Norikaeru

By Tom Slattery

The world shudders when Prime Minister McKenna of British North America is assassinated on November 22, 1963. Inventor Jimmy Keyes and his patent lawyer Marcus Morris find themselves entangled in the event, partly as a result of Keyes invention. As the world political crisis caused by the assassination deepens, and as they are hunted by elements connected to the assassination, they attempt to fire-up the invention, with curious and mixed results.

• Language: English
• Publisher: iUniverse
• Release date: Jan 8, 2001
• ISBN: 9781469712666

Tom Slattery

Tom Slattery was born and grew up in the Cleveland, Ohio, metropolitan area. He wandered through the world with an interested eye, a knack at seeing things differently, a fertile mind. He worked for colleges, universities, and research facilities, and lived and worked for years in Asia and Europe.

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All Rights Reserved © 2000 by Matthew Thomas Slattery; III

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To Miyo and Muto and Gigi and the way we were

Contents

PREFACE

PROLOGUE

PART ONE

PART TWO

PREFACE

In the summer of 1968, it looked like I would be in Japan for a while. I got hold of an old and slightly broken Hermes portable typewriter. I was without income, and even typewriter paper seemed expensive. I was hoping to get a little money from selling science fiction stories to American magazines, and the problem was trying to do it from Japan. This is literally the only story of a half-dozen that remains from that summer.

No one ever returned a number of stories I sent out, even when I included international postal-payment certificates, possibly because these were more mysterious to editors than my stories. Xerox machines were still a novelty. There was one in the distant Isetan department store in Shinjuku, but it cost the equivalent of twenty-five cents per copy, which would generate an astronomical amount for a novel-length manuscript. So while typing on that slightly broken machine, I agonizingly used two or three already worn old sheets of carbon paper for the entire short novel.

For further economy, because even typewriter paper was a burden to buy, I typed a number of the carbon pages onto creatively cut-to-typewriter-size brown-paper-bag pieces, already utilizing my few sheets of carbon paper to their limits. I sent off the original to an American science fiction magazine, and it never came back.

Fortunately the extremely poor carbon copy survived my many moves and travels until 1983, when I struggled to read the functionally illegible pages for the first time in 15 years, retyped it to save it while slightly rewriting it, and copyrighted it in a short fiction collection titled If, Never, and Maybe. In 1987, I polished it and put it out in a self-published book of my short fiction titled Open 25 Hours. In 1990, I adapted it as a first-draft screenplay with the same title and have rewritten the screenplay several times since.

Here is the short novel by itself, as I originally meant it in far-off Tokyo during those dog days of that long-ago hot summer of 1968.

Norikaeru means to transfer in Japanese.

PROLOGUE

CONSIDER WHAT THINGS MIGHT BE LIKE if the American Revolution had not been successful. Consider what the map of the world would be like. There would be a large area across the North American continent called British North America, and there would be other areas with different names. If the American Revolution had been unsuccessful, it is unlikely that the French Revolution would have occurred. If these two revolutions had not occurred or had not succeeded, the Meiji restoration, swayed by the US Navy’s Commodore Perry opening up Japan, and the Tai-ping rebellion in China, temporarily prevailing under the leadership of American-influenced Hung Hsiu-ch’uan, probably would not have occurred. American influence in both of these Asian events was not large, but critical. And it would also seem unlikely that the Russian Revolution would ever have occurred if the American Revolution had failed almost a century-and-a-half earlier. So given a steady but probably slower progress in information and control technologies, the world by the early 1960’s might be divided into moderately benevolent and quasi-parliamentary Orwellian monarchies of Eurasia, East Asia, and British Empire, each having evolved into a limited monarchy. And since the Latin American Revolutions followed the North American Revolution, countries like Mexico would probably be a part of New Spain and under a weak Spanish monarch.

