Trying to Summon an American Car, and...

[Core Room]

"So, supposing we go on extending the sphere of influence along the Nakayama Highway. Even Kōnodai is a fair distance off, closer than Oda Castle though it may be."

"With the dungeon having grown the way it has, I would rather like an American-made big rig about now, but there is no such thing among the library's equipment. And building one ourselves is out, too. A car tire, for instance, is not made of plain rubber of any simple construction, so the method of shaping an old tire as a dungeon structure and then releasing it won't produce one."

"Wouldn't a railway still be easier to make? A proper one like they have in the otherworld is hopeless, of course, but if it's just running a motorized truck along with no signals or anything at all…"

"In terms of energy, a railway does come in at less than a fifth of what trucks and passenger cars cost, so it might well suit a dungeon. But forcing a railway into being out of dungeon structures, ships aside, would all but run a Diet member down dead on opening day. A minimum of safety has to be secured. It would be quickest, of course, if there happened to be a rolling-stock depot dungeon buried somewhere, or a railway-museum dungeon, but…"

Marie said this with her eye on a map of Saitama Prefecture. There was no one-to-one correspondence with the otherworld, but the spot where this Library-City Dungeon stood ought to be the likeliest place in Saitama for something of the sort to be buried; and yet there was not so much as a hint of one.

"Marie-san, this dungeon sits on a hill that doesn't exist in the otherworld's Saitama. I wonder what's underneath this hill."

"That is the dungeon's 'root,' as it were, the part that channels energy from the World Core into the dungeon. There is a sizeable cavity, but nothing else is buried down there."

"If we can't pin much hope on the dungeon, then sooner or later we'll have to set up a factory that can manufacture our own things, be it automobiles or whatever else."

"Indeed. Even for the coming mechanization of the farming villages, mass-producing farm implements requires a proper factory. Even if we meant only to make an unlicensed copy of Worker-Peasant Russia's 'tractor that has driven more species to extinction than anything else,' at present it cannot be done."

"As for cars, I can summon a certain number, but there are constraints on that too."

"The farmers of this world haven't progressed to full-scale mechanization or large-scale operations, so a pickup truck would be the handy, sensible choice. But the library's official vehicles are mostly SUVs and compacts, on account of being meant to carry books."

The otherworld had had no Pacific War, so the American-car assembly plants and dealer networks had survived, and with the appearance of the car carrier ship in the 1960s, imports surged all at once. For this reason American-made pickup trucks and SUVs sold well. Official vehicles, however, were largely domestic for political reasons, the library no exception, and were unpopular among public servants. Marie, too, had gone out of her way to pick and summon an American-made SUV to drive.