The Spaceship Next Door (11 page)

“It’s a signal,” Oona said. “We don’t know what it means.”

“Maybe it means the ship has grown a pair of lungs,” Ed said.

“It’s not
actual
breathing, you dummy. It’s the
sound
of breathing.”

“Fine, it’s a signal. Who’s it for?”

“Well, we don’t know that either, do we?”

“
W
hat was that
?” Annie asked afterwards.

Ed was supposed to have a number of interview-like questions for Oona and Laura, to at least preserve the idea that he was doing a piece of journalism and not looking for a surreptitious way to question an entire town. Annie was becoming less comfortable with not being told things.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“So many things. You didn’t tell me about the infrared, you didn’t tell me you were looking for something that happened six weeks ago, and those two no longer think you’re writing anything as far as I can tell.”

“I’m sorry, I went a little off script. But you said nobody was going to believe me anyway.”

“Right, but I have to pretend I do, and not look like a moron at the same time.”

“We don’t have a lot of time.”

“What’s
that
supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m on deadline, that’s all it means.”

“That’s not what it sounded like.”

“Look, I don’t know what to think. Either their sound equipment works correctly and the ship is now
breathing
, or it’s
not
working and they’re delusional. Or, they spoofed all of that.”

“They didn’t spoof any of it.”

“Then they know damn well I’m not a journalist, and a whole lot more.”

“Why do you say that?”

“They just showed us. If everyone was as curious about me as you said, well, they could have eavesdropped on my entire conversation.”

Annie thought about this.

“You talk about super top-secret stuff in the field?”

“Not really, no. Except for… mostly no.”

“All right, where were you standing when you
were
talking about super top-secret stuff?”

Ed looked across the road at the ship, same as it ever was.

“Behind it. We were behind it.”

“Then you’re fine. Like Laura said, that thing is sucking up all the sound.”

“Right. If their equipment does what they say, they didn’t hear me and the spaceship is breathing. Or, they might have heard me and the thing isn’t breathing. I don’t like either of those choices.”

T
wo weeks passed
, during which the most exciting thing to happen was that Annie got her first paycheck. It was a decent enough sum to leave her wondering how long she could prolong things. To that end, she did not have a willing partner in Edgar Somerville.

It was hard to tell sometimes if they were even on the same side. She spent most of her days facilitating his introduction to various individuals, and then listening for clues as to what he was really after. So far, he hadn’t given her enough to assemble anything like a complete picture. She had tantalizing bits, but that was all. It gave each day a modestly adversarial angle, like they were playing a bad game of chess with one another.

In a lot of ways, she was learning more as a consequence of whom he was asking to speak with than she was by what he was saying to the people she lined up. They spent the first week at the campers, but the second week was with a subset of the Sorrow Falls population that consisted of all persons who lived in the town when the ship landed and hadn’t left it since.

The questions he had for the trailer park collective centered mostly around
tell me your crazy and how you arrived at it
, but the stuff he had for the other group suggested he was after a completely different thing. For the camper denizens it was all about what happened in the past six weeks. For everyone else—tacitly
not
the people in the campers, who arrived well after the ship landed—it was questions about what had changed in the town, overall, in three years.

Annie knew he had his theory that the ship was manipulating people at a distance, but these weren’t just that kind of question. He was after something specific.

It would have been nice if he could just tell her everything, and it was obvious it bothered him that he couldn’t. But apparently granting top-secret clearance to a sixteen year old was a hassle.

The second-most exciting thing to happen in the two weeks was that Annie got a chance on more than one occasion to hang out at the military base.

T
he base was established
in a field originally owned by the Tarver family. Annie knew a couple of the Tarvers back before they sold the field and moved away. All she remembered about them was that they weren’t all that good at farming—they’d been at it for five generations by then—and didn’t much enjoy it. The spaceship was basically the best thing that could have happened for them. Last she heard they’d opened a string of boutique coffee shops in San Diego.

The Tarvers were pretty lucky, not only for owning land the government wanted, but for being happy to sell it. More than a couple of Sorrow Falls families were considerably less fortunate. Ed’s theory that the town was entirely too idyllic under the circumstances ignored the many times locals were briefed on eminent domain laws and the terms of the martial law agreement between the state and federal governments. Admittedly, it would have looked a whole lot worse if they’d actually evacuated the area like Edgar wanted to, but that didn’t mean everything in town was puppies and rainbows from day one.

Unlike where the ship came down—on hard, rocky ground that wasn’t being used for anything—the base was built on top of fallow farmland. The ground took in moisture well, grew things (weeds) with great aplomb, and didn’t offer the sort of bedrock support needed for large, temporary buildings on wheels. Those were the only kinds of structures at the base for the first year, lasting until someone decided everybody could exhale and expect the ship to spend a while not doing anything. Then they started putting up permanent buildings, with solid foundations. They also put up a taller and more imposing perimeter fence, and paved their auto yard. Most importantly, as far as Annie was concerned, they built a basketball court.

Annie was not, under all but a few circumstances, particularly girlish. This sort of hinged on her personal definition of the word, which relied heavily on how Beth behaved whenever someone attractive and theoretically age-appropriate was in the diner. It was only theoretically because Beth was both playing in a higher age bracket than Annie and because Beth liked men in a higher age bracket than she herself was. It was also higher than Annie was comfortable with. Beth would probably think Ed was too young for her.

