I

The Japan Trench

1

The area around the rear entrance of Tokyo Station was crowded as always. The air conditioning hardly seemed to be making any headway at all against the clammy heat that radiated from the flesh of the milling crowd, most of whom were bound for the seashore and mountains or else returning to their native places for the approaching Festival of the Dead.

Toshio Onodera looked around with a grimace of distaste as he wiped the sweat from his chin with the back of his hand. The spring rainy season had been cold, and the Weather Service had been forecasting a cool summer, but once the rain was gone, a fierce heat wave had struck. It had taken its toll in both Osaka and Tokyo, killing many of its victims. And then there was the usual summer water shortage.

Onodera had some six or seven minutes until his train pulled in. Since he had no desire at all to go into one of the packed and steaming station restaurants, he walked restlessly about, elbowing his way through the sweaty crowd. Each of the bodies mottled with sweat that slipped by on either side seemed to radiate heat like a foot-warmer—a short, thickset office worker in short sleeves, wearing his best suit and down-at-the-heels shoes; a middle-aged woman from the country in denim pants cut off at the knee, staggering along under a heavy load of baggage, her face red from the heat, her too-full breasts wrapped in a cheap striped blouse; a girl in her late teens, a stiff straw hat wound with a gaudy ribbon on her head and sweat dripping from the tip of her flat nose . . .

As he made his way through this assortment of people, the thought struck him that his own hot, sweat-drenched body was in no way different from theirs, that it, too, reeked. And perhaps the lingering odor of the gin that he had gulped down the night before mingled even now with that of his sweat. Onodera shivered with disgust.

Finding himself in front of a water fountain, he stooped to take a drink. But then, ignoring the trickle of cold water, he crouched, mouth half open, with his gaze riveted upon a spot just to the rear of the water fountain. A thin crack ran up the wall, zigzagging ever so little, so thin as to be almost imperceptible. The wall on one side of the crack seemed about an inch higher than on the other.

“Something wrong?”

He heard a somewhat irritated voice behind him. Unnerved, he took a quick gulp of water and moved back from the fountain.

“Excuse me. Go right ahead.”

So saying, he attempted to give place to the tall man behind him, but the latter moved to block his way. Taken aback, Onodera looked up into the man’s broad face.

“Hello!” the man said to Onodera, seizing his shoulder with a huge hand. White teeth flashed in his dark, sunburned face.

Onodera, at a total loss for a moment, suddenly grinned in return. “Goh! Not you?”

“A hangover, eh?” said Rokuro Goh, wrinkling up his nose. “Now I see. You looked like a carp there, gulping down that water.”

Paying no attention to Onodera’s denials, the towering Goh bent over and began to drink as though he intended to drain the cooler right then and there.

“Where are you headed?” Goh asked, wiping his wet mouth.

“Yaizu.”

“Still at it, eh?” Goh bent back the fingers of his right hand and made a dipping motion.

“Right. Where’re you going?”

“In the same direction. Hamamatsu.”

“What’s in Hamamatsu? Work?” Onodera asked, as he sipped his beer in the train’s air-conditioned snack bar.

“Yes, the usual thing—construction.” Goh, already finishing his second beer, made a grimace that pulled taut his sunburned skin.

‘The Super Express?”

“Yes. There’s been one problem after another. The work on the roadbed is stalled.”

“What kind of problems?”

The train began to move. The view outside the window seemed to waver, catching Onodera’s attention. Just for a brief instant, how beautiful seemed the confused, dusty scene at the platform, the row of heat-oppressed faces. . . .

“What kind of problems, you say?” said Goh. Gripping his glass of beer tightly, he stared moodily at the dissolving froth. “All kinds. But it wouldn’t do to say anything about them yet. The newspapers might get on to it.”

Onodera did not press him further. He poured himself a second glass of beer.

“I don’t see how the survey could have been so far off,” Goh muttered as though talking to himself. “We have to practically start from scratch. The work’s in full swing, and then every thing blows up in our faces.”

“How do you mean?”

“Oh, it’s nothing, I suppose. But take it from me, Onodera, Japan these days seems to be very, very shaky. Like a mass of jelly . . . Another beer? Or should we go back to our seats?” asked Goh, looking around the crowded dining car.

“What’s going on in Yaizu, by the way? A sunken ship or something? Great work for hot weather.”

“Not so great,” answered Onodera with a wry grin. “A Security Agency ship is taking us south. It’s a matter of doing some research using a deep-sea submarine—the Wadatsumi.”

“Where are you going?”

“Southeast of Torijima. There was an island there, and it seems that it disappeared.”

“Disappeared? Was there an eruption?”

“No, there wasn’t any eruption. It just sank—just like that.”

2

The Wadatsumi, covered with canvas, was already loaded upon the rear deck of the Marine Security patrol boat Hokuto in the harbor at Yaizu when Onodera arrived.

Professor Yukinaga of M—— University caught sight of Onodera on the dock and waved to him: “Hello there. . . . I’m sorry about this. I hear you were on vacation.”

