It was almost the end of Graham Tyndall's shift and he had been staring at various satellite images since six that morning. Graham was looking forward to a long weekend of relaxation and recreation, fishing from his boat out in the Chesapeake Bay, as far as Graham was concerned, there was nowhere like the Bay. He had saved hard to buy the converted navel tender, it was almost fifty years old, built back in the nineteen-eighties, but was still sea worthy, and every July Graham took the MV Lauren down the coast to Florida.
His last job of the shift was to check the GSO satellite over the eastern Mediterranean. The image came up on the screen immediately and Graham noticed at once that the leading end of the fissure was no longer in his field of view. He adjusted the zoom and and discovered that the fissure had progressed another sixty-two miles since he had last checked it at just before seven that morning. The fissure was on the move again, or more precisely, had accelerated its rate of progress. Graham swung in his chair and tapped out a report, which he sent to his supervisor. That was it for this shift, and it was already ten minutes past two and time he wasn't there.