Дэймон Найт - Orbit 9

The two professors sank into their cushions and waited for the televisor in front of them to light up.

The cameraman climbed his stool and focused the camera, the great drums of Fuji Color film arching over his head, on the bioescent screen hidden in the cool depths of the hooded machine. There, the mysterious images would soon flicker into life.

A student assistant brought Dr. Mochizuki a copy of the script attached to a clipboard.

“Today,” he leaned sidewise, “we are founding empire in China—the great battle of 222 B.C. between Ch’in and the last of the undefeated feudal states. Ch’in strikes down the Yangtze and finishes Ch’u—over a million men fielded on both sides.”

“About the time of the Second Punic Wars in the Roman world,” put in Iwahashi.

“I am instructed,” replied Mochizuki, nodding his body forward in his chair. But he added, “I’ve never had the chance to live outside Japan and study foreign things as you have done.” This concealed a barb of sanctimonious aggression flicked at a man set apart by his colleagues for his recent visiting professorship at Harvard.

“Anyway,” Mochizuki went on, “we are attempting to film that big scene. I suppose that’s why you are here.”

Iwahashi said nothing. His provincial-minded colleagues thought of him as a tainted expatriate simply because he had been out of the country for more than six months. But he had won favor with the Ministry of Education for that. And it was they who had sent him to check up on Mochizuki’s work.

Another student assistant extended a black hood that opened out and masked Ito’s face. For the while he saw darkness and rested.

Dr. Mochizuki pointed a finger and yet another student trotted over with the folio of drawings the tsukisoi had put down. She was now slowly massaging her patient’s back.

“Ito-san is very good at keeping track of all this technical detail,” said Mochizuki, flipping through pages of architectural, landscape, and military drawings. “The main actors are all here,” he waved a hand at the mannequins, “dressed in all their changes of costume. Or at least he used to keep everything straight. That’s the whole trouble.”

“Yes, I see,” said Iwahashi. He meant he would see if the. project were worth saving or not. Probably not.

Buddhalike, Ito-san sat on the matting with his face cupped in the hood. He saw a rectangle come out of the darkness in the ratio of 1:2.55. The tsukisoi stopped rubbing his back and nodded to the cameraman.

The slave screen before Iwahashi’s eyes lighted up.

He could see, from the torn edges of the uneven picture, that horses, chariots, rice bags, arms, and other military supplies were being loaded on river barges, ready for dispatch against the enemy down the Yangtze.

But the picture went to pieces almost as soon as it had started.

Dr. Mochizuki stood up and shouted. “Failure! A great failure!”

The cameraman crept out with little hunched-over motions. The tsukisoi came up and asked leave to go to the movies. Mochizuki nodded and sadly watched her go. And Ito-san got up on his knees and made noises sounding like, “So sorry.”

“That’s new,” said Mochizuki.

“Will he be all right?” asked Iwahashi.

“He lives here,” replied Mochizuki. “Let us please quit for the day.”

Ito-san had the run of the whole twelfth floor of the new engineering building. He would trouble no one. Dr. Iwahashi knew that. He was famous for his comparative study of American and Japanese mental hospitals. He viewed the hospital ward as a small society, a kind of natural human community as suitable to anthropological fieldwork as any tribal home. In reporting his findings in the Japanese Journal of Psychiatry , before popularizing them in the newspapers, he could not resist delivering the following acid remarks:

We note with some irony that mental patients in America, that self-advertised homeland of democracy, are segregated into different classes as measured by the ruling ethic of social adjustment, which classes are meted out their custodial rewards in terms of placement in violent wards, general wards, or open wards. In Japan, still undemocratic in its feudal infrastructure—a condition our American critics never tire of exposing—mental patients enjoy unmitigated commonality. This equality under one class of confinement is enabled by the fact that we Japanese are so disciplined a race that even when we go mad, we go mad politely, with no disobedience to authority, no unguarded lapse of consideration for others, no unexpected breech of decorum, and no interruption of politesse.

Ito-san was simply installed in the laboratory where the experiment in bionic moviemaking was being conducted. The room contained a gas heater, a hot plate for cooking rice, and a four-mat platform: high-class quarters for a tsukisoi and her patient.

The times the tsukisoi had gone to the movies, which had become increasingly frequent, Ito paged idly through the script or strolled up and down the hallway in his clogs, whose sound of wooden kalumping gave Dr. Mochizuki an easy means of tracking him by ear.

After the laboratory failure, the two professors, leading a double procession of loyal students, retired to a small coffee shop across the street from the university grounds. A plaster cast of a Picasso bronze, an owl, sat in the front window as an emblem of the democratic comforts of informal lounging to which the coffee shop invited its seekers, faculty and students alike. Numerous other works of Western art, paintings of English landscapes and statues of naked Greeks, crowded the walls and corners of the tiny room.

The place was filled with male art students, their long hair internationally styled, one to a table, paying for their majestic, foreign-style privacy with demitasse Columbian coffee at the steep price of seventy-five yen a cup. The manager waved away the student at the window table to make room for the herr doktor professors, while the anthropology and engineering majors descended on the rest of the tables and ordered soft drinks. Drs. Iwahashi and Mochizuki drank beer. They looked out on a miniature courtyard, a sentimental rural scene of moss, paddle wheels, and recycled dripping water, glassed-in like a museum diorama and artificially illuminated. From time to time, in orderly succession, according to their class standing, one or two students would migrate over and sit at the professorial table to listen and ask questions.

At one point a person unknown to either one of them sat down and asked Dr. Iwahashi about his newspaper articles on American and Japanese mental hospitals. Did teacher believe, then, that Westernism was a kind of disease that had to be kept out of the motherland in order to preserve Japanese sanity?

“Oh?” asked Dr. Iwahashi coolly, not even turning his head to the speaker. “Are you one of our students?”

The person quickly removed himself and his misplaced communication and returned to a remote table where he nursed with melancholy intensity a German translation of Mao Tse-tung’s poetry.

“Some of these modern students have no manners,” Iwahashi said to his colleague Mochizuki. “Just because I write for the mass media, I get mass man on my tail.”

Mochizuki reached for a peanut and munched it, cupping a hand before his mouth by way of concealing the unlovely sight of teeth and jaws at work.

“But you technical people,” Iwahashi went on, “are paid enough so you don’t have to chase after the mass media for your children’s tuition money.”

A bona fide student took his place as soon as the conversation drifted away from personal matters.