Yukari Morita: 37 kg, Excellent Health

Two kilometers away, the image of the launchpad Isao Nasuda was peering at through his binoculars shimmered like a mirage. A fine white mist of liquid oxygen rose off the body of the rocket and spilled steadily down toward the ground.

“Hardly a breath of wind,” Isao muttered. “That’s good.”

The man next to him lowered his own binoculars. “What, Mr. Nasuda? A brisk wind all it takes to topple your rockets these days?” The man was stationed in Indonesia where he worked for the Overseas Economic Cooperation Fund. He had just flown out to the islands. “Don’t misunderstand me. No one would like to see this succeed more than I would.” His face split into a smile. “What’s the saying? Sixth time’s the charm?”

Isao snorted. “Accidents happen—goes hand in hand with breaking in new technology. We’re in this for the long haul.”

The man from the OECF shook his head. “The taxpayers are starting to ask if this is money—and it is a lot of money— well spent. It wasn’t all that long ago the people out here in the Solomons were running around hunting heads. How is a rocket like this going to help them?”

“Education. One communications satellite will bring modern education to all seven hundred-plus islands. That alone should be enough to sell it.”

“Then why a manned flight? If you want to bring satellite TV to the natives, why not launch from Tanegashima back in Japan?”

“Isn’t it a bit late for second thoughts?”

“I’m just passing along the complaints we hear every day.”

“Then maybe it’s time you started educating your complainers. Satellites are expensive pieces of hardware. Expensive enough for companies like AsiaSat out in Hong Kong to use the shuttle to go up and pluck a broken one out of orbit, have it repaired, and have it launched again. You want to keep a satellite working, you’re going to have to send people up to kick the tires every now and again.”

“Why not have NASA or the Russians do it?”

“Russia has one foot in the grave, and the shuttle is booked solid for the next decade,” sighed Isao. “Besides, they’re falling apart. Only a matter of time before another one goes boom. But if we had our own manned space program—just think of it!” Isao thrust a finger toward the OECF man’s nose. “The possibilities would be endless! He who rules space rules the world!”

“So that’s why we’re really here.”

“You work for the government. You of all people should know the importance of a good bait and switch.”

“Mr. Nasuda,” began the OECF man, frowning, “I have an official notice from the Department of Economic Planning. I don’t think you’re going to like what you see—it’s an ultimatum.”

[ACT 2]

IN THE CONTROL room, amid the throng of engineers, the traditional prelaunch betting pool was getting underway.

“Ten dollars says it fails,” declared Satsuki Asahikawa, the chief medical officer. She was clothed head to toe in crisp white.

“That’s pretty harsh, Satsuki,” Hiroyuki Mukai grumbled. “How ’bout a little faith, eh?” Fresh from an all-nighter, the chief engineer stared at the monitors with bloodshot eyes.

“Oh, I have a little faith.” The flight director, Kazuya Kinoshita, a tall man with hair combed straight back, threw a wad of Solomon Islands dollars in Satsuki’s cap. “Until the LS-7 booster proves itself, manned spaceflight is a no go. And judging by the mood in the observation room, the whole show’s riding on this one. That said…ten dollars on a failure.”

“The whole show? You think they’d cancel the program?”

“Sure do.”

“That wouldn’t be all bad,” interjected Haruyuki Yasukawa, “as long as I could go back to Hamamatsu. I come out here to be a big shot astronaut, and my ride keeps exploding. Now all I have to look forward to are daily torture sessions with Satsuki. I’m not sure how much more I can take.”

“That’s not torture, it’s training.”

“That what they’re calling it now?”

“You sure you want to go there?”

“There’s that look again—like you’re sizing up a guinea pig.”

“Oh, please.”

“You think I didn’t notice, Satsuki?”

“Notice what?”

“The last time you had me in the centrifuge, you bumped it up to 20 G, remember?” At 20 G, Yasukawa weighed about one and a half tons—enough load to kill the average person.

“What about it?”

“Before I passed out, you grinned.”

“Note to self,” she said after a brief pause. “Even air force pilots experience visual distortion at 20 G.”

“I know what I saw!”

“Next time we’ll just have to try twenty-five,” Satsuki purred. “Says you!”

Two years earlier, before coming to the islands, Yasukawa had been a test pilot in the Japan Air Self-Defense Force. He was stationed in Hamamatsu where he flew experimental Control-Configured Vehicles, or CCVs. All that changed when his commanding officer called him in and asked if he wanted to be an astronaut.

