previous night from my mind, I had to see if the seismograph worked. Kepler twisted around my feet, purring for attention, or maybe just expressing his own eagerness to see the results.
And there they were, the results of my experiment. The seismograph functioned perfectly. What’s more, when I opened my laptop and pulled up OSU’s seismography data, I saw that the explosion had registered there too.
I’d succeeded. Sure, there had been more trouble than expected, but isn’t trouble worthwhile when it’s in the name of science? Shouldn’t the first priority always be the pursuit of information, of discovering new and exciting things about the world?
The thought gave me pause. I reached down and scratched Kepler’s head while I sorted out what was bothering me.
Yes, discovery should come first.
But I hadn’t actually discovered anything, had I? I’d only duplicated a machine whose earliest prototype came from 132 AD. Nor would I stumble onto new information with my seismograph. I’d contributed nothing to the world.
I was hit with a wave of melancholy. The feeling of not being quite enough. I wanted to invent something of my own. Discover something special, accomplish something no one had before. I wanted to contribute to science in a meaningful way.
Truth be told, I wanted glory.
My phone dinged with a text message, and my musings screeched to a halt.
IH: come up to the house
I ignored him. A moment later:
IH: hurry
I decided to comply only because it was getting chilly and I hadn’t set up the space heater for the season. (My lab was kept running with a generator, so it had electricity, but heating and cooling options were limited.) Ishmael was the sort of person who’d interrupt important work to show you a YouTube video of a sloth playing guitar, or to see if you agreed that his fried egg was in the exact shape of Texas, so my expectations were low.
I crossed the field and approached the farmhouse from the back. In the kitchen, Ishmael sat at the table with a man who looked vaguely familiar. He was in his midtwenties, tall and lanky, wearing an ill-fitting suit. The jacket was too wide for his narrow shoulders and the cuffs hung over his wrists. While I wasn’t immensely knowledgeable about fashion, I did know wearing a suit that wasn’t properly tailored looked less professional than not wearing a suit at all.
The suit-wearer had a notepad and pen on the table in front of him.
“Hello,” I said cautiously.
He leapt to his feet, grinned, and extended his hand. “You must be Gideon. Adam Frykowski.”
As we shook—him too eagerly, I might add—I searched my brain until his name connected.
“You work for the Lansburg Daily Press,” I said.
Frykowski’s face lit up. Just another of us poor human souls looking for recognition, for someone to acknowledge that they exist.
“I do!”
“You edit the obituaries,” I continued. (The previous year I’d been fleetingly obsessed with population and spent hours comparing births versus deaths in Lansburg.)
Frykowski’s smile sagged. “Well, that’s my main assignment, but I get others. Sometimes.”
“Sit down, Gideon,” Ishmael said from the table, businesslike. “Mr. Frykowski wants to discuss last night.”
I sat, but raised my eyebrows. “I don’t recall anyone dying in the explosion.”
Frykowski joined us at the table, a fervent light in his eyes. “But there was an explosion?”
“Where are our parents?” I asked Ishmael.
“Mom’s still working, and Dad took Maggie shopping for new cleats.”
“Should we wait for them?”
“It’s fine, Gideon,” Ishmael assured me. “He only has a few questions.”
Clearly, Ishmael would talk to whomever he wanted no matter how I tried to contain the story. Better to be present during it so I’d at least know what tales he was telling.
“Make it quick,” I said.
And the song and dance began again. Ishmael became animated. He told the greatly exaggerated story of how we were innocently minding our own business when something came from the sky and exploded in our field.
“And at first you suspected it was a meteor?” Frykowski asked.
“Meteoroid,” I offered.
But what did he mean by at first?
“Did you actually see the meteoroid?”
Ishmael hesitated, probably trying to sort through the various versions of the story he’d told all day. “No,” he finally admitted.
“You saw nothing until after the impact.”
Ishmael nodded.
“Yet you’re sure it was a meteor?”
Meteoroid. But I kept my mouth shut.
“Well,” Ishmael said, “we kinda assumed.”
“You assumed, but you don’t have any evidence that a meteor hit the ground, is that correct?” Frykowski pressed.
I took a long look at him, a tight, anxious feeling spreading through my chest.