THE DRUM OF rain against the ship subsided, and Yukari stepped out on deck. The storm clouds that had brought the squall were already receding into the distance, leaving behind a clear blue sky. The sea air was heavy with the smell of trees and people. Maltide was close.
Maltide was an island covered with dense jungle. Coral reefs and palm trees hemmed the beaches, but the interior was filled with sharp peaks, the occasional black spire breaking through the foliage.
The island was bigger than Yukari had expected. Back in March her uncle had told her of a Japanese enclave on a small island in the Solomons. He had been in Guadalcanal visiting a skipjack tuna cannery for the food-service company he worked for, which was where he had heard the rumors.
Japanese in the Solomons…
Did it mean what she thought it did? She had to find out. Even if it only ended in disappointment.
Unfortunately, there weren’t any direct flights between Japan and the Solomon Islands, and getting there using a prepackaged tour would be too expensive. The high school Yukari had been accepted to last spring didn’t allow its students to hold part-time jobs, so saving up was out of the question. After brooding over the problem for a few days, she decided to take it to her mother.
“I don’t know what good it will do,” her mother began. “But who knows? A trip like this on your own—it might be good for you.” And like that, her mother handed her five hundred thousand yen in cash.
Yukari’s mother was in architectural design, so she made considerably more than the average salaryman. Better still, she wasn’t stingy with it. The air of indifference with which she had given Yukari the money was simply intended to annoy her daughter, which it did.
By the time summer vacation rolled around, Yukari was armed with passport, visa, and traveler’s checks. She left Narita Airport on July 21 aboard an Air France DC-10 that took her as far as New Caledonia. From there a Solomon Airlines Boeing 737 brought her to Guadalcanal. After a night in a hotel in Honiara, she boarded a ferry. Now she was eight hundred kilometers south of the equator, a world of sun, coral, and jungle.
As the ferry pulled up to the pier, Yukari shouldered a backpack over her windbreaker and pulled on a short-brimmed straw hat she had picked up in Honiara. She stepped off the boat, followed by a stream of men with blackened arms and necks. The rickety wooden pier she found herself on looked as though it might give way at any moment, but after a few heart-stopping steps, she had reached the shore.
A short walk along a road made of crushed oyster shells and bits of coral brought her to Main Street in the town of Santiago. According to her guidebook, Santiago was the closest thing to a proper city on the entire island. Even so, she couldn’t spot a single building taller than the palm trees. A stone mansion from the days of British rule caught her eye. She peered past the outer wall and saw that the grounds had been converted to a marketplace. Stalls led up to the open hall on the first floor of the house, and smoke from grilling fish filled the air. Shoppers carrying baskets and bags of woven hemp filled the market, the pale East Asians standing out against the dark-skinned Melanesians. English was supposed to be the common language here, but what strange, clipped syllables Yukari could make out didn’t sound like any dialect of English she’d ever heard. A stucco church stood beside the market, and beyond that stretched rows of small shops.
Yukari was on a missing-person search, so she figured the city hall or the police station would be good places to start. She began exploring the city and before long came across a peculiar street market. A riot of primary colors—reds, yellows, greens—filled her view. At the head of the street stood a brightly colored gate decorated with two dragons.
“I guess anywhere you go, they have a Chinatown.”
Amused, she stepped through the gate.
She had scarcely crossed the threshold when someone called to her in accented Japanese. “Miss! Miss! You come from Japan?”
An aging Asian man with ruddy cheeks stood in front of the shop on her left, beckoning her closer. The sign behind him read TIANJIN RESTAURANT in large Chinese characters. Scrawled messily to one side, an addendum in Japanese read RICE PORRIDGE, DIM SUM. JAPANESE WELCOME. STAFF SPEAK JAPANESE.
A stroke of luck. Yukari could hold a light conversation in English, but the pidgin they spoke on the islands was another beast. More importantly, she might overhear something to aid her search in a restaurant that catered to Japanese.
“Hello.”
