven-degree inclination when she commuted into the metropolis to work every day. Thus she was able to assert that it was not Marine City that was tilting, but the rest of the world.

Soon, others who worked in the metropolis started to copy Miss Loyalty, and tried to find spiritual balance by tilting their bodies. As a result, many people could now be seen in the metropolis walking with their bodies tilted eleven degrees to the southwest. Not only did this mark them out as residents of Marine City, but the direction in which they tilted was also a useful aid to judging compass bearings.

Early on Sunday – the day the tilt increased from eleven to twelve degrees – Professor McLogick prepared to move out of the City. He didn’t keep many books at home anyway, and his furniture easily fitted into a single removal van. He’d nearly finished loading the furniture, with the help of two removal men and two of his students, when they were spotted by some local housewives who’d just got up and now came to surround them. Most of them were sympathizers of the Mayor, and had already tried various tricks to stop people escaping. This time, however, their adversary was Professor McLogick. They knew that their persuasion would be to no avail, that the tables would only be turned and he’d start lecturing them, and that, if anything, they’d end up wishing he would just leave. So all they did, at first, was to surround the truck from a distance and loudly hurl abuse.

“So you’re running away then!”

“Coward! Call yourself a man?!”

“Frightened of a little slope, are we?”

But Professor McLogick wouldn’t be Professor McLogick if he didn’t have his say at this point. “Ladies,” he called out loudly. “You’d better leave quickly too. The buildings will start falling soon. After all, it stands to reason that they haven’t been built properly, with all this bribery and corruption.”

From among the housewives stepped one woman. She strode forwards, stopped in front of the Professor, and slapped him hard on the face.

It was Miss Loyalty. The sound of the slap rang out through the fresh morning air.

“What do you think you’re doing?!” screamed one of the students, full of youthful vigour. He ran straight up to Miss Loyalty and punched her to the ground.

All hell broke loose. The house was in the middle of an estate. One look from their upper floor balconies told the other residents what was happening right away. Housewives came swarming in like wasps from all directions.

The Professor jumped onto the loading platform at the back of the van. “Get in quick! Get in quick!” he yelled at the students, who were fighting with the women over some boxes that hadn’t been loaded yet. “I don’t need those. Get in quick. If we’re caught by the police, we’ll all be executed!”

“Jesus!”

“Move it!”

The removal men, shaken at the thought of execution, started up the van in a panic. The students managed to free themselves from the women, and jumped onto the platform in the nick of time. The housewives, being women, declined to chase the van in a bid to stop it leaving. And so, Professor McLogick made his escape from Marine City.

The following morning, the poetess Stille Hungova awoke at six o’clock, still hungover, and went to get a drink of tap water. “Urghhh!” she exclaimed as she spat it out. It was sea water.

The water pipes from the mainland had burst. They’d been designed with sufficient tolerance for movement, bearing in mind that Marine City was built on an artificial island. But now the pipes had been crushed on the seabed. The water supply to Marine City was cut. The gas supply was also turned off, in view of the obvious danger. That day, Mayor Fedora Last asked the Waterworks Bureau for a supply of water to Marine City using tank trucks. Meanwhile, shoppers fought tooth and nail over mineral water in supermarkets and propane gas in hardware stores; dozens of housewives were seriously injured.

Caprice Le Mesurier, appointed Chief of Police to succeed Rory O’Storm, suddenly started to assume a more friendly attitude towards her husband Rod. This was partly because she saw him in a different light now that he’d been promoted to Head of Sales. But it was also because she’d been compelled to vow even greater allegiance to Fedora Last, like it or not, in view of the tremendous debt she now owed her. She’d be in dire straits if Rod said he wanted to move out. On that day, as it happened, the Transport Bureau gave notice that the bus service between the metropolis and the City would terminate the following day. Now Caprice would have to buy Rod the car he’d always wanted.

Prompted by the loss of water and the termination of the bus service, more citizens now tried to escape to the mainland, resulting in scores of skirmishes with people trying to stop them. The writer Justa Plagiarist realized there was no way he could carry all his household effects off, so he simply boarded the last bus to the metropolis with nothing but the clothes on his back. Supermarket owner Kapital Interest and his young wife were about to sneak away in their car, taking only their art works and other belongings of value, when they were discovered by the neighbourhood house wives, who immediately destroyed the car and the art works in it. For good measure they also pulled the clothes off the backs of the fleeing pair, leaving them to run for their lives, half-naked, across Marine Bridge.

Children and students who attended schools and colleges in the metropolis gradually fled across the bridge to safety, some with their parents, some on their own as their parents insisted on staying, some after violent rows with their mothers. At least the housewives didn’t prevent them from leaving. They also turned a blind eye to parents who left with their children. This was because there’d been a series of accidents in which infants had fallen to their deaths from tilting stairs or balconies in their homes, fallen on roads and suffered serious harm, and so on. But men who tried to leave on grounds of greater convenience for commuting were stopped and forced to commute from Marine City by car. Rod Le Mesurier did so every day, taking five others with him. Often, husbands who worked in the metropolis would fail to return home in the evening, leaving their abandoned wives to be pilloried and vilified by their neighbours.