The Solomon Space Association was a new program continuing the work of the former National Space Development Agency of Japan and the Institute of Space and Astronautical Science, and they were about to begin manned-flight operations. The SSA was a local endeavor, operating solely within Solomon Islands territory, or so went the official line. In reality, it was financed with Japanese cash and staffed almost exclusively by Japanese nationals.

Since members of the Japan Self-Defense Force are not generally allowed to serve overseas, Yasukawa had to be temporarily discharged from the service before he could work for the SSA. There would be risks, he knew, but they were risks he was willing to take for a once-in-a-lifetime chance.

“If this launch fails, I’m going back to Hamamatsu.”

“If they’ll still have you.”

“Yeah—what?”

“It’s time,” interrupted the flight director without looking up from his screen. He flicked on his mike. “T-minus ten minutes. All personnel clear the launchpad!”

[ACT 3]

TEN KILOMETERS AWAY, the voice from the loudspeaker reached a small village in the jungle. The village stood on the slopes of one of the Shiribas, a line of jagged peaks that crossed the island from northwest to southeast. A handful of huts and towers stood around a crude square at the village center.

Each of the huts had a log frame and banana-leaf roof. The floors were raised a full meter off the ground to distance them from the scorpions, snakes, and poisonous ants that teemed on the jungle floor. Walking around barefoot was one thing, but even the locals, who called themselves the Taliho, slept better with a good meter of open air between them and the local fauna. The floor of the chief’s hut extended past its walls, forming a balcony that encircled the structure. Baskets and water jugs lined the balcony atop a rug of woven coconut fibers.

The chief sat on the rug with one of his many daughters, Matsuri. Her sharp ears had no difficulty picking out the announcement against the backdrop of birdsong and screeching beasts.

“T-minus ten,” she announced to her father.

“Ten minutes until the fireworks.”

“We will see them from here?”

“Probably.”

“Woo!” Her face glowing, Matsuri rose and leapt from the balcony. A grass skirt and woven bikini top were all that covered her sun-bronzed skin. She was much lighter than the dark-skinned Melanesians, and her chest-length hair fell straight. The Melanesians wore their hair short and kinked.

Matsuri beat the large talking drum at the center of the village, calling her friends to gather. “Fireworks soon! Fireworks soon!”

People streamed from the fields and dense jungle surrounding the village square. Most of the adults were dark-skinned locals, but many of the children had skin the same lighter color as Matsuri’s. Everyone wore grass skirts and ornaments made from shells or animal fangs, and little else.

A ripple of excitement passed through the crowd.

“The fireworks are starting! Hurry up!”

“The Japanese are shooting their fireworks.”

“It’s been a while since the last one.”

“Think this one will go high?”

“Last time was all smoke, no fire.”

“I hope there’s a big fireball this time.”

Their chief had explained that the Japanese used fireworks to put things up in the sky. Sometimes the fireworks flew so high they could no longer see them, but more often they burst into balls of flame—much to the villagers’ delight.

The adults watched from the square while the children perched in the towers like so many bells. They watched and waited.

Without warning, a pillar of white smoke rose beyond the trees. An orange flame burned at the head of the column, topped by a small silver cylinder. Then came a roar like thunder, sending birds flying from the trees. The silver cylinder sped skyward with incredible power, followed after a forty-five-second delay by the terrible roar of its ascent.

“Go! Go! Go!” the villagers cheered with delight. They clapped their hands; they stomped the ground; they beat on drums and sticks of bamboo.

“C’mon, fireball!”

“Boom! Go boom!”

Bright red flames enveloped the cylinder.

For a moment, a flash as bright as the sun lit the sky, then faded to reveal bits of metal trailing white smoke, scattering like strips of paper in a ticker tape parade.

“Wow!”

“They did it!”

“That was the best one yet!”

Shouts of exultation rose throughout the village.

The chief called down from his balcony. “No work! Today, we feast! We have drink and wild boar! So light the bonfire, and make it big!”

The villagers cheered.

[ACT 4]

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]

“MAYBE THAT OLD Chinese guy was right,” muttered Yukari. “I should’ve waited until dark.”

There weren’t any trains or buses from Santiago to the base on the northeast shore of the island—the base needed to be somewhere isolated. A single road, barely wide enough for one truck, wound its way through the mountains from Santiago to the base. Rocket Road. On foot, the going wasn’t easy.

Mr. Cheung had suggested that Yukari wait until the evening when the people at the base came to town for dinner. Then she could simply catch a ride with someone on their way back. But Yukari had consulted a map in the restaurant, and the base was only fifteen kilometers away. She figured it would be a three-hour hike at most. She weighed her options after leaving the restaurant and finally decided to hoof it. Now she was regretting that decision.