Surprised at the stir aboard ship, Onodera glanced at his watch in surprise. “Is it sailing time already?” he asked as he came on board.

“Well, we have to sail as soon as we can,” answered Yukinaga, looking down at the wharf. “Should the papers find out that the Wadatsumi is going out, you see, it would be awkward.”

Onodera grinned. “The A——Journal is especially eager, I hear. I understand they chartered a seaplane.”

“They’re making too much of it,” said Yukinaga, shrugging. Though his field was marine geology and he spent much of his life aboard ship, his pale skin seemed untouched by the sun. “Anyway, I don’t think there’s any cause for alarm. They won’t learn anything even if they do fly down there.”

“Well, I suppose it’s the slow season for news.”

“There would be quite an uproar, though,” said Yukinaga, dropping his voice and narrowing his eyes somewhat in the strong sunlight, “if something were to come out about the trouble they’re running into with the new Super Express line.”

“Oh?” Onodera was taken by surprise. “You know about that?”

“I’ve heard things,” said the professor, his voice still low. “A colleague of mine was commissioned to make a confidential investigation. . . .”

Suddenly Yukinaga raised his hand. Down the concrete pier swarming with buzzing flies, a broad, plump figure was running toward them in a flurry of sweat. He banged the suitcase he was carrying against a capstan and almost went sprawling when he trampled upon one of the fish that lay scattered over the con crete, but, nevertheless, he finally reached the ship.

“Hurry up,” said Yukinaga, laughing. “We’re on our way.”

“Without me?” the fat man shouted indignantly. “If you want to go, go. I’ll come swimming after you.”

“I know you would,” said Yukinaga, reaching out for the man’s suitcase as he came across the gangplank. “Onodera, this is Professor Tadokoro.”

“Oh, yes, Professor . . . underwater volcanoes . . .” said Onodera, nodding eagerly. “I’m Onodera of Sea Floor Development.”

“The truth is my field is geophysics,” said Tadokoro, “but I stick my nose into everything.” With that, he walked abruptly back to the stern, where the Wadatsumi lay beneath its tarpaulin.

He rapped his hand smartly against the steel plating under the canvas. “So this is it? You know, I asked that fellow Yamashiro at your place again and again. ...”

“Well, there’s been a constant demand for it,” Onodera re plied, smiling awkwardly. “The Wadatsumi 2 will be finished soon, and then I think things will be better.”

“It’s the same design as the Archimedes. So it should be able to dive to thirty-five thousand. Right?” said Tadokoro, eying Onodera sharply. “How absurd to use something like this to study ocean currents and fishing grounds. Like using a laser beam to cut up a chicken.”

“It’s a tricky ship. The deeper you go, the less time you can stay under,” said Onodera, stroking the side of the submarine.

“How many times has it gone down really deep?”

“Thirty thousand feet, four times. Beyond thirty-five thou sand, twice. There was no particular danger, but . . .”

“How about the Vityaz Deep? Would it be safe to go all the way down there?”

“Well, if it were the new submarine ...” said Onodera.

“Yukinaga!” said Tadokoro, moving away from the Wadatsumi with sudden resolution. “Let’s talk for a bit.” He threw his arm around Yukinaga’s shoulders, and the two walked toward the cabin door, leaving Onodera to himself.

Now that everyone was accounted for, the Hokuto’s departure siren sounded. The crew cast off the hawsers, and white water boiled up at the stern as the sleek, shiny gray-blue patrol boat moved away from the dock. Though there were a few people on the dock to wave farewell, it was an austere leave-taking.

Shortly after they were under way, Onodera noticed a small man with an unlit corncob pipe in his mouth coming from the forward deck.

“Yuki!” he shouted. “I didn’t expect to find you here.”

“I’m just here to hand things over to you,” said the little man, grinning nervously. “I’ve been a little concerned. Anyway, if I was back on shore, I’d only be suffering from the heat. I’ll give you a hand with the repairs.”

“I understand that the gondola was scraped,” said Onodera, turning toward the submarine. A revolving gondola was at tached to the bottom of the craft. Heavy and egg-shaped, it was made of steel bolstered with molybdenum.

“Where it scraped was on the side here. The window has a slight crack, but we have a spare one.”

They began to discuss Onodera’s mission. The request for the Wadatsumi, Yuki said, had probably come from scientists in the group already dispatched by the Weather Service to investigate the sinking of the island.

“Have you heard any news since then?” asked Onodera. “I thought that the meteorological people were concerned about volcanic activity in the Fuji area. And so to go to all this effort for the sake of one uninhabited island . . .”

“Not completely uninhabited,” said Yuki, his face showing signs of fatigue. “Some Polynesian fishermen stopped there the night it sank.”

“Really?” said Onodera, surprised. “Were they rescued?”

“Yes. A Japanese fishing boat happened to be anchored in the lee of the island.”

3

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.

4

It was seven in the evening when the Hokuto arrived at its rendezvous point eighteen miles northeast of Torishima. At this latitude the setting sun had force enough to strike the sea with fierce intensity, but the water lay calm beneath the consuming rays, its surface slick and still except for a faint breeze from south-southeast.

