As was the case in Los Angeles, some went stark-raving mad. Others prayed. Some decided to spend their last evening eating, drinking, and enjoying the pleasures of the night.

AT 9:00 P.M., AS IF SOME huge beast had emerged from under the sea, the giant Pacific Plate plunged beneath the Eurasian Plate, thrusting it upward one hundred fifty feet in the air. The first breaks were in the north throughout Hokkaido. Tokai was next. Buildings and roadways collapsed in seconds. Thousands of flimsy houses began to blaze from thousands of fires ignited by overturned kerosene stoves. The water pipes at Tokai Number One and Tokai Number Two broke apart like clay pots. The containment walls shattered in scores of places. The overheated cores began meltdown. It was only a question of time before a cloud of poisonous radiation would engulf every man, woman, and child within ten miles.

But the big one was Tokyo. When the plates beneath it jumped, it seemed that hell was unleashed on earth. Downtown buildings swayed and then collapsed. The fill dirt from centuries of dumping into Tokyo Bay suddenly liquefied. The high-rise apartments, the airport, everything man-made no longer had support. It all collapsed and crumbled.

All electricity was out in the city and its suburbs. The only light was from the wind-whipped flames bursting up from hundreds of thousands of shops and dwellings.

Yet, the roaring beast was still not satisfied. Wave after wave of violent shocks ravaged the entire island nation. Virtually every nuclear facility in Japan was in a crisis meltdown condition. Roads were destroyed. Power lines and telephone lines were down. Every railroad train had been derailed. Bridges and overpasses were twisted rubble.

Millions of people crawled out of the rubble of the cities and villages. They groped about in the dark, grateful to be alive. To them, an even greater horror was yet to come.

Early Saturday morning, while it was still dark and their nation was in ruins, they heard a roaring noise in the distance. Then the great wave broke over them. They were picked up five hundred feet in the air, then smashed back to earth again. They were turned over and over again by the violence of the waves until their bodies were like jelly. Their lungs gasped for air while their ear drums exploded with the pressure.

They couldn’t see. They couldn’t hear. Nothing had prepared them for the horror of being seized by this malevolent force.

The angry wave poured inland as far as the mountains. Nothing living in its path survived. Then it retreated to its boundaries, pulling with it the bodies of people and animals, the rich topsoil, and all those things that people, when they were alive, had counted precious.