And suddenly, incredibly the sun was rising—its golden-yellow face peeking over the violent western horizon. Only it was not the sun, it was the moon and it was enormous.

I sat up, mesmerized by the luminous orange sphere. For a brief moment it disappeared behind a cresting swell, its lunar light casting the dark wall of water turquoise before it reappeared above the crashing wave.

Rising higher, the moon shed its orange tint, its reflection paling over the servant ocean, which rose to Himalayan heights to greet it.

And now a shadow appeared on the lunar surface—the Earth’s shadow—the brief eclipse exposing the pattern of the moon’s altered orbit as elliptical—a radical change that must have resulted in its unfathomable proximity—perhaps a third of its former distance.

“What could have caused…?”

The surface of the dead world blossomed in its full splendor, revealing evidence of its recent pillage—a crater that looked the size of Australia, its telltale profile indicating the impact had occurred on the far side of the moon.

The asteroid. It must have missed Earth … and struck the moon!

A trail of debris appeared over the horizon as the moon passed overhead, stretching across the sky like a cosmic tail, the dust and rocks and spinning satellites of exhumed geology caught in its wounded parent’s gravitational tide.

Can’t see the full size of that impact crater, but the debris field must have been huge. All that mass, blasted into space, caught in Earth’s gravitational field …

I collapsed to my knees, my skin tingling, my hair surreally standing on end as I realized that this might not be a dream after all, that the planet may have experienced a cataclysm while we were being held in cryogenic stasis … that I may have been the only one to wake—my species’ lone survivor.

“Whoa!”

Suddenly reeling off balance, I lashed out for the rocky ground with both arms as my body levitated into the air! Twisting in a pocket of zero gravity, I flailed into an off-kilter somersault, nearly striking my head on the slate-covered summit, only to spin around again to face the moon—now hovering directly overhead, so close I imagined I could swim to it, its luminescent mass blotting out a third of the night sky.

Oh, but there were so many things happening at once, my senses on overload, for rising around me was a ballet of floating objects—gravel and palm fronds and even droplets of froth spewed skyward by the undulating sea. My ascent found its equilibrium at eighty-five feet, affording me a view of seascape so spellbinding it silenced the revelation of being weightless.