Walking quietly, Kyohei approached the room. The sliding doors were wide open. He peeked in and saw Yukawa sitting exactly where he had the night before. He was stirring something on his tray, but his hand stopped abruptly, and he said, “Do you like peeking in on other people eating?”
Kyohei reflexively drew back from the door, then gave up and walked out into the open. Yukawa was draping sticky beans over his morning rice. He hadn’t even looked in Kyohei’s direction.
“I was just wondering who was in here,” Kyohei said.
Yukawa answered that with a snort and a slightly derisive smile. “That was a waste of your time. If you’d thought about it, you would’ve realized that this is a dining room expressly for the use of guests. Which makes it likely anyone in here was a guest. Given that there are only two guests staying in this entire inn, and that one of them is no longer with us, that leaves only one person it could’ve been. Namely, myself.”
“What do you mean, ‘no longer with us’? Did the other guy leave?”
Yukawa’s chopsticks stopped in midair. His eyes met Kyohei’s for the first time. “Oh,” he said. “You haven’t heard.”
“I know something happened. The police are here. But they didn’t tell me what.” He looked down at his feet. “Typical.”
“Don’t sulk. Usually when grown-ups hide something from you, it’s because knowing it won’t do you any good.” Yukawa took a sip of his miso soup. “They found his body down by the harbor.”
“His body? What, he died?”
“Apparently he left the inn last night at some point and never returned. This morning they found him on the rocks by the seawall. They think he might’ve fallen by accident in the night.”
“Oh, wow. How did you hear?”
“The girl who works here. Narumi, was it? My breakfast was late, so I went to find out why, and she told me the whole story.”
“Ah,” Kyohei said, looking down the hallway. He wondered where Narumi was now.
“I believe she’s at the police station,” Yukawa said, seeming to read his mind. “Along with the woman who runs the place.”
“Why did my aunt have to go down to the police station?”
“So that they can write up an official report. Your aunt was the only one who spoke with the man. They probably want to know whether there was anything unusual about his behavior yesterday.”
“They have to go through all that trouble just because he fell on some rocks?”
Yukawa’s chopsticks stopped again and he looked at Kyohei. “You should consider the feelings of the deceased’s family. Do you think they’d be satisfied if the police just told them, ‘Oh, he fell on some rocks’? No, they probably want to know how it came to pass, in as much detail as possible. Personally, I would hope the police take their investigation very seriously.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?”
“It’s not supposed to mean anything beyond what I said,” Yukawa said, eating some of his rice with sticky beans and reaching for a teacup.
“Can I ask you something?” Kyohei asked.
“If it’s about what happened, I’ve already told you all I know.”
“No, not about that. I was just wondering why you decided to stay here. There are lots of inns in town.”
Yukawa picked up the cup and shrugged. “Should I not have stayed here?”
“No, but didn’t you have reservations somewhere before you came?”
“I did, but not my own reservations. Somebody at DESMEC arranged them for me.”
“Hey, I know them. They’re the ones that want to dig up the seafloor, right? Narumi doesn’t like them.”
Yukawa chuckled. “Right. Well, I’m not exactly allies with DESMEC either. Mostly because I don’t have a position on their undersea resource development proposal. This is why I want to avoid being in their debt as much as possible. One might think it only natural for them to provide lodging, since they asked me to come down and help with their informational hearing, but it bothered me nonetheless. That’s why, when I met you, I decided on this place. That seems like as good a reason as any to me.”
“I guess. You’re pretty strange for a professor.”
Yukawa furrowed his eyebrows. “Professor?”
“You teach science at a university, right? Doesn’t that make you a professor? Or are you just a teacher?”
“Either one is fine. I do have my doctorate, but I doubt you’re that interested in my credentials.”
“I’ll call you Professor, then. It sounds better.”
“As you like. So, exactly how am I strange?”
“Well, if it was me, I would’ve stayed at the place they got for me. I bet it’s a better inn than this one.”
“I heard it was the fanciest resort hotel in Hari Cove.”
“See? They’ve got money. I bet they’d pay you a lot if they go through with this undersea mining thing, too.”
Yukawa finished his tea, then, shaking his head, set down his cup. “Scientists don’t make decisions based on potential profit. What a scientist must consider foremost is which of the many available paths will lead to the greatest benefit for humanity. Even if said path doesn’t result in any personal gain, it’s still the one to pick. Of course, ideally, we hope that the most beneficial path also results in personal gain.”
Kyohei decided that the professor was a bit of a talker who liked making things sound more complicated than they really were. Who used words like humanity in a sentence like that?
“So scientists aren’t interested in money?”
Yukawa shook his head again. “No. We are interested in money. I want money, myself. If you’re offering me some with no strings attached, I’ll be happy to take it. My point is, I don’t conduct research for the sake of money alone.”
“But studying science is your job, right? And they pay you to do your job, don’t they?”
“I receive a salary from the university, yes.”
“Then you should think more about making money. If Mom and Dad hire somebody to work at their shop, and that person doesn’t make money for them, that person needs to be fired. They say that all the time.”
Yukawa scooted back from the table, crossed his legs, and turned to face Kyohei straight on. “We seem to have a misunderstanding on some basic things here, so let me explain. I receive my salary in exchange for teaching physics to university students. I conduct my own research as well, of course, but no matter what great papers I might write, the university won’t give me any more money for them. They do pay any expenses incurred by the research, but you can consider that more of an investment. Should one of my papers win an award, like the Nobel Prize, that would confer a good deal of prestige on the university.”
Kyohei stared at the professor. “You’re gonna win the Nobel Prize?”
“It was merely an example,” Yukawa said, pushing up his glasses with his finger. “Scientists want to uncover the truth. You understand what the truth is?”
“Like true or false? Sure.”
“I’m talking about a deeper truth. For example, a lot of physicists are very interested in how the universe came to be. Have you heard of neutrinos? They’re particles released when a star goes supernova. By analyzing these particles, you can understand things about the nature of stars an almost unimaginable distance away, but if you ask what sort of benefits that kind of research brought society, I’d have to agree that the benefit to our daily lives is practically nonexistent.”
“So why do they do it?”
“Because they want to know,” Yukawa said. “You used a map to get to this inn yesterday, did you not? Because of that map, you are able to find your way up the road without getting lost. Likewise, in order for us as a species to walk the correct path in life, we need a very detailed map that will tell us what the world is like. Except our map is incomplete, almost entirely useless. Which is why, even now, in the twenty-first century, people are still making mistakes. War and the destruction of the environment and countless other things persist because the only map we have is woefully lacking. It’s the mission of scientists to fill in those missing pieces.”