“Professor Tadokoro,” said Yukinaga, as he went up to him and put a hand on his shoulder. “Aren’t you feeling well?”
At Yukinaga’s touch, Tadokoro started as though he had received an electric shock. He jumped up from his chair. “Oh,” he said, expelling his breath harshly. “Oh, yes . . . of course.”
Tadokoro then walked with dragging footsteps toward the desk around which the others were gathered. He looked vacantly at the computers along the walls, the control board, and then he stared at the three-dimensional image of the Japan Archipelago that glimmered in the huge block of plastic, as though noticing it for the first time. As he stared, the light gradually came back to his hollow eyes.
“An interesting device,” said Tadokoro, his eyes now boring into the plastic projection screen. “Can you show more—not just the Japan Archipelago but the whole area, taking in the Western Pacific to Southeast Asia?”
“Right now this is the widest area we can show,” said Kataoka, pressing a switch to project a view that, with Japan at its center, took in the Ogasawara Islands, Okinawa, Taiwan, the Philippines, together with the Korean Peninsula and a section of the Chinese coast.
“Good enough. Leave that on, please.”
With that, Tadokoro walked away from the screen and stood beneath the plastic board on which was drawn the map of the Japan Archipelago.
“Sit down, gentlemen,” said Tadokoro, his voice low and hoarse. “I’ll tell you what has to be said.”
The group took seats around the desk. Tadokoro stood for a few moments with his eyes cast down as though considering something. As Yukinaga gazed at Tadokoro standing thus, he suddenly felt his chest painfully constricted. This man, Yukinaga thought—how much he’s aged in just two or three months! It’s as though he’s ten years older. His hair has gotten whiter, there’s no vitality in his expression, his wrinkles have grown deeper. . . . His eyes are heavy and bloodshot, and his whole expression is that of a man who’s burned out.
“This Plan D of ours,” began Tadokoro, his voice lifeless, “took its origin from a possibility that had arisen in my mind as a result of the varied research I had been doing for the past ten years, research that had begun with marine volcanoes and then had gradually spread to mountain ranges, geology, and, finally to the basic structure of the earth beneath the ocean floor. The possibility is that there might take place a vast alteration of the earth crust of the Japan Archipelago.”
As Tadokoro paused, a chill seemed to sweep over the group around the desk.
“The plan is presently divided into D-l and D-2. D-l is our concern—further investigation. The burden of D-2 is to formulate an evacuation program, should worse come to worst.” Tadokoro paused for a moment, his hand to his head as though marshaling his thoughts. Then he placed both his hands on top of the plastic-block screen. “Let me take things in order. The thing that first led me to suspect that something was wrong was the manner in which marine gravitational irregularities were distributed in the areas adjacent to the Japan Archipelago. There was an incredible change from what had been recorded in a survey made a mere decade before. Furthermore, there was the same sort of radical change with regard to earth magnetism and electrical and heat currents, especially the heat currents on the Japan Sea coast. And then in the Ogasawara group, as you know, an island with an elevation of some two hundred feet sank in a single night—an event of extraordinary significance.”
Tadokoro glanced down at Onodera.
“As it happened, in the course of investigating that, some thing further came to my attention, something that our most recent explorations have confirmed: it seems to me that the pattern of mantle convection far beneath the Japan Trench is changing radically.”
“Professor,” said Kunieda, “would you be kind enough to explain what a mantle convection is?”
“Very good,” said Tadokoro, some color returning to his life less skin. “Our specialties vary, so some basic explanations are in order. First, a convection: for the present, think of it as the transfer of heat through fluid motion, especially motion up ward. Now let’s take the structure of the earth.” He drew a circle on a blackboard and then a much smaller one within it. “At the center of the earth, like the yolk of an egg, is the core.
Surrounding it, like the white of the egg, is the mantle. Finally, the thinnest and outermost layer, the crust. Judging from the way that earthquake waves are transmitted from deep within the earth, we believe that the mantle is solid, the outer core liquid, and the inner core solid. The mantle is some two thousand miles thick, approximately half the radius of the earth. The crust, on the other hand, is a mere twenty miles thick beneath the continents and still thinner beneath the ocean floor—apparently no more than three miles. We like to think of the ground beneath our feet as solid, but the truth is that the thickness of the crust upon which we and all our history and civilization rest is, relative to the size of the earth, like the stretched rubber of an inflated balloon. And within the mantle itself, solid though it seems, the evidence indicates that, over vast stretches of time, convections take form here just as they do in liquids. The mantle, in fact, flows beneath the crust at the rather rapid rate of two inches per year in its deep portion and at the rate of six inches per year in the portion near the crust, which, in turn, provokes great movement on the surface of the crust, especially beneath the ocean. This seems to be the motive force that moves the continents. . . . Kataoka, let’s have a topographical map of the world.”
Kataoka pressed a switch, and a brilliantly colored map appeared on the projection screen on the desk. Tadokoro took up his explanation, tapping the map with his pen.
“Note the respective concave and convex portions of the European and African coasts and the North and South American coasts, so aligned that it seems as though they would fit neatly together. It is this configuration that gave Wegener the hint that they had in fact once been joined and so led him to his famous theory of Continental Drift.”
Tadokoro next ran his pen down the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, indicating the massive Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which reached a height of 9,000 feet and was 600 miles wide, stretching in an S shape from the Arctic Circle all the way down to the southern polar region.