The map of North America thus shows a region similar to the territory occupied by our familiar forty-eight lower states, but it is called The Dominion of British North America. Most of what we know as Canada is included in this. To the south is New Spain, and its border reaches up to just south of Monterey on the California Coast and goes across to about where we know Oklahoma City to be. From there the border drops south and then follows the Guadalupe River to the Gulf of Mexico.

British North America is divided into fourteen large provinces and a few small ones. The important ones in this story are the Province of Oregon, which reaches from the border of New Spain to the northern coast of Alaska, and the Province of Western Reserve, which includes the area around what we know as Cleveland, Ohio. But the city there is known as Jefferson, not Cleveland, and Jefferson is the capital of Western Reserve Province. The capital of Oregon Province is The Dalles on the Columbia River. And not far away is the independent country of Vancouver Island, an island only a little smaller than Cuba.

The Constitution of the United States of America was, of course, never written, so an often-overlooked legal guarantee representing an ethical advance in civilization is also lacking. Without it, both technical and social progress would undoubtedly be slower because this was the first such written legal guarantee that creative people could benefit from their creative powers and efforts and influenced subsequent legal guarantees elsewhere in the world. It might be difficult to measure the motivating force of these words, but it is impossible to deny it. Tucked away in the Constitution among the vital powers of Congress to raise armies and collect taxes is this:

.. .To promote the progress of science and useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries. (Article I, Section 8).

Progress in areas where creative people benefit from this protection would be slower, but in areas concerned with national defense and military preparedness, where minds are mustered for great causes, it might not lag so much, and the world might be less pleasant and more dangerous. Television, for instance, might not be on the mass marketplace, but nuclear bombs and missile delivery systems would have been concocted in the international competitive pressure of military research.

Quite possibly unaffected by the forces which caused the American Revolution to fail, the ancient Roman Empire had come and gone ages earlier. One of its historians, Tacitus, wrote in The Annals of Imperial Rome, in a matter-of-fact assertion amid textual matter on conspiracies, intrigues, and power struggles of the Roman government in the year 31 AD: Next year, at the conclusion of an age-old cycle, the phoenix appeared in Egypt, a remarkable event which occasioned much discussion by Egyptian and Greek authorities.

PART ONE

THE HUMAN SPECIES HAS A CERTAIN CAPACITY to accept change. Beyond this capacity, human mental activities and behavior begin to diverge from norms. The changes that had thus far affected Jimmy Keyes were large but within his capacity. As he walked west on San Francisco’s Market Street, more changes were in store for him. And these were not the usual kind.

Keyes had just crossed Third Street and was walking on the right side of the street toward the Ferry Building—walking about in the middle of the sidewalk—when changes that should really happen to no one began happening to Jimmy Keyes.

The new skyscrapers at the lower end of Market Street took on a sudden unreal appearance, standing like images or holograms in contrast with what seemed to be real, but architecturally old style buildings. For an instant, older automobiles that looked like early 1920’s motorcars of some strange European design seemed to be moving in both directions on the wrong side of the street.

Illusion superimposed itself on reality. Or was it the other way around? Keyes felt dizziness, fever, and chills. His perceptions of corpo-realty commenced to spin within and without as if in collision with a realm of the illusionary. He collapsed on the sidewalk and lost consciousness.

If these were the only changes, it is possible that they would have been in themselves sufficient to cause Keyes’s subsequent brief spell of amnesia and apparent total disorientation.

IT WAS ABOUT LUNCH HOUR. Marcus Morris, stout, balding, and fifty-three, set the papers he was reading on his desk, stretched, took a deep breath, got up from his chair, and wandered over to his office window.

The scene on the street three stories below was unusual and puzzling. The crowd—not the normal lunch-hour crowd—was emotional and evidently in grief. The chill November air normally would have kept many of those people indoors.

Morris, a law practitioner licensed by the Royal Patent Office, was a man who could more easily make sense of designs of machines than actions of people. It had just occurred to him to go downstairs and see what was going on