In the days of Noah, people were eating and drinking, marrying, and generally going about their daily lives, unaware of the coming disaster. So it is in this novel. A giant asteroid is coming so close to the earth that astronomers all over the world are concerned it will hit. And the worst of it is that no one knows exactly where. The novel is fiction, but the scientific data regarding asteroids and the possibility of a near miss or collision is, unfortunately, not.