Rocket Road straddled the Shiriba Mountains, which rose as high as thirteen hundred meters above sea level. The road threaded its way through the valleys, making the journey much longer than it appeared on the map. At times the path was steep enough to give a double black diamond ski slope a run for its money.

Yukari had pushed ahead, but youthful exuberance had given way to exhaustion before she had traveled even a third of the distance to the base. Even standing still, she could feel the midday sun beating down on her, sapping her strength and wringing every drop of water out of her. At times the jungle canopy made a tunnel that afforded some protection against the sun, but after spying a python in the branches of a tree, Yukari was disinclined to linger in the shade.

Yukari found a large stone in a small clearing at the side of the road and sat down. She wasn’t sure she had the energy to turn back and make it to town, much less press on to the base. Tired and alone, Yukari was on the brink of despair when she heard the sound of an engine approaching.

“Yes! A car!” Yukari bounded off the rock. She walked to the middle of the road, planted her feet, and waited.

The noise suddenly grew louder. A huge car came speeding out of the shadows at the far side of the clearing. It was a Humvee. The driver slammed on the brakes, bringing the car skidding to a stop in front of Yukari.

“Trying to get yourself killed?!” the driver shouted in Japanese. A large man who looked to be in his twenties sat alone in the car. He didn’t look happy.

Yukari ran up to the driver-side window. “Could you give me a lift?”

“Outta my way, kid, I’m in a hurry.”

“I was heading to the base, but I don’t think I can make it.”

He unlocked the passenger door. “Time’s a-wastin’.”

Yukari climbed in. From the outside, the Humvee looked like a Jeep with a roof, but inside it was spacious, big enough to seat four across a single seat. “Better buckle up. It can get a little bumpy.”

“Right.”

The man slammed his beast of a vehicle into gear, and they sprang forward. Yukari sank into the hard seat as the car jostled her every which way.

She glanced over in the driver’s direction. “So…”

“Yeah?”

“You going to Santiago?”

“Hamamatsu.”

“What?”

“Hamamatsu. That’s home.”

What was up with this guy?

The Humvee sped through the jungle at terrific speed, brushing past plants that encroached too close on either side. Over the whine of the engine, Yukari made out a low, methodic whir coming from behind and a little above them as well. Whatever it was, it was getting closer.

“Damn, that was fast.”

“What’s that sound?”

“HSS-2. Security chopper. But they have to catch me first!” he said, upshifting the double clutch and slamming the accelerator to the floor.

The roar of the helicopter blades was almost deafening. A shadow crept over the hood of the Humvee. Overhead a large boat-shaped object seemed to hover. A voice rang out over a loudspeaker, drowning out even the sound of the blades. “Pull over now, Yasukawa, and we can still keep this civil!”

Yukari cast a sideways glance at the driver’s seat. Apparently his name was Yasukawa.

“I’m not stopping till I’m back in Hamamatsu!”

“You’ve got to the count of three before we open up with our Baby Mark II. One!”

Yasukawa’s foot didn’t move from the pedal.

The Humvee climbed a steep grade, going airborne as it topped the rise.

“Two! This isn’t some slack-spined Self-Defense crew you’re dealing with. We will fire, Yasukawa!”

“Do me a favor!” barked Yasukawa.

“Who, me?!”

“Wave your hands so the chopper can see you.”

“But they said they were going to shoot—”

“If you don’t want that to happen, better start wavin’.”

Yukari leaned out the passenger-side window. The helicopter was trailing them at a distance of about fifty meters. A man leaned out an open side door, pointing something with a long, slender barrel at them.

Yukari waved her arms like mad.

Yasukawa flipped a switch to turn on the Humvee’s bullhorn and shouted into the mike. “See this kid, Kurosu? You want her blood on your hands, be my guest!”

The barrel belched flame.

Yukari ducked back inside the car with a yelp.

Something whizzed past her head, exploding where it struck the road in front of them. The Humvee leapt through the rising flames like a lion at the circus.

“You said they wouldn’t shoot!”

Rocket fuel burned on the hood of the car. Yasukawa kept driving. “Kurosu doesn’t want me to make it to town.”

“Kurosu?”

“Chief of security—damn!”

FWOOMP!

The second shell exploded ahead of them, bringing a large gum tree down across the road. Yasukawa jerked the wheel hard to the right, sending the Humvee into the jungle.

“Out!”

Yukari pushed the door open and slid to the ground.

“This way! Run!”

Yukari hurried down a steep trail after Yasukawa. “Why do I have to run?”

“If Kurosu catches you, he’ll use you as a hostage.”