The national government issued an order for all residents of Marine City to leave the island. Furious, Fedora Last declared her intention to disobey the order. It was “tyrannical interference in the affairs of a local authority” and a “serious challenge to feminism”. “I will not obey the order. Marine City is not tilting.”

The tilt worsened with each passing day. On Wednesday it was eighteen degrees, on Thursday it was twenty. Soon, the power had failed and telephone links were broken. On Thursday evening, Marine Bridge collapsed into the sea with a great reverberating boom. With that, the road connection to the metropolis was lost.

Professor McLogick’s prediction that buildings would collapse was, in fact, inaccurate. The only building to fall was Marine City Hall, which was built of brick. Most steel-reinforced concrete buildings had upright metal sections welded to the steel base of the City, replacing the usual pile-driven foundations. But now those buildings were starting to become warped. Of course, lifts stopped working. Doors would not open once closed, nor close once opened. So, for fear of being trapped inside their homes, residents started to leave their doors open. Even so, the buildings somehow stayed upright. But the shift in their centre of gravity only served to accelerate the tilt in Marine City. On Friday, the angle reached twenty-three degrees. At such an acute angle, even pavements that were originally flat could no longer be walked on. Well, “walk” was hardly the word anyway – people would be sliding and falling as they crept along the roads. They also had to be wary of objects falling from above. Children’s toys, shoes, kitchenware, and sundry household goods falling from verandas were one thing. But sometimes even dogs or people would come tumbling down, or pianos would crash through iron railings and plummet to the ground. Which was not such a laughing matter. Soon, it was normal to see housewives, who’d popped out for a spot of shopping, returning home with bloody injuries and their clothing in shreds.

Several buildings along the coast at the southwestern end of Marine City – including a children’s amusement centre, the Toximere Clinic, and a poodle parlour – were soon submerged. A nearby road that ran from north to south sloped diagonally into the sea. Sometimes cars or people would slide sideways off the camber of the road and simply disappear under the water. For this reason, the area came to be constantly patrolled by police boats. As well as saving people who came sliding down the road, they also had the admirable task of rescuing desperate Marine City residents who tried to escape the City secretly at night and ferrying them over to the mainland. Helicopters circled above the City during the day, urging residents to leave and telling them where the police boats were waiting.

“Damn. It could at least have collapsed while I was at work. Then I needn’t have come home!”

Caprice Le Mesurier dragged Rod, still grumbling thus as he gazed out through the window of their apartment – which now leant at an angle of twenty-six degrees – at the straits into which Marine Bridge had collapsed, back into bed on Saturday morning.

“What are you moaning about? Come here, I said.”

“But it’s every morning these days!”

“What about it?! You haven’t anything better to do, have you?!”

The Le Mesurier residence was on the northeastern side of the building, at the far end of an open walkway on the eleventh floor. As the couple entered the throes of ecstasy, the nails that fastened the legs of their bed to the floor came loose, causing the bed to slide out of the bedroom with considerable force. It travelled across the living room and out through the front door (which had of course been left open) onto the walkway, where it struck a woman and hurled her high over the railings, before finally colliding with the iron railings at the southwestern end. The railings stopped the bed, but the momentum sent Rod and Caprice, still in their coital embrace, flying naked through the air.

Miss Loyalty, who could no longer get to work, was appointed Chief of Police to replace the late Caprice Le Mesurier. Nothing could have suited her better. Since the only remaining police staff were two female deskworkers, she donned the uniform herself, correctly tilted her body at an angle of twenty-six degrees to the south-southwest, and ran around Marine City investigating incidents and accidents as if considerations such as gravity were not an issue. If she spotted anyone trying to leave the City, she would take out her pistol and fire shots at them. She remained active even at night, when she would be involved in spectacular gunfights with the police boats as she tried to stop them carrying escapees to the mainland. With this, those left on the island lost their last remaining means of escape.

The alcohol requirement of the poetess Stille Hungova increased. If anything, the drink took effect more quickly now that she was living in a tilting world; she was more or less in a permanent state of inebriation. One day, she went out in search of more alcohol, and started to negotiate the southwest-facing stairs of her apartment building. As the stairs were originally inclined at forty-two degrees, the angle was now more than seventy degrees. She immediately fell, hit the road, bounced twice on its surface, then started sliding along it. Wearing an Oriental gown, she continued to slide along in her wholly unseemly state, then, after sinking six metres into the sea on the already submerged road, gently floated back to the surface. The crew of a tourist pleasureboat, carrying fifty-six passengers who callously wanted to see the tilting Marine City for themselves, threw out a life belt from a safe distance in an attempt to rescue her. No sooner had she been hauled up on deck than she started badgering the onlookers for alcohol, amazing all and sundry with her sheer pluck and courage.

