While the Hokuto kept to its course to the south at high speed, Onodera and Yuki completed the repairs on the Wadatsumi and did the necessary maintenance work despite the fierce heat of the sun. Hachijojima appeared on the horizon and then fell away behind the ship’s long white trailing wake. Now there was no trace of anything on the horizon—nothing to be seen but a vast, convex expanse of water.
With time hanging heavy, Onodera climbed to the crow’s-nest and looked around him. From this vantage point, the Hokuto seemed no more than a tiny waterbug set down atop that vast globe of water of mind-numbing size. This was the area where the Pacific Tropics stretched far to the north, borne upon the ocean currents. Now the prow of this tiny, yet somehow brashly resolute ship was pointed toward the Torrid Zone and the islands below the Equator. Ever more to the south . . .
Down as far as Cape Horn, except for the small islands scattered like a handful of dust across that broad expanse, the face of the globe was covered with nothing but water, ever more water. The world’s largest ocean, its mean depth was 14,155 feet, and at the Equator it stretched over nearly 180 degrees of latitude, nearly half the distance around the world—a vast sea that contained almost half of the water in the world, that covered one third of the surface of the world, that, even if all the continents were set within it, would still consist of over 14 million square miles of ocean.
“How about coming down?” Yukinaga called up to him, wav ing a can of beer. “It’s cold. Let’s have one.”
Yukinaga was leaning against the ship’s rail, beer can raised to his lips, when Onodera came down. When he pulled back the tab on the chill can Yukinaga gave him, the wind snatched at the clinging white froth that bubbled up and mingled it with the spray.
“I wonder if that’s Aogashima,” said Yukinaga, shading his eyes and looking toward the east where a cluster of clouds lay over the horizon. “I suppose it is. At this rate, we should be at Torishima before sunset.”
“Look over there,” said Onodera, pointing. “Do you think it’s a ship?”
Straight ahead, almost directly to the south, there was a trace of black smoke upon the horizon. As it rose, the wind caught it and blew it in a trailing swirl to the northeast.
“That’s no boat,” answered Yukinaga, narrowing his eyes. “It’s from a volcano. It’s near the Bayonnaise Rocks.”
“Is it Myojin Reef?”
“No. Myojin isn’t active right now. But Smith Reef has shown signs of erupting, after more than fifty years. It stands to reason that there should be something in the Bayonnaise Rocks ready to erupt about now.”
Onodera suddenly remembered something from his child hood—how he had read about the eruption of Myojin Reef. That had been in 1952. Could it have been that long ago? From the sea floor, covered by the glassy surface of the ocean, fire, smoke, and lava had suddenly come heaving upward. The fire had raged in the midst of the sea, the smoke boiling up right out of the water. How powerful an impression the news photo had made upon Onodera! A weather-survey ship, the Kaiyo Maru, had been destroyed, with the loss of thirty-one crewmen, when the cold, tranquil surface of the Pacific had dissolved in a catac lysmic surge of searing smoke and ashes. Even now the bizarre, disordered nature of the event caused Onodera’s chest to tighten. A shiver ran through him.
“Torishima had its own catastrophe in 1886,” Yukinaga said in a low voice, his cheeks a faint red from the wind. “A mountain right at the center of the island exploded. In an instant the whole population of the island, 125 people, was wiped out.”
“There seems to be a lot of volcanic activity recently,” said Onodera.
“Yes. Oshima, Miyakejima, Aoshima... and there’s talk about Amagi now.”
“Is there any connection?”
“There’s not supposed to be—the way we’ve understood things up to now. But . . .”
“But what?”
“Well, the emergence of a volcanic region is linked with mountain-building activity, and so it seems that any change in the structure as a whole would have to have some general effect.”
The two were silent for a time, looking at the sea.
The ship was now pursuing its southward course directly above the Fuji volcanic range running across the floor of the ocean. Beginning in Central Honshu with Mounts Shirauma, Hida, and Norikura, moving through Asama and Fuji, Hakone, Amagi, the Izu Islands, Aogashima, the Bayonnaise Rocks, Torishima, and farther down yet, to the Iwojima chain and almost to the Tropic of Capricorn, there stretched a long belt of fire covering 1,000 miles. Here and there along its length, volcanic peaks broke the surface of the sea, rising up from the ocean floor, some 13,000 feet below. These scattered islands, extending from the Equator north to the fire-spouting Kasai Ar chipelago, constituted the true western shore of the Pacific, a vast undersea mountain range over which the ship was now passing. They marked the great geological fold that began in Siberia and extended down through Hokkaido to Central Honshu. Thence it lay along the ocean floor beneath a thousand fathoms of water, its course marked by the Fuji Archipelago, the Ogasawara Archipelago, the Marianas, and the Palau Is lands, curving at last to link up with the arc of Java and Sumatra. This ring of fire, this sunken shoreline, fell away on its Pacific side to trenches of awesome depth.
Suddenly there was a loud thump, as though something had struck the bottom of the boat.
“Did we hit something?” asked Onodera.
“I don’t think there’s any reef around here,” said Yukinaga.
Just at that moment, though there was no sound, a wave of air struck their faces. Then came what sounded like the rumble of a far-off cannon.
A shout came from the bridge. Sailors were running across the deck and down the passageways.
“It’s an eruption!” cried Yuki, coming out on deck.
The loud rumbling went on, and when they looked behind them, they saw gray-brown smoke pouring up from the Bayon-naise Rocks, orange flame glowing at the border between smoke and water.
“Dr. Tadokoro!” the captain called from the bridge. “What is the situation? Are we all right?”
“There’s no need to worry about something no bigger than that,” answered Tadokoro, who had appeared on deck and was holding a pair of binoculars to his eyes. “Warn the ships in the area, but we should hurry on to where we’re going.”
“Look, over by Myojin, too, there’s vapor rising,” said Yukinaga, looking through the binoculars he had taken from Tadokoro. “It doesn’t seem too large a volcano.”
“That shock before—was it a tidal wave?” asked Onodera.
“Yes. A small one, though,” answered Tadokoro.
Onodera took the binoculars from Yukinaga. Tongues of orange flame rose up out of the ocean. The peak of the rock had been blown away. The surface of the sea about the island began to boil, and the brown smoke and the white steam seemed to be quenching the flames. The smoke climbed higher and higher into the sky, though a part spread out in a heavy layer over the water. Torrid projectiles and pumice stone peppered the surface of the sea like a sudden squall, whipping the water into a froth beneath the pall of smoke. And the surface of the sea shuddered as muffled explosions continued.
While they had been intent upon the volcano, the Hokuto had increased its speed. The waves at the bow rose so high that they broke over the foredeck, and the spray stung the men’s faces. Tremors ran through the ship, and the groaning of the gas turbines took on the pitch of wind howling through a cave.
“I’ve moved up the rendezvous time,” said the captain after coming down from the bridge. “After I get you to the survey ship, I have to go back to Torishima to pick up the Weather Service people.”
“Torishima?” Yukinaga asked in surprise. “Are there indications of an eruption there, too?”
“I don’t know. They say it’s a precautionary measure. You’re going to get wet here. I think it would be best to go inside.” Then, as he was climbing the ladder to the bridge, the captain turned and said: “Oh, and by the way, that tidal wave seems to have had nothing to do with that underwater eruption. We just got a warning about an undersea earthquake in the eastern part of the Ogasawara Trench, and that’s most likely what caused it.”
For some reason, this news provoked a fierce frown on Tadokoro’s face.