The Wadatsumi was lowered into the water by a derrick and drawn by towlines to the Weather Service ship the Dai to Maru #3, where it was lifted once more and secured to the rear deck.

When the work was completed at dusk, the Hokuto sounded its departure siren at once and sailed off at full speed, bound for Torishima.

Onodera, leaving to Yuki the overseeing of the Wadatsumi s securing, left the afterdeck of the Daito Maru and went inside. As he was walking down a passageway, the door to the ward room opened and Yukinaga put his head out.

“Onodera,” he called. “Come in, we want you here, too.”

When Onodera stepped through the door, he saw some ten or more men, scientists and research personnel, gathered around the wardroom table, which was spread with sea charts and other papers.

“The Polynesian fishermen who were on the island when it sunk—where are they?” Tadokoro asked in a loud voice. “Are they on board?”

“We’ve just sent for them,” answered an elderly man who seemed every inch a university professor. “Tomorrow they’ll be transferred to an American naval ship and taken home.”

“It seems to me, gentlemen,” said Tadokoro, sizing up the group around the table, “that this is a lot of fuss to be making over an insignificant little island. Here we have the Weather Service, the Fisheries Bureau, the Technological Bureau, all going to the trouble of outfitting and dispatching a ship of this size. What was this island like anyway?”

“Well, a weather-survey ship discovered it only five or six years ago,” answered a man from the Weather Service. “It was very small—only one mile from north to south and eight hundred yards from east to west. The highest elevation was about two hundred feet.”

The door opened and a man of about fifty entered. His shoulders were incredibly broad, and the sun had turned his complexion swarthy. His arms, bared by his T-shirt were thick and powerful, and his body reeked of fish and engine oil. Behind him three tall men came hesitantly into the room, their skins coal black, their eyes staring wildly. Two of them wore what looked like ragged aloha shirts bleached by the sun, and the third, a torn undershirt darkened to a muddy brown. Their lips were thick, and the hair that covered their long, narrow heads spread out softly like the crest of a crane. The one who seemed to be the oldest had hair sprinkled with silver, and his face, chest, and upper arms were covered with blue tattooing.

The squat man who had led them in took off his oil-stained work cap, gave a polite bow, and then stood there uncertain and ill at ease.

“This is Mr. Yamamoto, whose fishing boat, the Suiten Mam 9, rescued the Polynesian fishermen,” the man from the Weather Service explained. “Since he can speak a bit of Polynesian, his captain was kind enough to send him to us with them.

These men, who were on the island when it went under, are fishermen from Uragasu Island, he says.”

“Let’s hear what you have to say,” said Tadokoro, indicating that they were to sit down. “I’m sure you’ve told the others already, but we would appreciate hearing it once again.”

“Well,” said the fisherman, “the day before, our ship was somewhere north-northeast of Yamome Rock in the northeast part of the Ogasawara chain, and we were fishing. In the after noon a weather report came warning about a tropical storm, and we got ready to clear out fast, but our engine started to act up. We could make headway, as far as that went, but it was slow going. The storm wasn’t supposed to amount to much, but when you spun the wheel, it didn’t respond right. And so we were in a situation in which something had to be done, and so we started thinking about what island we could shelter at. We decided to make for this island without a name rather than try for Torishima. We reached it just about sunset. We dropped anchor about seven hundred yards off the north side, and every body but the engineers got some sleep. It was really a dark night, cloudy without a single star.”

“What was the depth where you dropped anchor?” asked Yukinaga.

“I think it was about fifty feet. The radio report we heard said that the storm had just grazed us and moved off to the east. So everybody felt good about that, and then we really went to sleep. Then ... well, let’s see. It started to get light before three o’clock, I know. Up by the bow there was this sudden jerking like the ship was being pulled down. I was awake since I’d got up to go to the toilet, and it was just as I was coming back. I heard the captain yell from up above: ‘What’s the matter?’ And then the watch yelled back: ‘Everything’s all right.’ And so I went back to sleep, and when I woke up the next time, it was after four o’clock. I heard shouting up on deck, and so I went up to have a look. Everybody was yelling about the island being gone. The cloudiness had cleared up by now, and the surface of the ocean was fairly bright. And when you looked around, there wasn’t a thing to be seen, not a trace of the island, when, the night before, there it was looming up solid as could be right in front of your nose. The ship was floating there all by itself on the open sea as far as you could look in any direction. We were just drifting, with our engine off. The anchor line’s cut,’ somebody said. But in fact the anchor was hanging there, not touching the bottom. Then suddenly the watch yelled: ‘Somebody’s in the water.’ We looked and we saw some men swimming near the boat and yelling out something. We pulled them out right away, and it was this bunch here.”

“I see,” said Tadokoro, taking a quick breath. “These men, then—they were on the island that night.”

“So they say. They had their sails torn in a gale, and so they stopped off there at noon the day before.”

“I suppose you’ve been asked this any number of times,” said Yukinaga, “but did you measure the water’s depth at the rescue point?”