In no time at all, the tilt had increased to forty degrees. Soon, people no longer knew whether they were going up- or downstairs. People who slipped in the street found themselves not so much sliding as actually falling down the road. By now, the only people remaining in Marine City were the Mayor Fedora Last, the Chief of Police Miss Loyalty, and thirteen other women. The only man left was the carpenter Stubber Nasamule. Determined to see the end of Marine City, he’d made his wife and children leave for the mainland, while he himself enjoyed the sight of the City gradually sinking under the sea. He fashioned a rope walkway that allowed him to crawl back and forth along the road from his home to the supermarket, where goods could now be taken for free. He also made handholds and footholds here and there on other roads to prevent slippage. He even made some on request for the remaining women. Even then, he himself slipped on occasion, once sliding tens of yards. But he was always sure to keep the rope tied securely around his body. Even if he were to fall into the sea, he was confident of his ability to swim.

Some of the remaining women didn’t need to trouble Stubber at all, relying on their own wits to devise means of motion. One of them found a way of moving from building to building using ropes. But such measures were out of the question for Fedora Last, on account of her obesity. Finally, she came to a decision and ordered Miss Loyalty to take her to the most northerly apartment building in Marine City. It was now clear that, once the tilt reached forty-five degrees, it would only be a matter of time before the city capsized completely. Under orders from Fedora Last, Miss Loyalty chained the Mayor’s body to a water tower at the top of the building.

Actually, the government hadn’t expected Marine City to tilt this far, and had tended to take a rather optimistic view of things. The assumption was that, once the sunken south-southwest section of Marine City’s base reached the bottom of the bay – which itself should only be sixty metres deep, at the deepest point – the tilting would naturally stop. But when the angle approached forty-five degrees, there was now a very real possibility that the whole island could capsize. Nobody understood why the bottom of the bay had become so deep. Not even the author knew. Some speculated that the base had sunk into the mud layer at the bottom of the bay, and was gouging out the mud. But the mud layer couldn’t possibly continue for a depth of several miles, and it was therefore decided, after all, that the reason was unknown. So, the debate now turned to urgent measures to prevent the City from completely turning over.

At last, the day had come when Marine City was predicted to capsize completely. An air force rescue team in a 26-seater V-107/A helicopter came to pick up the last survivors. One of its occupants was Rory O’Storm, who’d volunteered to persuade the remaining residents. The helicopter descended into the middle of the residential area and hovered at a height of two metres while staying more or less parallel to the ground. The rescue operation started. Realizing that to stay on the island would mean certain death, the thirteen housewives responded to persuasion and came out one by one. Stubber Nasamule followed suit.

It was almost midday. After passing forty-five degrees, the angle of inclination quickly started shifting to ninety degrees. Buildings began to make strange creaking, grating noises in unison, and objects began to fall at random onto the helicopter from buildings in the northeast.

The V-107/A had successfully picked up the thirteen women and Stubber Nasamule, along with two dogs and five cats, and was about to start its ascent, when Miss Loyalty, her body correctly inclined at 72.8 degrees to the south-southwest-by-west, came racing out of an apartment building to the northeast, popping away with her pistol, which she aimed at the helicopter’s rotor. Rory O’Storm, judging her to be no longer human but some kind of demon, shot her dead.

The helicopter pulled away and set off towards the roof of the apartment building at the northeastern end of the City. The intention was to persuade Fedora Last, still chained to the iron frame of the water tower there, to give herself up. Rory O’Storm called out to her.

“Come any closer and I’ll shoot!” she screamed back, brandishing a pistol that Miss Loyalty must have given her. “I’ll have none of your meddling here!”

“Mayor. If you stay here you will die!” Rory O’Storm tried his hardest to explain. “Please leave with us. Marine City can always be rebuilt.”

“Oh yes?!” the Mayor shouted back. She was looking up from what was virtually the summit of Marine City, which now protruded vertically from the sea on its side. “You men will just have a good laugh and say we told you so! Of course it won’t be rebuilt!”

“The angle has reached ninety degrees. Mayor. In a few seconds you will be sinking upside down in the sea. It won’t be nice at all.”

“Shut up!” She fired her pistol at the helicopter.

Dwooooooooooooooooooooaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarrrrhhhh!

The collapse of the century had started. With a deafening roar, the northern half of Marine City plummeted towards the sea.

“I’m not going to die!” Fedora Last screeched yet, as she plunged seawards head first. “Even if I sink on this side, I’ll float straight back up on the other side, me and Marine City. I’ll show you!”

“It’s not a waterwheel!” Rory O’Storm yelled from the helicopter, which continued to follow her down. “You can still save yourself with the rope. Throw the gun away. Don’t waste your life!”

“Who says I’m going to die?! You fools! I’m not going to die, I am not! I’m going to float back up agebbo gabbo gobbo! Blublublublublub! Glugluglug, gluglug glugluglug!”

Upside down, Fedora Last disappeared under the sea. With that, the City capsized completely, sending up a massive column of spray hundreds of feet high.

Marine City floated upside down in the bay like a gigantic chocolate cake, its rust-coloured base exposed to view. After reaching an angle of 180 degrees, the City did not complete a turn of 360 degrees. It did not refloat itself. And Mayor Fedora Last was never seen or heard of again.