
Lockley is a surveyor living in a rugged mountain camp, tasked with laying out the baseline for a new national‑park development. His mornings begin in a sleeping bag under a canopy of conifers, his thoughts drifting to a fleeting romance that haunts him. The routine is interrupted when distant radar stations in Alaska and Oregon pick up an unexpected, slow‑moving object high above the Pacific coast.
The reports quickly cascade to the military hub in Denver, then to Washington, prompting every aircraft on the coast to scramble. As the data are cross‑checked, the object’s trajectory appears to converge on the very site where Boulder Lake is being transformed into a recreational haven. With impact time projected for just minutes later, the tranquil wilderness is suddenly poised on the brink of an extraordinary event that could change everything for the workers and the landscape alike.
Language
en
Duration
~4 hours (260K characters)
Publisher of text edition
Project Gutenberg
Credits
Produced by Greg Weeks, Geoffrey Kidd, Sankar Viswanathan, and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net
Release date
2006-02-27
Rights
Public domain in the USA.

1896–1975
A prolific pioneer of science fiction, he helped shape the genre with fast-moving stories full of big ideas, practical ingenuity, and a sense that ordinary people could outthink extraordinary problems.
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