“What? That’s psycho!”

“That’s island fever.”

“Island fever?”

“Far as he’s concerned, what happens on the island stays on the island. This whole damn place is a loony bin!”

Yukari kept running. Soon they were out of the jungle and in a familiar sweet potato field. They could see Santiago on the far side.

The helicopter had gained some altitude now, but it didn’t show any signs of breaking off the chase.

“He wouldn’t dare shoot at us in town,” said Yasukawa, jogging across the field.

“But they’re watching us.”

“We’ll lose ourselves in a crowd. Next stop, Chinatown.”

“Then what?”

“Shut up and move.”

Soon they were in the backstreets of Chinatown. They ducked low, keeping close to the walls of the houses. After darting in and out of what seemed like the hundredth alleyway, Yasukawa walked up to the back of a house and rapped on the door.

“Yo, Cheung! It’s me, Yasukawa! Open up!”

The door swung open.

“Look here! Mr. Yasukawa and young lady. What’s wrong?”

“Let us in. I’ll explain later.”

“Okay, okay.”

Mr. Cheung stepped aside to let them in. They were in the kitchen at the back of the restaurant.

“Got any empty rooms?”

“Aiyaa…” Cheung sighed. Then, with a wink, “You not waste any time. This way, please.”

They climbed a flight of stairs up to a small twin bedroom. Apparently the second floor of the Tianjin Restaurant was a hotel.

“Enjoy yourselves. You want something to drink?”

“You got the wrong idea, Mr. Cheung. We’re on the lam.”

“On the lam?”

Yasukawa produced a one hundred Solomon Islands dollar bill from his pocket and pushed it into Cheung’s hand.

“If anybody from the base comes poking around, we’re not here.”

“Ah, I see. I will keep you on the lam, Mr. Yasukawa,” Cheung said with a wink.

“One more thing. I need you to get a boat down to Clepp Point for me. Something that’ll get me to Santa Isabel.”

“Leave everything to me. You rest here until tonight. I bring you tea.”

Cheung soon returned with a small teapot and two cups. Yukari and Yasukawa sat down side by side on the bed. One sip of hot oolong tea and Yukari was already feeling more like herself.

“So, Mr. Yasukawa.”

“That’s me.”

“Feel like explaining why people were shooting missiles at us in the jungle?”

“Yeah, that. Long story short, working conditions on the base took a sudden turn for the worse. I submitted my resignation, but something tells me they didn’t accept.”

“So that’s what that was about?”

“More or less.”

Yukari knitted her brow. She poured some more tea into her cup and moved casually to the edge of the bed.

“What’s your story? Don’t get many girls running around by themselves out here in the middle of nowhere.”

Yukari had her doubts about Yasukawa, but if he worked on the base, she decided he was worth the risk. She took a photograph from a pouch on her backpack, a picture of a man and woman posed in front of the ocean.

“Do you know this man?”

The man in the picture was about thirty, handsome, with the look of an eager salesman.

“Nope. Never seen him.”

“It’s from sixteen years ago, so he’d look a little older now.”

Yasukawa took another look. “Sorry, I don’t think so.”

“Oh…” Yukari’s shoulders sank.

“Who is he?”

“My dad.”

“You came all the way out here looking for Daddy?”

“I heard there were a bunch of Japanese in the Solomon Islands. I thought maybe he was one of them.”

“There are about three hundred at the base, but it’s only been there three years.”

“What?”

“Only showed up two years ago myself. Sixteen years ago, there wouldn’t have been anything to find.”

“My dad disappeared before I was born. On my parents’ honeymoon.”

“Just like that? Gone?”

“Yeah. They were in their hotel—it was their first night on Guadalcanal. He said he was going out to look at the moon, and he never came back.”

“I’ve heard stranger things. Guess that makes you the honeymoon baby.”

Silence fell over the room.

“Musta been hard on your mother.”

“She said she was all right. She went to the police, and they looked for my dad for a week without finding anything. Then she canceled the rest of her vacation and flew back to Japan. She had a career of her own, so money was never a problem. And I never knew him, so it’s not like I miss him. But still…”

The memories came rushing back.

Parents’ Day at school.

The class report on The Return, a movie about a missing father who suddenly comes home after twelve years.

Ever since elementary school, Japanese class had been one nightmare after another. Teachers really had a thing for assigning essays about your family. Not that the essays themselves were all that bad. The worst part was her classmates. A ring of sympathetic friends would encircle her, and without fail a boy would come to tease her. Then more girls would come to defend her, and before long things were out of hand. When the dust settled, half the class would be looking at her with pity.

