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and... sort of... skipped?'
    "Like chucking stones over water?" Matt asked. I could hear he wasn't buying it. "You know how fast it had to be traveling to –"
    "Well, it had to be going fast?" I said. "To just appear like that."
    "I make it the speed of light?" somebody said. "Or close enough as not to make much difference."
    "How do you figure?"
    "The distance covered, that we can see from some of these views, is about a quarter of a million miles, and I can't see which direction it came from. That means some small fraction of a second. It takes light –"
    "Look, look!" somebody else shouted. "The JPL screen!"
    That window was showing a slowed-down rerun from some distant satellite with a high-shutter-speed camera. Frame by frame, we could see the streak form. It definitely began on the ocean and shot off to the northeast very quickly, even slowed down as it was. Down at the bottom of the window was a clock counting off hundred-thousandths of a second, and a computer-generated computation of speed: .999 c . C, in case they didn't teach any physics in your school, is the speed of light in a vacuum: 186,000 miles per second.
    Nobody had anything to say when that figure came up.
    I began to realize this was going to be one of those Where were you? moments. Where were you when you heard about New Delhi and Islamabad? For my parents, it was Where were you on September 11, 2001? For Grandma it was John Kennedy's assassination, and before that it was Pearl Harbor. This was going to be that bad. I didn't quite know how or why yet, but I felt it.
    A few seconds later most of the screen cleared for a moment, and then somebody appeared, same shot, in all of them. It was a black woman – short, judging from the shoulders on either side of her – and she looked out of breath, like she'd run all the way to the cameras. The crawl at the bottom of the windows identified her as the Honorable Shirley Tsange, acting director of UNGWS. I ticked the acronym and was told it stood for United Nations Global Warning System. There was a lot of shouting from reporters off-screen, flashes going off, the usual turmoil of the press pack.
    She started speaking without preamble, raising her voice almost to a shout until she got some quiet. She was reading from a prepared statement.
    "At 1836 Greenwich Mean Time, a high-speed object of unknown origin impacted the North Atlantic Ocean at approximately sixty-seven degrees west longitude and twenty-four degrees north latitude. The global early-warning system had no indication at all of this object prior to impact, but the impact itself triggered numerous automatic systems that have been monitoring and extrapolating possible effects of the impact since that time. Ten minutes ago the data became alarming enough that I, acting for the director of the UNGWS, issued a tsunami alarm, which went out immediately. The following countries are expected to be immediately affected, in order of their proximity to the impact:
    The Bahama Islands, Puerto Rico and the British and American Virgin Islands.
    Anguilla, St. Martin, St. Barts... in fact the entire chain of the Leeward and Windward Islands." I winced, recalling that just a few moments ago I was thinking of those places as "flyspecks." That's what they are, on the map, but those flyspecks were inhabited by human beings.
    "The Dominican Republic. Haiti. The Turks and Caicos Islands. The eastern provinces of Cuba.
    But first..." She paused, and put down the paper she was reading from. "Sorry, I should have skipped right to this part, things have been happening very fast, and the warning is already out, automatically, so..." She paused, took a deep breath, and we could all see just how shaken she really was.
    "First, the residents of the Bahamas are in the worst danger. The highest waves seem to be propagating in their direction. We offer the following advice:
    First, if you are able, get to high ground. The initial wave is in the eighty-to-one-hundred-foot range,