“Yes, sir. Right below the ship, it was two thousand feet. But, as we figured out later, we had been carried at least one and a half miles north from the spot where we had anchored. The captain said that it was the damnedest thing he’d ever heard of. And so, with the engine fixed, we got under way and headed south like a bat out of hell, taking depth soundings as we went. No more than fifteen minutes went by, before the mate yelled: ‘Captain! The water’s getting shallow all of a sudden. It’s 160 feet here.’ ‘You don’t often find anything so shallow in this area,’ the captain answered. ‘Come here,’ the mate said. Take a look at the depth chart. You see?’ Then the mate moved the compass bearing ten degrees to the west, and signaled for quarter-speed. Then he signaled for slow, and he kept a sharp watch as he moved the ship forward. The captain stood straight up in the prow—he had experience as a pilot, and with the sun finally out altogether, he kept his eyes fixed on the water in front of the ship, staring down into it. ‘Was there an island here or not?’ he muttered to himself. But then, all of a sudden, even I could see that there was a definite change in color coming over the water. ‘Watch it, it’s getting shallow,’ the captain yelled. ‘Captain, right now we’re over the island,’ the mate shouted. If we are, be careful,’ the captain yelled back, ‘it’s getting shallow fast.’ ‘We’re okay,’ said the mate, ‘we’ve already almost passed over the island. The deep part we went over just before must have been the inlet formed by the crater. One spot there was nearly three hundred feet deep. Right now we’re passing over the peak on the southern edge of the island. But even so, the depth is thirty feet. . . .’ ”

Yamamoto closed his mouth, his story done. There was perfect silence in the wardroom.

Finally the elderly man spoke, his manner quite composed. Onodera had by now recognized him as an eminent authority on oceanography. “And, gentlemen, while this nameless little island was going under, Torishima itself sank three feet.”

“Well, let’s hear what these men have to say,” said Tadokoro, turning toward the three Polynesians. “Can you interpret well enough?”

Yamamoto scratched his head and then set to work. Neither his Polynesian, however, nor the Japanese of the old man nor the English of the young one was of much help when it came to detailed questions. But rather the three natives, children of nature that they were, eloquently conveyed the circumstances of the sinking by skillful use of gestures and sounds.

After spending the day in repairing their damaged craft, the Polynesians had gone to sleep in a cave in the cliff face that looked down upon the inlet. In the middle of the night, they had been awakened by the sound of waves, and they had found the sea already at the mouth of their cave.

Had there been an earthquake? Had they heard any rumblings?

They answered that they had been aware of nothing of the sort. And when someone asked how fast the island had sunk, the youngest of the three, by way of answer, bent over to touch the floor with his hands and then raised them steadily until they were level with his chest.

“Like a submarine,” someone said.

They had rushed up to the top of the cliff and thence to the island’s peak, the encroaching sea hard on their heels. The peak had soon been reduced to a bit of rock on the black surface of the sea, beset by hungry white waves. Soon this, too, had been overwhelmed, and the three of them had been swept away, whirlpools of all sizes swirling all around them. Stricken with terror, they had felt themselves dead already, but a large piece of driftwood had happened to come their way, and they had taken turns clinging to it until daybreak.

“Well,” said Tadokoro after they had finished, “there have been accounts enough of islands sinking—but an island so large . . . and for it to sink so fast . . . Well, gentlemen, that’s not something you run into every day, now is it?”

“And there’s more yet,” said the gray-haired oceanographer coolly. “The fishing boat dropped a buoy to mark the island’s highest point.”

“You found it?”

“We found it all right. And we definitely established that we were over the island. But by then the peak was three hundred feet below the surface. What do you think of that, Tadokoro? The entire ocean floor in this area, in a mere two and a half days, has sunk more than five hundred feet.”

5

At seven the next morning, after moving at a slow speed and taking repeated soundings, the Daito Maru stopped directly above the sunken island. The sea was peaceful. The tanker Tatsumi Maru, which belonged to Sea Floor Development, an chored some 300 meters from the Daito Maru. It functioned as a maintenance ship for the submarine, and now its decks were stirring with preparations. A derrick lifted the Wadatsumi from the deck and lowered it gently to the water. Onodera and Yuki went aboard, jumping onto the precariously rolling deck of the submarine. Onodera, going down through the passageway in side the conning tower, lowered himself into the gondola. Then, taking the directions that Yuki gave him through the open hatch, he guided the submarine over to the Tatsumi Maru.

The red no-smoking flag flew from the Tatsumi Maru’s deck, and the smell of gasoline filled the air. The Wadatsumi, its white hull set off in striking fashion by four stripes, two red and two orange, slowly settled to its proper draft. Three dives were planned, each in a different spot. The first was to last two and a half hours or longer if advisable.

The first passengers were Tadokoro and a young engineer from the Fisheries Bureau. After the two of them had preceded him down the hatch into the gondola, Onodera signaled with upraised thumb for the release of the mooring arm. Rattling loudly, the arm swung into action and pushed the Wadatsumi away from the side of the tanker. The submarine floated free upon the waves, its conning tower rocking from side to side.

