Einige transkribierte Auszüge aus einer BBC-Radio-Adaptation (2014) von Lavinia Greenlaws Kurzgeschichte 'We Are Watching Something Terrible Happening.' Die Geschichte wurde teilweise durch den Meteoritenfall von Tissint im Jahr 2011 inspiriert.
"I returned to work at the Museum and he complained of my long hours. It bothered him that my days were not easy to explain. [...] 'You take a peculiar pleasure in labelling and locking things away and in extracting their secrets. We are not all chunks of rock and balls of dust.' He knew what it meant to hold such things in your hands but now he refused to understand.[...]
There are many things contained in locked boxes, placed in locked cupboards, inside locked rooms. Gold, plutonium, diamonds, ashes, things that fix the making and unmaking of our lives.
It is objects that make sense, not the answer to the question, but the ring on the finger, the frame around the picture, the key to the lock, the door to the room. When my husband asked me what I did all day that made me so silent when I came home this is what I said. 'The boxes that come to me contain parts of other worlds. I hold a meteorite in my hands and have the same feeling I had lying on the beach and measuring everything I felt against the distance between Earth and Mars. Space opens up around me. Time too. It makes me think about what really matters.'
'What do you mean? 'What really matters.'', he said. 'Oh, what matters is what lies beyond us' and he smiled in the way that I chose not to understand.
The box I'm about to open contains a sample unlike anything else I've been given to work on before. Of the tens of thousands of meteorites that have landed on earth only 60 or so have been from Mars and only 5 of those have been witnessed. This is a piece of one of them. It was reported by nomads in the Tata region of Morocco last July. They described the fireball. At first yellow and then green. There were two great booms and a ball appeared to burst in two. We have a record of their statements. One remembered saying 'It is beautiful', another that 'we are watching something terrible happening'.
The story of this meteorite began on Mars with a collision or crash. Out there the scale of things is different. Think of a god throwing a stone in the air and that stone rising and falling over hundreds of millions of miles and 60 million years. In the vacuum of space it would neither rise nor fall but would just keep moving, frozen in its journey until it collided with something else or got caught up, as this one did, in the gravitational pull of another planet. Then it started a fall so fast it caught fire. The nomads were watching the end. So yes, it was terrible! [...]
And then I come to work, open a box and tell myself that what I am about to do is hold another world in my hands. I put on my gloves and lift out this lump of rock. It weighs about as much as a couple of bags of sugar. Its charred surface records how it burst into flame when falling at a speed at such odds with the thickness of our atmosphere that it scraped and ignited like a struck match. It contains an unusual amount of glass, probably formed in the explosion that propelled it into space and this glass may contain pockets of atmosphere which
may contain the compounds that are evidence of life. Life persists. If life is found, it will be life that is long gone, of a kind I can't envisage and in a place I'll never go. Does that make my work pointless, desperate? My husband started to make things plain and still I wouldn't look at what he was trying to show me. [...] 'I'm here, he said, 'here on earth.' I didn't respond.
As soon as the scene of the impact was located the debris was being collected. The locals arrived first, then the dealers, then the scientists. All is business-like and intent as those who work their way through a battlefield, taking boots and guns and wedding rings. The value lies in provenance and documentation. Proof of its strangeness is what we're after. Some things like some people are made valuable by the fact that they aren't known. [...]
We will run the test as quickly as possible and then the meteorite will be sealed behind glass. I go back to my empty house and I watch more television, listen to more radio. Space will open up around me. This is life down here on the turning Earth. Here where other worlds fall. Where fire rains down. And still we walk out into the sky as if one thing will not lead to another. As if we're not here at all but out there watching something terrible happening. From an untouchable distance as if we will not be drawn in."
Greenlaws Gedanken zu ihrer Kurzgeschichte können
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