“Hello! You pretty girl! You come inside, you eat. My name is Tianjin Cheung. This my restaurant. Japanese love my food.” Mr. Cheung led her inside, peppering Yukari with pleasantries all the while. The shop was decorated with openwork folding screens, black tables and chairs, and all the usual fixtures. A stereotypical Chinese restaurant.
Mr. Cheung brought her a menu with Japanese translations beside each item.
Yukari glanced down the menu. “Um…rice porridge, please.”
“Rice porridge? Nothing else? You should eat. Too thin. Bad luck being thin.”
Yukari didn’t appreciate the pressure tactics but decided she stood more to gain by befriending the proprietor than by getting on his bad side. “Okay, throw in some dumplings.”
“Dumplings. Very good. One minute, please.”
Mr. Cheung disappeared into the back and returned a moment later carrying a tray laden with a bowl of rice porridge that looked exactly like the paste kids use in arts and crafts, a small bamboo basket of dumplings, and a mystery deep-fried morsel that loosely resembled a twisted doughnut.
He poured Yukari a glass of oolong tea. “You come visit base?”
“Base?”
“Sure, rocket base. Other side of mountain.”
“There’s a rocket base here? Really?”
“Oh yes. I never tell lie.”
“There wouldn’t be any Japanese on this base, would there?”
“Oh yes. Only Japanese.”
“For real?” Yukari sprang to her feet. Jackpot.
“For real. I never tell lie.”
“How do you get there? Is there a train? A bus?”
Mr. Cheung only shook his head.
✦ ✦ ✦
[ACT 5]
✦ ✦ ✦
THIRTY MINUTES AFTER the explosion the management team had already been called into a meeting. It was unusual to meet before the initial telemetry analysis was even complete. Whatever this was about, it wasn’t going to be good.
Once everyone had settled into their seats, Director Nasuda addressed the team.
“The LS-7 booster that just exploded so fantastically was to be our ticket to manned spaceflight…had it been successful.” He cleared his throat before continuing. “These six failures have given us a lot of valuable data. With another year, we’d have ourselves a world-class rocket. But that’s another year we don’t have.” He glared at the assembled managers. “The suits bankrolling this operation, the Department of Economic Planning, have short-sightedly concluded that if this launch failed, our base here in the Solomons would be closed, and the manned spaceflight program would be indefinitely shelved.”
Gasps filled the room. This was hardly a revelation, but that did nothing to lessen the shock. “Hamamatsu, here I come,” mumbled Yasukawa.
“Not so fast, Yasukawa!” the director barked. “We’re not finished yet. If we can get you in orbit in the next six months, they wouldn’t dare pull our funding.”
“We can’t get the LS-7 up and running that soon,” said Kinoshita, the flight director. “The first stage is still too unreliable. We need a 99.99 percent safety margin before we go strapping people on top.”
“We won’t be using the LS-7,” Nasuda said. “We’re using the LS-5. What she lacks in lift, she makes up for in reliability.”
“Won’t work,” said Mukai, the chief engineer. “The whole reason we’re developing the LS-7 is because the LS-5 doesn’t have enough lift.”
“Then we reduce the payload. Strip down every system that’s not absolutely essential. Shave the critical load coefficient down to 1.05.”
Mukai’s brow furrowed. “You think that will get us to 99.99 percent?”
“The numbers will work themselves out. If we can just keep that first stage from exploding, we can sail right into low earth orbit.”
“I’ll do what I can, but I’m not making any promises.”
“Fair enough,” agreed Nasuda. “Satsuki?”
“Sir?”
“How light can you get Yasukawa here?” Clearly, Nasuda was going to go after every last gram.
“Let’s see…He’s 170 centimeters tall, and there’s not much we can do about his bone mass. I’d say fifty kilograms.”
“Do it.”
“Yes, sir.”
There was a loud bang from the back of the room. The door stood half open, the sound of running footsteps echoing from the hall.
“Yasukawa.” Nasuda sighed as he reached for the intercom on the wall. “You there, Kurosu? Yasukawa may be trying to leave the base. See that he doesn’t.”
✦ ✦ ✦
[ACT 6]