Onodera bent his index finger, thrust it between his teeth, and whistled sharply, to ward off ill luck. From the work deck of the Tatsumi Maru, Yuki gave an answering whistle. Onodera made his way down the long, narrow hatchway, thirteen feet in height, and lowered himself into the gondola, closing the hatch cover behind him.

“Well, here we go,” said Onodera to the two men sitting tense behind him as he gave the VLF radio a routine final check. After Onodera had dimmed the interior lighting, he put his hand to the control stick and released the air from the front and rear flotation tanks. The water churned noisily about the Wadatsumi and rushed upward past its observation windows. As Yuki watched from the deck of the Tatsumi Maru, the white-and-orange conning tower of the Wadatsumi slipped silently away, sinking down into the waves as it trailed bubbles from its prow and stern.

Onodera threw the power switch. The screw set in the stern at an upward slant began to turn over quietly.

“We are making a power dive down close to the island. The depth will be two hundred feet. Please hold on.”

Onodera pushed the control stick forward sharply and then cut it to the right. The Wadatsumi began its dive, spiraling downward, its bow set at an angle of about fifteen degrees. Tadokoro and the engineer took turns peering at the TV screen and looking out the window.

“There it is,” muttered Tadokoro, his voice like a growl. “There it is, all right.”

It was nine o’clock by now, but down here in the depths there was as yet little light. The water was clear, however, and, on the screen of the free-ranging TV camera, one could dimly see, looming up from the dark depths, the massive and still darker bulk of the undersea island. Its peak alone was faintly touched with light. Its sloping side faded from sight as it trailed down through a thousand fathoms of black water.

“Point the nose right at it,” said Tadokoro, throwing the switch to activate the videotape recorder.

Onodera cautiously, bit by bit, moved the control stick to straighten out the submarine’s course and direct it at the island. Gently he shifted into reverse, and the vessel’s forward motion stopped. He released a bit of the air used for stabilization, and after depressing the nose fifteen degrees, he gently edged the vessel into a dive. Like stage scenery rising into position, the crest of the nameless island loomed up from the bottom of the TV screen. The nose of the submarine was now about 300 yards distant from it. Professor Tadokoro pushed a button, and the compact videotape recorder began to spin with a faint whirring noise.

Onodera turned on the ultrasonic-wave fathometer.

“Turn it off whenever you think it’s time,” said Onodera, peering sharply at the trembling needle of the sonic depth-recorder and at the speed-of-descent needle. “We still have quite a distance remaining.”

When the slope coming down from the crest was ten yards away, Onodera put the engine into fast reverse, and the Wadatsumi, its nose still tipped down at a fifteen-degree angle, darted backward like a killifish.

“Should we make a descent following the line of the slope, Professor?” Onodera asked.

“Hey, take it easy, will you!” Yuki’s voice came in from the Tatsumi Maru on the VLF radio. “We thought you smashed into it for sure.”

“Try circling the crest,” said Tadokoro. “And then we’ll go down the slope.”

“Professor Tadokoro,” said Onodera as he started to move the vessel forward, “even with the ocean floor sinking nearly six hundred feet in two days, there was no tidal wave or anything. Why not, do you suppose?”

“I don’t know!” Tadokoro barked in answer. “Somehow equilibrium was maintained, I suppose, but I have no idea how. I just don’t know!”

I just don’t know—that’s the same refrain I’ve heard ever since last evening, Onodera thought.

The Wadatsumi kept a distance of about 150 yards from the crest of the undersea island as it began to circle it at a speed of three knots. They were close enough to see clearly the creases that ran down the crater wall of the old volcano. As soon as he turned on the searchlight, even Onodera, layman though he was, was able to perceive the difference between water and wind erosion. The diameter of the crater at its mouth was some 200 to 300 yards. On its inside the sides of the crater fell away in a sheer, almost perpendicular drop. There was a deep V-shaped crevice in the crater wall. It seemed to have been caused not by the eruption, but by some earlier disturbance. The fathometer showed a depth of about 300 feet at the crater. Onodera felt a chill as the thought struck him that Tadokoro might say, “Let’s go down into there for a look.” There was no evidence of volcanic activity at the time of the island’s sinking.

Just as though it had been there forever, the black bulk of the island lay in the cold gloom of the ocean depths, a pall of heavy silence shrouding it.

Onodera began his descent. Using the sonar to ensure the greatest safety, he fixed upon the slope line of the volcano, pointing the nose down at an angle of nearly thirty degrees.

“We’re going down the slope, Yuki,” he said into the micro phone. “Keep a sharp watch.”

“I’ve got you.”

Onodera turned the rheostat lever. The sound of flowing water penetrated the thick metal of the gondola casing, and the vibrations of the engine shook it as the Wadatsumi began its descent at a speed of two knots. Professor Tadokoro and the young engineer tightened their seat belts, their eyes like saucers as they looked out the observation window and at the TV screen. The dull, twanging echo of the sonar reverberated through the gondola.

