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else.
    "Wider," Elizabeth corrected. "It's getting wider, and it's a little fainter."
    I thought she was right. There was no wind where this streak was, but if it was a gas cloud of some kind, you'd expect it to expand in space.
    "Down there at the bottom, where it hits the Earth," came another voice. "Isn't it getting wider? Sort of a cigar shape?" I thought it was more of an oval, an ellipse, but it was plain enough. I felt my skin prickle in goose bumps.
    "Something hit the Earth," I said.
    "Yeah, but..."
    "No, that doesn't make sense."
    "Sure it does," I said. "See, it came in from two o'clock, and it hit in the water."
    "No, why would it leave a trail like that? An asteroid wouldn't leave a trail –"
    "Would a ship leave a trail like that?"
    "No ship I ever saw. It's big, and it's still expanding."
    "Plus, look how fast it must have been moving before –"
    Somebody did that fingers-in-the-lips whistle that I've never been able to master, and we all looked for the source. To no one's surprise, it was Matt Kaminsky, the senior captain of the swimming team.
    "Let's pool, people," he said.
    No, he wasn't talking about taking a dip in the lap pool behind me. He meant he thought we ought to pool all our cyber resources, link up, so we'd all be on the same page, more or less. I had five windows running at that time, all different news sources. No telling what everybody else was watching. There being no objection, the motion carried. We all switched our stereos into network setting, and Matt pointed to the east wall of the gym. Windows began appearing in a mosaic as we all turned to face it, hanging a few inches out in front of the equipment there. They were stabilized windows, meaning that if I turned my head, they stayed there in front of the wall, didn't move with my field of vision. Now we knew we were all seeing the same stuff at the same time. There were all the usual suspects: CNN-Mars, EuroTV, TeleLuna, CBS. Some showed talking heads and print crawl lines, others were picking up different angle shots of the streak from various manned and unmanned satellites and orbital resorts. A couple were showing tourist-eye views from people who just happened to be looking at that part of the Earth when the streak appeared. There was no point in that, really; the resolution wasn't as good, and being closer to the Earth didn't reveal any new detail.
    Matt pulled up a few more windows, including some I had never seen. There was a public feed from the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, and a false-color image from the United States National Weather Service. That one looked interesting, but I didn't know how to interpret it. There was something happening at what I was thinking of as the impact point, something with a lot of reds and yellows, and I thought I could almost see it expanding as I watched. I checked the count clock that had started when the urgent bulletin came in. We'd been watching for eight minutes, and the event had happened no more than five minutes before that. The visible-light image was just white in the impact area, a lozenge of what looked like a puffy white cloud that was growing. Unseen producers were running recordings backward and forward at high speed, and they all showed the same thing. The streak would appear instantaneously, fully formed, and then the white area would expand until it froze in real time. Big as that area was, we couldn't see it growing in the live feeds.
    All the windows were showing the same view, but from widely different angles. From a satellite over the North Pole it was possible to see that the streak seemed to graze the Earth's atmosphere, maybe dip into the ocean.
    Wait a minute, I thought.
    "Wait a minute," I said, before the thought was fully formed in my mind. Several heads turned in my direction.
    "Maybe I had it backwards," I said, and wondered why I'd said it. Then I had it.
    "I think that streak is moving away from the Earth. I think it hit on a tangent, right there above the ocean,