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...