The meteor camera is a fisheye on the roof that records the whole sky all night, and it is one of a network, so a meteor seen by two cameras can be triangulated and its fall worked out. Ours records a fireball every night at twelve past midnight. Bright, slow, fragmenting, on a track that ends over a field ten miles away. No other camera in the network sees it. And the field has a stone in it, in a ring of iron railings, with a date.
I am the meteor network coordinator at a university observatory, which is a grand name for the person who looks at the fisheye pictures, and our camera sees something the network does not.
The camera.
A fisheye lens pointed straight up, recording video all night, with software that triggers on anything moving. It is one of forty in the network, and when two cameras see the same meteor the software triangulates the path, and sometimes a path ends on the ground, and sometimes people go and find it.
Ours triggers at twelve past midnight every night.
The fireball.
Bright. Brighter than anything else we record. Slow, for a meteor, which means it came in at a low angle. It fragments: the video shows the head breaking into three and the three going on together and going out, one by one, low in the sky, over the same part of the horizon.
I have worked out the track from our camera alone, which you are not supposed to be able to do, by assuming a height, and it ends over a field ten miles away, every night, the same field.
No other camera sees it. The two nearest, which between them cover every part of the sky ours does, see nothing at twelve past midnight. The fireball is on our camera and in no other sky.
What has been checked.
The camera, replaced. The fireball is on the new one.
The sky, at twelve past midnight, by me, on the roof, with my own eyes. There was nothing. The camera triggered beside me and recorded a fireball across the sky above me and I was looking at the sky above me and there was nothing in it, and I have done that eleven times and it is the loneliest thing I have done in this job.
The field. I drove there. It is a field. In the middle of it, in the grass, a ring of iron railings, old, rusted, about three metres across, and inside the railings a stone, a plain one, and on the stone a date, 1912, and nothing else. The farmer, when I found him, said his grandfather had put the railings up, and that the stone had come down there, and that the family did not plough inside the railings and never had, and that nobody had ever told him why there was a date on it and no name.
The date.
1912. The observatory has a record of it. A fireball, seen across the county, a fall, a search, and a stone recovered from a field, by the observatory's director of the time, who had gone out with a cart, and the stone had been brought here, to this building, and catalogued, and put in a case, and the case is in the basement, and the stone is in it, and I have held it, and it is a meteorite, and it is small, and it is cold.
And the record has a second paragraph, which says that a farm boy had been in the field when it came down, and had been the one who found the stone, and had been, the record says in the language of 1912, much affected, and had taken to the bed, and the record does not say what happened after, and the farmer's family put up railings round a stone that was not the stone, because the stone was here, and I have started to think the railings were never about the stone.
He is watching it come down. Every night at twelve past midnight, from the field, and our camera sees what he sees, because our camera is where the director stood when he looked at the sky that night and decided to take the cart.
What is done about it.
The nightly trigger is on the network's log as a single station event, unconfirmed, which is the category for noise, and the network's coordinator, who is a friend, has asked me to fix my camera, and I have sent him the video, and he has asked me not to send him any more.
What I do.
I coordinate the network.
A fall that is seen and not recovered is the worst kind. Somebody saw it come down and nobody went. That did not happen in 1912, the director went, but the boy who found it was left in a field with railings round where it landed for the rest of his life and nobody ever told him where the stone had gone.
So I took it back. Not for good. The stone is the observatory's. But I took it out of the case and I drove it to the field at midnight and I climbed the railings and I put it on the plain stone with the date, and I stood back, and at twelve past midnight the camera on the roof ten miles away triggered, and I was in the field, and I saw nothing in the sky, and I felt it. The ground. A thump, through my boots, from inside the railings, from the place the stone was, the thump a small heavy thing makes landing in a field, and the grass inside the railings was flattened in a circle round the plain stone, and the meteorite was on it, cold, where I had put it, and somebody in the field said, very quietly, in a boy's voice, there it is.
I took it home to the case. The camera still triggers. But the track has changed. It is shorter, on the video, since that night, and it ends higher, as if whatever is being seen is going out before it reaches the ground, and I think that is a boy in a field who has been shown where the stone went, and is watching the sky now for the light and not the landing, and I have put a note in the catalogue entry for the stone that says, returned to the fall site, one night, and the curator has initialled it without asking.