Rogue Wave

was happy to see her mother pass away like that.'

'You sound like you don't believe her,' Rachel said.

'Oh, she smiled, and she seemed glad and relieved to be there, but happy? No.'

'Why not?'

'Life never has a happy ending,' Teresa said. 'It always ends in death. Death can be dignified or wretched, agonizing or painless, horrifying or serene, untimely or welcome. But it's always sad. Happiness comes from what you do with the time between the beginning and the end.'

Now that Rachel was gone, Kai often wondered what she would want him to do with the rest of his life. As he closed his laptop, he looked at Teresa smiling at him, and he thought he knew.

Rachel would want him to be happy.

END

Afterword

Asteroids are a very real threat to our planet. The story told in The Palmyra Impact is a dramatization of what would happen if one of them struck Earth, but it is not science fiction. When I visited the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center for my research, I spent three hours with the director, Chip McCreery, who graciously gave me a tour of the facility. The tour took place more than eighteen months before the Asia tsunami devastated Thailand, Sri Lanka, and Indonesia in December 2004. When I told him the plot to my story, he agreed that the scenario was indeed plausible.

The reason is that asteroids are very difficult to detect. As I mentioned in the novel, asteroid 2002 MN wasn't discovered until it had already passed by Earth. If that asteroid had hit the middle of the ocean, we may not have known about it until the first waves hit populated shores.

In the future, one of those asteroids won't miss. It may not be in my lifetime, but someday it will happen unless we do something to deflect the asteroid.

Spaceguard is a real entity scanning the skies for dangerous near-earth objects. They've identified Apophis, a near-Earth asteroid almost identical in size to the one in The Palmyra Impact. There is a 1 in 45,000 chance that it will hit Earth in 2036.

The computer models that I referenced in the novel are very real and are an example of extensive research into tsunamis caused by asteroid impact. Those models may not match up exactly with the size and frequency of waves I sent towards Honolulu in my book, but I will point out that until we actually experience an asteroid impact, we have no real data. The computer models may be wrong.

One thing is certain, though. I won't be in Hawaii the day Apophis makes its closest approach.