At this same moment the American satellite Manned Orbiting Laboratory #3, having passed through the already bright Northern Pacific sky, was moving through the predawn darkness that still covered Japan at an altitude of seventy miles. The commander was monitoring the vast array of cameras and other instruments trained on the scene below. Two other crewmen were sleeping, and the fourth was peering out the observation window, watching through binoculars the smoke still pouring up from shattered Mount Fuji and the flickering points of fire that marked the newly active volcanoes strung through the central mountain ranges. With dawn just breaking, he found his vision obscured, and he switched on the night vision screen.
“Hey, look!” he shouted, grabbing the commander’s shoulder. “There’s something going on in Western Japan.”
The area covered by the screen was Ise Bay and the Kii Peninsula, south of Osaka. The commander turned to look over the man’s shoulder, and then he immediately switched to a wider coverage and started the video transmission.
“What’s the matter?” said a third man in a sleepy voice as he got out of his bunk.
“I don’t know. Get Pat up. We’ll need him. Look! The color of the water’s changing.”
On the almost black surface of the sea, just off the Japanese coast, blue-green splotches took form and then spread at incredible speed, moving east and west. And at the same time they began to move out into the Pacific, coalescing to form an advancing blue-green line behind which new splotches, light blue in color, began to appear. “Keep those cameras going. Jimmy, look out the other window.”
The fourth crewman, too, sprang into action. He threw switches on the control panel and fixed his eyes to the quivering needles, some of which began to spin erratically.
“Damn! This is really something,” he said, frantically making adjustments. “Both gravity and terrestrial magnetism are all screwed up. Bill, are we on the frequency of any ships in the area?”
“Yes. The LaFayette should be right below us. Should I tell them not to get too close to the coast?”
“My God!” cried the crewman with the binoculars. “Look what’s happening. Japan is breaking up!”
Before the horrified eyes of the four Americans, the outline of Shikoku and the southern part of the Kii Peninsula below suddenly seemed to blur slightly, as though trembling. The now blue surface of the sea became covered with small pale splotches, which spread out to the east and west, forming a single line. A shock sent a ripple over the surface of the ocean, and this, gathering up the splotches as it went, began to spread outward with awesome deliberation, a dark, sweeping curve.
“A tidal wave,” cried the crewman with the binoculars. The dark line of the wave spread across the blue surface of the ocean beneath them. It would strike the islands of Eastern Asia and even the coast of Chile.
“Hey, the southern coast of Japan is changing,” said the crewman at the movie camera.
“Pat! Get Houston,” shouted the commander, staring at the screen. “Tell them that Japan is going under.”
✦ ✦ ✦
The southern portion of Shikoku and the Kii Peninsula along the structural fault line of the Yoshino and Kiino rivers had begun to move southeast into the Pacific, rocked by quake after quake. The rest of the Western Archipelago was moving too, but at a slower pace. The sea swept into the breach, and the Yoshino and the Kiino grew broader and broader. When the detached land mass reached the end of the continental shelf, it began to sink at the incredible rate of several yards an hour along a line some hundreds of miles long. Several hours after the first quake had struck, most of the towns along the southern coasts of Shikoku and the Kii Peninsula had disappeared, the ocean coming as far as the foot of Nachi Falls on the Kii.
The slippage between north and south along the central structural line gradually spread eastward. When the quake had struck Western Japan at dawn, the whole Central Region too, had experienced a medium-grade quake. Afterward the earth had continued to rumble in sinister fashion. Now at 10:47 a quake of like severity struck Central Japan, and a new fault developed on a line running from the mouth of Ise Bay to the Fuji River at the base of Mount Fuji. A tidal wave nearly thirty feet high swept into Sagami Bay, devastating the coastal cities. Destroying as they went, the ocean waters surged over the area depressed by the great eruption, moving along the line of the Fuji River as far as Fujinomiya.
A vast quantity of ocean water poured into the still-active Ashitaka volcano, southwest of the shattered slopes of Fuji. Mount Ashitaka shook throughout the day with minor eruptions, and then, at two in the afternoon, a thunderous explosion destroyed every vestige of it. The hostile elements clashed again, and firestorm and flood ravaged Central Honshu.
✦ ✦ ✦
The television-equipped helicopter carrying Kataoka on a Plan D inspection mission crossed from the Kii Peninsula to Shikoku, following the fault line. The heavy rain brought on by the shock of the quake had slackened after an hour and a half, and Shiko-ku’s mountains had begun to show through the clouds. The helicopter pilot flew as low as he dared through the treacherous air currents, and as Kataoka looked down, he saw, through the breaks in the clouds, traces of the havoc below. He caught glimpses of ravaged earth and the dull, leaden glint of flooded fields. Furthermore, he could see any number of crevices cutting diagonally through the mountains from northwest to southeast. The green mountainsides were rent, exposing the raw texture of the earth beneath, red, brown, and black scars. In places the dark crevices seemed to gape open to incredible depths. It was as though giant hands had wrung the earth below like a mop. Kataoka could see landslides still taking place and steam boiling up from the crevices.
A colleague sitting beside him tapped his shoulder and pointed down. A passenger boat lay on its side in the rice paddies below. From such a height it was of course impossible to make out any people, but when Kataoka looked down at the red bottom of the stranded vessel, he thought of the crowds massed on the docks and shorelines that morning, fearful of what was ahead but relieved that their turn to leave had come, and a black depression took hold of him. His own family had been wiped out in an instant by the tidal wave that had followed the great Tokyo quake, and now he imagined he could hear the cries of his young brother and sister rising from the drowned fields below. He covered his ears with his hands.
“What’s the matter?”
“Take over for me, will you?” said Kataoka, getting up from the television monitor. “I have to vomit.”