Ito was shocked by this news, since he knew that his reactors could not survive the damage. He could not shut them down without permission, for they were too important to the electric power grid of central Honshu Island. If they continued to operate, his reactors could one day release enough radiation to kill most of the surrounding population. In the end, he remained the loyal company man. He kept the reactors running at peak capacity. The danger from earthquakes, he decided, must be the concern of his superiors.

Now, if the television report he had seen was to be trusted, his reactors faced two devastating blows: a giant tsunami, and earthquakes of a magnitude Japan had never before experienced.

He had been assured that the Richter scale was a reliable measure of ground motion caused by an earthquake. Each point on the scale indicated a ten-fold increase in movement. An earthquake measuring five would do considerable damage. An earthquake of magnitude six is ten times as powerful and would cause severe damage. At magnitude seven, a quake would produce widespread damage. An earthquake of magnitude eight would be a thousand times more powerful than one at five on the Richter scale. None of the earthquakes forecast for Japan in the aftermath of the meteor were less than 8.5.

As the Far East braced for the shock of a tidal wave, nature played a cruel trick. The earthquake tremors from California traveled underground around the Pacific at about two-tenths of a mile per second, or 720 miles per hour. Denying that such a phenomenon was possible, scientists had calculated seismic movement at a lightning-fast twelve thousand kilometers an hour. But, like so much in seismic theory, these earlier calculations proved wrong. Like a string of firecrackers on the Fourth of July, a massive series of earthquakes struck the Pacific Northwest, Alaska, and the Aleutians, and then headed at supersonic speed toward Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Indonesia.

At noon, Ito’s superiors had telephoned an order to shut down the reactors. What possible good will that do? he wondered. He knew there was no way to cool and protect a hot reactor core in nine hours— and that’s all the time he would have before the earthquake hit. And what about the pond for storing the spent fuel rods? If the water covering them boiled off, the radiation from the damaged spent fuel pond could, according to some experts, triple the total area of radiation contamination.

If the nuclear power from his plant and others like it were to be cut off, the elevators, the electric trains, the switches, the lights, the communications, the computers in Tokyo would all stop. His superiors were wrong. It was too late to argue. He had given his best years to the company. Now, he would save what was left for himself.