Gabriel Tall Chief, a Rosebud Lakota Indian and a teenage Cerebral Palsy patient, fights his last battle with his degenerative disease while concocting a way to communicate his trapped inner thoughts and even his unique vision. Nobody on the nursing staff really knows why he has to be read the books he demands--incomprehensible books to their estimation, all about "auras" or "body frequencies," and "nano technology," and equally strange things. Before he dies Gabriel tries to warn everybody around him and the world of a coming fatal convergence with something more deadly than CP. Can they comprehend his warning? Who will take him seriously? Was he just playing a lot of hopeless mind games before the inevitable end?
The world spins on, and unexplained disasters pile up. A Japanese oceanographer sees the writing on a watery wall, as Kaiko, his expensive deepsea exploratory craft explodes between two depth-challenged, ocean temperature-monitoring ALACES after a sighting of a strange, red-glowing object. Meanwhile, space authorities grow alarmed at the possibility of convergence with debris from space and Hantsbo, a maverick astronomer, figures out a way to avoid Earth's imminent vaporization due to a rapidly approaching comet called Chiron the Centaur.
Unfortunately, all the penguins of Antarctica have to be sacrificed to save Earth. Hantsbo also meets with a V.I.P. from ancient Atlantis, the lost continent. This is one gambit too dangerous for him to manage, but at least he has gained entrance to the incredibly old but sophisticated technology of Atlantis for a very brief, tantalizing space of time--a plum the scientist in him could not resist even though he knew it would cost him his life.
Elsewhere, Canada, as expected, breaks up--agriculture cannot be sustained in the ever-lengthening cold season. Further afield, NASA's Mars mission goes well at first, until the changeable martian weather forces Kipp St. Kitts Mina to sail beyond the safe, planned sites to a landing on the flanks of Olympus Mons, the biggest volcano in the Solar System. It was there on the edge of the monster volcano he made sightings he could not safely relay back to mission control. Further unauthorized and highly risky exploration on his own revealed evidence of an underground city and spaceport! The Atlanteans again? But when he returned to Earth, Kipp, after debriefing, was forced into early retirement in a guarded condo somewhere in the wilds of New Jersey. So much for space exploration and expanding the range of human knowledge of the Universe! Discovering new worlds, as Kipp found, was NOT at all what NASA was about.
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