Schools of fish and huge shadows which might have been sharks crossed the screen. The side of the undersea crater loomed up outside the right window until at last the unmistakable traces of sea erosion came into view.

“Go back up to the water line,” said Tadokoro.

Onodera raised the nose of the submarine until the erosion mark was opposite the window.

“Where’s your level?” asked Tadokoro.

“In the drawer there.”

Tadokoro laid the level on the ledge of the observation win dow and studied it with rapt attention. Finally he spoke abruptly: “If that’s the sea-level mark as of three days ago, the whole island has tipped four to five degrees to the east.”

“Should I continue down?” asked Onodera.

Tadokoro signaled his assent with a tap on the shoulder. The Wadatsumi resumed its descent. . . . 600 feet . . . 800 feet . . . The sun was apparently high in the sky by now, for visibility remained fairly constant. The water outside the window, how ever, quickly took on a bluish cast. At 1,000 feet Onodera slowly brought up the nose of the submarine. The slope of the crater was gradually growing less steep as its skirts trailed down into the indigo-blue depths of the ocean floor. Onodera turned off both the television and the lights inside the gondola. A ghostly blue light poured in from the round observation windows. At 1,200 feet, the Wadatsumi, now almost level, continued to follow the gradual slope which trailed far off to the vanishing point in the darkness of the ocean floor. He jettisoned a small amount of ballast.

“We’ll reach the bottom in just a bit,” Onodera announced.

He turned on the searchlight. Beyond the cloudy wall of water ahead, the sea floor came dimly into view. The guide chain trailing from the bottom of the submarine struck with a thump, transmitting the shock to the gondola. Phosphorescent fish swam up to the window. The floor of the sea, beneath the powerful glare of the searchlight, seemed to loom up like some massive gray living thing. Onodera dropped their speed to a half-knot. The guide chain stirred up mud from the bottom as the Wadatsumi finally came to a gradual stop. There were only six feet between it and the ocean floor.

The bottom of the sea, as far as Onodera was concerned, showed nothing unusual. For the two men behind him, how ever, there was something that gave rise to great excitement.

“Ripple marks ...” muttered the young engineer.

“Volcanic rock projectiles—right out in the open like that!” exclaimed Tadokoro excitedly.

“It’s obvious, isn’t it, that mud on the bottom shifted violently just a little while ago?” said the engineer. “Take a look—there!”

“Hmmmmm.” Tadokoro nodded. “The sea floor here, keeping the same slope, seems to have shifted over a broad area, doesn’t it?”

“Rather than shifted, wouldn’t you say that there might have been something like a landslide?”

“Onodera,” said Tadokoro, “what we have to do next is to see what we can see on the eastern part of the shelf.”

Professor Yukinaga and a specialist in volcanoes from the expedition went aboard for the second dive. This time Onodera went down at full power and brought the submarine rapidly to a depth of 2,000 feet. And from there, following the slope of the shelf, they dove to the ocean floor, a depth of 6,050 feet. Again the two observers came across a wealth of exciting discoveries. Once even the ever-composed Yukinaga cried out shrilly. The sea was beginning to get rough when they surfaced again.

“We’ll postpone the third dive until tomorrow,” said Tadokoro. “The Daito Maru seems to have discovered some thing unusual about ninety miles east of here, in the Ogasawara Trench. This time well go down to the bottom of the trench to have a look. No difficulty in that?”

“No, sir,” said Onodera.

6

Visibility was bad when the Wadatsumi slipped below the surface the next day, with Tadokoro and Yukinaga aboard. It plunged into the jaws of a vast black watery void, and at 3,000 feet darkness swallowed it up completely. The force of the water coming to bear upon a portion of metal no larger than the palm of a hand was more than 100 tons. The Wadatsumi continued its dive smoothly at a speed of three knots an hour into that freezing hell of crushing pressure, like a specimen sealed in blue glass. The interior of the gondola became cold. Moisture condensed in drops upon the inner walls.

“It would be good to put on your jackets,” said Onodera.

The control board glowed with a green, firefly-like light. At 5,000 feet Onodera turned on the searchlight, and the water seemed to envelop the Wadatsumi like a gray-blue fog. From time to time, strange creatures of the deep floated up into the spotlight and then swam casually away without showing the least interest in the odd invader.

“Ten thousand feet,” said Onodera, his eyes on the water-pressure gauge. “To the left there . . . the trench slope begins. The distance is eight miles. The slope angle is twenty-five degrees. According to the charts, it should be much steeper.”

The temperature continued to drop. Yukinaga unobtrusively pulled his jacket collar tighter about him. The dehumidifier had begun to take effect. The drops of moisture on the walls and the pipes had disappeared. The inside of the gondola had the hush of a graveyard at dusk. The submarine seemed to Yukinaga like a metal coffin drawn ever deeper into the terrible pressure of the abyss.

Fifteen thousand feet. Professor Yukinaga felt his skin prickle at the thought of the water crowding against the outside of the metal wall a bare twenty inches from his shoulder. He heard a faint crackling noise, and he looked furtively about him.