Yukari never felt sorry for herself. It was always well-meaning third parties who did it for her. It took a lot of self-control to keep from breaking down sometimes. Yukari was tougher than most, but not that tough.

“The not knowing is the hard part. Was it a random accident? Did he get cold feet and just leave? Did he kill himself? I have to know.”

They heard the sound of footsteps on the stairs. The door swung open, revealing the friendly proprietor.

“You have visitors, Mr. Yasukawa.”

“Visitors? Who the hell—” A man in combat fatigues entered after Cheung. His eyes were hidden behind sunglasses, and he carried a pistol at his hip. “Kurosu?” Behind him, a bulky man in his fifties pushed into the room. Director Nasuda. The third and final person through the door was a woman in her late twenties with long hair, dressed all in white. “Et tu, Satsuki?”

Yasukawa turned on Mr. Cheung. “You sold me out!”

“Base good for business. Everybody get along, business stay good.”

“You just lost a customer.”

“Give it up, Yasukawa,” said Kurosu. “You’re not gettin’ off that easy.”

“That’s right,” added Satsuki. “We’ve got two years of training tied up in you. We can’t let you just walk away.” She turned to Director Nasuda for agreement, but his attention was squarely on Yukari. Not to be outdone, Yukari held his gaze.

“Who’s the girl?” the director asked.

“Leave her out of this! She’s just some kid looking for her dad.”

“Is that right? Interesting…” he mumbled with disinterest. “Stand up, would you?”

“What? Why?”

“Come on, give us a twirl. Let’s have a look at you.”

“I asked why.”

“Humor me!”

Yukari shrugged, then rose from the bed and did a quick spin.

“Satsuki,” the director lowered his voice, “how much would you say she weighs?”

Satsuki’s eyes flashed. “Somewhere in the neighborhood of thirty-seven kilograms.”

“Thirty-seven? Good, good. Measurements?”

“Height, about 154 centimeters, eighty-one centimeters through the chest, fifty-four at the waist, maybe eighty-two at the hips.” She smiled. “The very picture of health.”

His eyes still glued to Yukari, Director Nasuda nodded. He mumbled something under his breath.

Yasukawa shouted, “You can’t be serious!”

“You stay out of this! We don’t have room in our organization for cowards who turn tail and run when they’re needed most. You’re fired! Go back to Hamamatsu!”

“Wait—what?”

Ignoring him, the director approached Yukari, his voice smooth as silk. “What’s your name?”

“Yukari Morita.”

“Here looking for your father, was it?”

“That’s right.”

“There are over seven hundred islands in the Solomons, and every one a jungle. How exactly did you plan on finding him?”

“I, uh…” Before she left, Yukari had just assumed she’d figure things out as she went. It wasn’t until she’d reached the islands that she realized how naive she’d been.

“What would you say if I told you we’d help you look for your father?”

“Why would you do that?”

“My name is Isao Nasuda. I’m the director of the space center here on the island. We have helicopters, trucks, ships—even contacts with the local police. Japanese don’t exactly blend in on the Solomons. If he’s here, we’ll find him.”

“Really? You’d do that?” Yukari practically leapt up with joy.

“Don’t listen to him!” shouted Yasukawa.

The director turned to Cheung. “Take Mr. Yasukawa downstairs and give him something to eat, would you? He gets so excitable on an empty stomach.” Then, to Kurosu, “Go with him. We wouldn’t want him to have any trouble finding his table.”

“On it,” replied Kurosu, placing an arm around Yasukawa.

“Hey, let go of me!”

“I give you something very tasty, I promise.”

When the three of them had left, Director Nasuda turned back to Yukari. “Sorry about that. Now, where were we? Ah yes, your father. We’re prepared to help you look for him. In return, there’s something we’d like you to help us with. Call it a…part-time job.”

“What kind of job?”

“The lodgings on the base are fully air-conditioned. We have a cafeteria. And we’ll pay you, of course.”

“What do I have to do?”

“You just need to sit in front of a computer. When a message comes in, you answer. Maybe press a few buttons. So simple a monkey could do it.”

It sounded good. Too good to be true, really, but Yukari was prepared to take some chances if it meant finding her father.

“Well, okay. But only if you show me how to do everything.”

“Of course,” the director beamed. “This is Satsuki Asahikawa. She’ll teach you everything you need to know. Isn’t that right, Satsuki?”

“Absolutely. If you have any questions, anything at all, just ask.” Satsuki smiled from ear to ear, but her eyes were cold as ice. The perfect, unsuspecting guinea pig had fallen right into her lap.