The message reached the Military Information Center in Denver at 8:05 A.M.  By 8:06 it had been relayed to Washington and every plane on the Pacific Coast was ordered aloft.  The Oregon radar unit reported the same object at 8:07 A.M.  It said the object was seven hundred fifty miles high, four hundred miles out at sea, and was headed toward the Oregon coastline, moving northwest to southeast.  There was no major city in its line of travel.  The impact point computed by the Oregon station was nowhere near South Dakota.  As other computations followed other observations, a second place of fall was calculated, then a third.  Then the Oregon radar unbelievably reported that the object was decelerating.  Allowing for deceleration, three successive predictions of its landing point agreed.  The object, said these calculations, would come to earth somewhere near Boulder Lake, Colorado, in what was to become a national park.  Impact time should be approximately 8:14 A.M.

These events followed Lockley’s awakening in the wilds, but he knew nothing of any of them.  He himself wasn’t near the lake, which was to be the center of a vacation facility for people who liked the outdoors.  The lake was almost circular and was a deep, rich blue.  It occupied what had been the crater of a volcano millions of years ago.  Already bulldozers had ploughed out roads to it through the forest.  Men worked with graders and concrete mixers on highways and on bridges across small rushing streams.  There was a camp for them.  A lakeside hotel had been designed and stakes were driven in the ground where its foundation would eventually be poured.  There were infant big-mouthed bass in the lake and fingerling trout in many of the streams.  A huge Wild Life Control trailer-truck went grumbling about such trails as were practical, attending to these matters.  Yesterday Lockley had seen it gleaming in bright sunshine as it moved toward Boulder Lake on the highway nearest to his station.

But that was yesterday.  This morning he awoke under a pale gray sky.  There was complete cloud cover overhead.  He smelled conifers and woods-mould and mountain stone in the morning.  He heard the faint sound of tree branches moving in the wind.  He noted the cloud cover.  The clouds were high, though.  The air at ground level was perfectly transparent.  He turned his head and saw a prospect that made being in the wilderness seem entirely reasonable and satisfying.

Mountains reared up in every direction.  A valley lay some thousands of feet below him, and beyond it other valleys, and somewhere a stream rushed white water to an unknown destination.  Not many wake to such a scene.