“Everything’s in good shape,” said Onodera, noticing Yukinaga’s concern. “The instruments contract and pull at their fittings when the temperature drops. Should I turn on the heater?”

“No . . .” said Tadokoro. “We’ll soon be at the bottom?”

“We’re at 17,200 feet,” said Onodera, looking up at the pres sure gauge. “The bottom should be . . .”

There was a loud ping as a downward sound wave gave back an immediate echo.

“. . . 5,850 feet farther.”

Only rarely now did any living thing pass through the search light beam. Sometimes a small jellyfish or shellfish, immune to the terrible pressure, would flash by. When Onodera turned off the searchlight, however, living creatures, like scattered stars, shone with blue-white phosphorescence in the pitch-black void. The water temperature fell to 1.8 degrees Centigrade. One hour and forty-two minutes had passed since they had left the surface behind.

“Twenty-two thousand feet ...”

“That there!” exclaimed Yukinaga, a quaver to his voice. “Is it a ray?”

Outside the left window, a creature like a huge curtain was flapping its way slowly through the searchlight beam.

“Surely,” said Tadokoro, his voice hoarse, “something that big couldn’t be a living thing.”

The creature, caught in the outer circle of light, took a good five or six seconds to pass by. It seemed to be more than 100 feet in length.

“Could we try to track it with the sonar?” asked Yukinaga.

“It’s already way above us,” answered Onodera. “We’ll soon be at the bottom.”

Suddenly there was a loud thump as the submarine took a shocking blow upon its side. The Wadatsumi shuddered, and its nose twisted sharply to the left more than twenty degrees, then thirty degrees back to the right.

“What is it?” Yukinaga asked, his voice harsh. “An accident?”

“No,” answered Onodera calmly. “It seems like it was an undersea tidal current.”

“At a spot this deep?” asked Tadokoro. “A current that strong? How’s that?”

“I don’t know,” answered Onodera. “Sometimes we run into them. But I’ve never hit one that strong before.”

“There’s the bottom,” said Yukinaga, his voice like a sigh.

Directly below them two mustard-colored circles seemed to loom dimly, the targets of the two powerful searchlights pointing straight down from the front and rear of the submarine. Gradually they got brighter, their outlines growing quite distinct. At several points doughnut-shaped clouds of mud whirled up, rising as they broadened, stirred by released ballast. The guide chain struck the sea floor, and the Wadatsumi, halting its descent, pursued a course barely five feet from the bottom.

The water was clear at this depth. Once the flowing clouds of ooze had thinned, there was almost nothing to catch the light cast by the searchlight. The melancholy brown desert of the sea floor stretched all around them. The distant portion was grayish with a tinge of indigo. Beyond that was blackness.

“Well ...” said Onodera, breaking silence, his voice harsh, “this is the floor of the trench. The depth is 23,840 feet.”

As though jarred by Onodera’s voice, the two scientists began to exchange low, hurried whispers.

“Look there!” exclaimed Tadokoro, pointing his finger.

Yukinaga nodded. Running from west to east across the sea floor were any number of ripple marks.

“That over there,” said Tadokoro, “what’s that long thing like a rut?”

“I don’t know,” answered Yukinaga, shaking his head. He spoke to Onodera: “Could we turn in that direction?”

Onodera released a small amount of ballast. Once more a cloud of mud rose up outside the window. The Wadatsumi climbed a bit, and Onodera guided the nose of the submarine in the direction Yukinaga wanted by careful use of his jets rather than by the control stick, moving forward at extremely slow speed.

The long trench on the sea floor, some seven or eight feet wide, came into view through the cloud of muddy water. It looked as though some creature of fantastic size had dragged itself through the ooze.

“Over there, too,” Yukinaga whispered. “Why, there are all kinds of them.^,,

“What do you think they are?” asked Tadokoro.

“I don’t know.” Onodera shook his head. “I’ve gone down into a trench two or three times now, but this is the first time I’ve ever seen anything like this.”

The sea floor was covered with these broad ruts. They ranged from fifteen feet in width to twenty or more. They extended east and west beyond the limits of the submarine’s field of vision. Something had caused the sea floor to shift. Some force of unimaginable power.

“Could it be that there was some extraordinary gravitational variation in this area?” Yukinaga asked.

“No idea,” answered Tadokoro. “Let’s follow along and have a look.”

Turning the wireless up to its full capacity, Onodera at tempted contact with the Tatsumi Maru. At length Yuki’s voice came through. The reception was terribly weak and marred by static.

“What is it?” came the faint response. “We lost all trace of you just now. We had been monitoring your sonar vibrations.”

“We ran into some strange-looking ruts at the bottom of the trench,” said Onodera. “So what we’re going to do now is follow them, going east. Take a verification of my position.”

“All right,” answered Yuki. “In one minute give me a signal. And then let’s have a sound wave every minute after that.”

