Sunward Passage

By Harold McAlister

Walker Ransom, a fortyish astronomer who lost his young wife in a car accident while still in graduate school, teaches at a small college in western North Carolina and lives with his Airedale terrier in a cabin on Clickrattle Creek. A specialist in the study of comets, he is plucked off the mountainous summit of Kitt Peak Observatory in southwest Arizona in the middle of a miserably unsuccessful observing run and taken under protective custody by uniformed troops to Davis Monthan Air Force Base in Tucson. He learns that an old colleague of his in the former East Germany, Joachim Schmidtler, has been found under the red light of a darkroom nearly afloat in a black pool of his own blood. Schmidtler's dying words to his wife caution her to protect the "secret library" and warn that only one astronomer - Walker Ransom - can now "determine the elements."Ransom embarks on a two-week chase against time to decipher Schmidtler's cryptic words only to come full circle back to his own scientific quest. With the assistance of Kitt Peak staffers Alyssa Kennedy and Paul Collins and pseudo-cowboy Duke Wayne, Ransom's team sniffs out leads in Germany that eventually take them to the Big Island of Hawaii where all the pieces of the puzzle come together under potentially apocalyptic circumstances."The sky had become a blizzard of shooting stars. Nothing like this had ever been recorded in human history. He knew their number could build to the ultimate crescendo of the comet striking the Earth. At this rate, it might happen in minutes. But, again, it might not. He would not resign himself to death by comet. He had to do something about the men now descending the cliff, whose probability of inflicting death was 100%. The comet might kill a good fraction of the Earth's population, but these bastards would with absolute certainty kill the four of them!"Sunward Passage is a scientific thriller that deals with the international politics, ethics, and fanatical religious aspects surrounding the potential civilization-altering impact by an astronomical body with the Earth. The author is Regents' Professor Emeritus of Astronomy at Georgia State University where he founded and directed until 2015 the Center for High Angular Resolutions Astronomy, which operates the world's highest resolution telescope - the CHARA Array - on Mount Wilson, California. McAlister also served as director of historic Mount Wilson Observatory during 2002 to 2014. He is the author of Diary of a Fire, which recalls the weeks in August and September 2009 during which Mount Wilson was threatened by the Station Fire in the Angeles National Forest.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1522007814
• ISBN13: 9781522007814
• Release Date: July 2018
• Publisher: Independently published
• Length: 329 Pages
• Weight: 0.99 lbs.
• Dimensions: 8.0" x 0.8" x 5.3"