The observatory photographed the sky on glass plates for a century, and the plates are in an archive, numbered, with a gap in the sequence where a year's worth was destroyed in a flood. Every morning there is a plate in the darkroom's drying rack. Glass, developed, the emulsion still tacky, showing a star field with last night's date scratched in the corner in the old style, and the number scratched beside it is the next missing number in the gap.
I am the archivist at an observatory with a plate collection, and the plate collection is a hundred years of the sky on glass, and it is one year short, and somebody is making it up.
The plates.
Photographic plates, glass, exposed at the telescope and developed in the darkroom, numbered in sequence, stored in the archive in wooden boxes. A hundred thousand of them. They are the observatory's treasure, because the sky on them is the sky as it was, and nothing else is.
There is a gap. A flood, in the sixties, in the basement, took one year's boxes, about three hundred plates, and the numbers on either side of the gap are on the shelf and the gap is a label that says, lost.
Every morning there is a plate in the darkroom.
The plate.
In the drying rack, which is a wooden rack over the sink, where plates stood to dry. Glass, the old size. Developed: a negative of a star field, the stars black on clear. The emulsion tacky, the way it is in the first hour out of the fixer. In the corner, scratched into the emulsion with a needle in the way the old observers did, a date and a number.
The date is last night's. The number is the next one in the gap.
The darkroom has no chemicals. The bottles are on the shelf, dry, and have been since the darkroom was last used in 1985. The telescope the plates were taken on has not had a plate holder on it since the same year, because the camera that replaced it is bolted where the holder went.
The star field.
I have measured the plates. That is what an archivist does with a plate. The field is the field the telescope would have photographed at the time on the date scratched in the corner, if it had been pointed where the original plates in that part of the sequence were pointed, which I know from the observing logs, which survived the flood because they were upstairs.
They are the missing plates. The same fields, in the same order, taken again, a night at a time, with last night's sky, which is the same sky, because the stars do not move in sixty years, except the ones that do, and those are on the new plates where they are now and not where they were then, which is how I know the plates are real.
What has been checked.
The darkroom, at midnight, by me, with the safelight on. The sink was dry. The rack was empty. At about one, the smell came. Developer, fixer, the smell of a darkroom working, sharp, and the sink, which was dry, had liquid in it, in the dishes, which were on the shelf and were in the sink, and a plate went into the first dish, from nothing, and was rocked, the way you rock a dish, by nothing, and went to the second, and the third, and came out, and was held up to the safelight, and I could see the star field on it, and it went into the rack, and the smell went, and the dishes were on the shelf, dry.
Who.
The flood was in the sixties and the plates lost were a year of one observer's work, and the observatory's history has him, a man who had spent that year on a survey of a part of the sky and had lost all of it, and had, the history says, begun the survey again, and had not finished it before he retired, and had died, the history says, still working on it at home from the logs.
He is finishing it. A plate a night. In a darkroom with no chemicals, from a telescope with no plate holder, and the numbers are the numbers, and in about three hundred nights the gap will be closed.
What is done about it.
The plates are real and they are in the archive and the archive's catalogue has them as, recovered, with a note that says, provenance under investigation, which the funding body has read and not queried, because nobody queries an archive.
What I do.
I keep the plates.
A plate that comes out of the fixer is washed, dried, sleeved, labelled and boxed. The observer did the first three. The archivist did the rest. He has been doing the first three every night for a year and nobody has done the rest, and the plates have been sitting in the rack until I come in at eight.
So I come in at two. I take the plate from the rack, when it is dry, and I sleeve it, in the acid free paper, and I label it, with the number he has scratched, and I put it in the box, in the gap, in its place, and the gap closes by one, and I write it in the accession book, and in the column for who took the plate I write his name, and in the column for who archived it I write mine.
He has started leaving me a note. On the bench, in pencil, on a scrap of the old plate paper, one a night, since I started doing the boxing, and it is the plate number and the field and a remark about the seeing, which is what an observer left for the archivist in the days when they were two people, and the last one said, nearly there, and the gap is forty plates, and I am going to be in the darkroom at two for the last one, because somebody should be.