His eye on his stopwatch, Onodera let a minute elapse and then sent up a signal from the ultrasonic oscillator. When he had gotten a reply verifying his position, Onodera set the oscillator at one-minute intervals and started the submarine forward. He steered it into a shallow curve, and, passing over two ruts, he lined up the vessel’s axis with the third and then moved forward at a speed of three knots. Apparently they had not yet reached the deepest part of the sea trench. In front of them there was a gentle grade of about twenty degrees, which fell off to the east. The vessel moved ahead, its guide chain maintaining a fixed distance from the sea floor. The water pressure began to climb slightly. After they had gone a mile and a half, the rut broadened, almost doubling in width, and it also grew shallower. Finally it disappeared into the ooze. All was silent save for the faint ping of the oscillator and the quiet vibration of the motor.

“We’re down to 23,950,” said Onodera. “The slope of the floor is getting steep all of a sudden.”

“The water’s gotten muddy,” said Tadokoro.

Suddenly the nose of the vessel rose up with a thumping noise. It climbed some sixty feet above the sea floor before Onodera could check it.

“Are we all right?” asked Yukinaga, gripping his chair as the submarine pitched forward and back. The dim cabin light showed his forehead beaded with sweat.

Without answering, Onodera gripped the control stick and brought the vessel some ninety feet farther up. The pitching lessened at once. How incredible, thought Onodera, a current so violent that close to the floor of a trench! He leveled out on a course 180 feet from the bottom. The vibrations ceased almost entirely.

“Should we go down again?” Onodera asked.

“No ...” muttered Tadokoro as though uncertain.

“How about a flare?”

“Give it a try.”

Onodera opened the lid of a small control box to his right and depressed one of the six levers it contained. There was a faint shock. Then in the upper portion of the television screen a dazzling sphere of brilliance burst into view. Surrounded by a frenzied mass of bubbles, it slanted slowly downward.

The two scientists, clinging to the edge of the observation window, gasped with surprise. Onodera fixed his eyes on the television screen. What had come into view, lit by the blue-white glare of that underwater sun, was peak upon peak of gray-yellow clouds of mud, wavering in the current and stretching far into the distance like a vast sea of stratocumuli seen from an airplane.

“Can we go down?” muttered Tadokoro.

“We can try 150 feet,” said Onodera.

“All right. Be careful ...” said Tadokoro. “Make sure that we can go back up at any moment.”

Onodera released a spurt of gasoline from the small tank used to trim the vessel, and the Wadatsumi began to sink rapidly. Startled, Onodera let go some ballast and lessened the rate of descent. They were already in the midst of the muddy clouds, however. Once more the vessel began to tremble violently. Gradually Onodera brought it up forty-five feet, climbing out of the clouds. Another blow struck the Wadatsumi, and it began to rock from side to side.

“Let’s try another flare,” said Tadokoro, absorbed in the instruments and oblivious to the new crisis.

As he fired the flare, however, Onodera, reacting to some instinct of danger, released a large quantity of ballast, and the whirlpool of brown cloud beneath them suddenly fell away. An instant later a fierce rush of water hit the Wadatsumi broadside, tipping it over and sweeping it far off course before Onodera could reassert control and start the engine. The submarine then began to rise steadily.

“Professor Tadokoro! Look there!” Yukinaga cried.

The flare that had been released before the current struck them was drifting in the distance, shedding its light upon the yellow-brown chaos below. At the extreme edge of the light, some huge thing was churning with terrible force—a mass of mud cloud tinged with green. Swelling as it came, it was pouring down the sloping side of the trench, down out of the darkness above.

“A turbulent mud current!” shouted Tadokoro, his voice uncharacteristically shrill. “We’re the first ones to actually lay eyes on one.”

“But . . . at this depth?” asked Yukinaga, trembling with excitement. “It looks as though it’s pouring out of the side of the trench.”

“I’m going to take us all the way up,” said Onodera, regaining his voice. “There was a message from the ship. The surface is getting rough.”

The Wadatsumi began its lonely ascent at a point some 240 feet above the rolling sea of mud which filled the trench. Like a balloon cut loose from its moorings, it soared upward with steadily increasing speed toward the silver sky that glinted nearly 24,000 feet above it. Onodera fired off the three remaining flares. They burst and hung suspended above the Wadatsumi, their burning blue-white glare creating a circle of light more than a mile in diameter.

For the first time Onodera was able to grasp something of the total environment that enclosed them—that vast, crushing environment of chill, clear water. Far off to the left, at the very edge of the light, loomed the dark face of the trench wall, merging into the blackness beyond. The twisting yellow-brown mud current was now far below them, but Onodera could make out the faint shadow of the Wadatsumi falling upon it, a tiny metal cylinder suspended in a void.

The Japan Trench. That deepest of trenches, whose broad expanse lay nearly 24,000 feet below the sunlit waves of the vast Pacific. Now in that immense watery void, something was stir ring. That icy, monstrous serpent of blackness that lay within the trench, stretching from one end of it to another—it was beginning to writhe beneath the terrible weight of pressure piled upon it. It was beginning to edge its body forward.