Beth’s girlishness consisted of swooning, flirting, blushing, and gasping, and being just in general very Marilyn Monroe about everything. Annie wasn’t like that. She tended to adopt a sort of Katherine Hepburn-ishness on a day-to-day basis, and was straight-up Rosalind Russell when flirting, which was almost never.

(Beth wouldn’t have understood any of these references, except possibly the Marilyn one, which she probably would have liked. Annie didn’t have any friends who would have gotten them, actually, aside from Violet. Interestingly, Annie never watched movies with Violet aside from Vi’s favorite film,
The Wizard of Oz
, which they watched at least once a month together. Violet never explained why she found the movie so appealing, but since Annie never seemed to get bored of watching it with her, maybe there was no reason to explain.)

Annie made one exception to the girlishness rule, and that was the army compound’s basketball court in the summertime.

The court wasn’t exactly a secret, but it was right in the middle of the compound, which made it hard to see. What was known about it was that on certain days, men from the base would play basketball on the court, wearing camo pants and combat boots and hardly anything else. (Unstated and unknown was whether any of the women on the base partook as well. This may have been because there were hardly any women on the base, period. Annie wasn’t sure why this was so, but it was clearly so.)

For the population of teenage girls in Sorrow Falls—already surrounded by attractive, polite young men in uniform—the basketball court had obtained a kind of mythic status. And as Annie sat at a courtside bleacher in the late-August sun watching those polite young men lumber around under the hoop, she had to say that the mythos was entirely earned.

“So that’s all you’ve been doing?” Sam asked. He was sitting next to her, an appropriately chaste distance apart, while the game was going on. Like half the court, he wasn’t wearing a shirt, and seemed to think this wasn’t mind-numbingly distracting.

“Pretty much, yeah. Just going around town and asking the same questions to different people. What are they saying about him around here?”

“Ah, we don’t trade in rumors so much on the base.”

Annie laughed. “No, seriously.”

“Nobody knows who he really works for, but his credentials… Someone said his credentials gives him the authority to do some things to the general that would be illegal in most states, let’s just say. I’m cleaning that up for you.”

“I appreciate that. He told me he writes classified reports.”

“Yeah, and he probably does. Wonder what he’s going to write about us?”

“I don’t know.”

What she did know was Ed had a propensity for saying ominous things about
running out of time
, then refusing to say what would happen when they
ran
out of time. She didn’t share this with Sam because she didn’t want to talk about it. Hopefully, Ed was just worried about the start of the school year, because if he were counting down to the evacuation of Sorrow Falls, she’d rather not know it.

Plus, there was a basketball game to watch.

There was no apparent score-keeping going on. The game was three-on-three and it was only half-court, and nobody was trying all too hard, but that didn’t make it any less compelling.

“Why do they keep yelling
pickles
?” Annie asked. She’d heard it four times now, and kept trying to tie the word to a particular play being run or something, but it didn’t appear related to one.

“That’s his name,” Sam said.

“Someone out there is named Pickles?”

“Nickname. Hey, Pickles, come here and introduce yourself.”

The shortest guy on the court stepped away from the game and came over. He was replaced immediately by another soldier, just so the rest of them could keep playing.

“What’re you talkin’ about me for? Is it because I’m so pretty?”

“You know it is, soldier,” Sam said. “Corporal Dill Louboutin, this is Annie Collins.”

Louboutin gasped and clutched his heart.

“Not
the
Annie Collins! Why I do believe I have been instructed not to converse with you, young lady.”

Dill Louboutin had a drawl that reminded her of the villain from a half-dozen B-films in her mother’s collection. Oddly, this made the soldier before her seem a little more charming.

“Have you really?”

“Yes ma’am, we were notified that on occasion, you might find yourself among our company, and that we are to compost… did he say compost?”

“Comport,” Sam said. “Compost is something else.”

“That we are to comport ourselves as gentlemen at all times on account of your delicate age and temperament.”

Annie raised an eyebrow at Sam.

“He’s making this up,” she said. “Right?”

“Tell her the rest,” Sam said.

“Oh yes, and also to not engage you in conversation.”

“And why is that?”

“Something about devil or, seductress or… you know, along those general lines.”

“Because you know things and you find things out,” Sam said. “They don’t want anyone telling you something they shouldn’t.”

“You mean, like you do?”

“I’m hurt. That hurts me.”

“I’m guessing they don’t have a problem with all the dirt I get out of you. Or maybe you just don’t know any of the good stuff, like Pickles here does.”

“Please don’t call me that,” Dill said.

“You’re digging around the wrong shrub, he knows even less than I do,” Sam said.

“That is true, young lady. I in fact know just about nothing. Why
are
you here, anyway? See, I don’t even know that.”

“Ed’s in his top secret batcave. He’d rather I hang out here because I guess he’s just bathing in confidential files or something.”

Ed’s batcave was actually one of the few remaining temporary structures from the initial move-in. It was a steel-paneled eyesore that was towed in on a flatbed, now sinking slowly into the mud. The window faced the court, possibly so he could keep an eye on her while working with his decoder ring and invisible ink.

“Yes, but why you, exactly?”

“My girlish good looks, corporal. Of course. Also, because I know everyone and everything in town. I thought you’d been briefed already.”

“All right, I feel a test is in order.”

“Dill…” Sam said.

“No, go ahead, this should be fun,” Annie said. “Give me your best, Pickles.”

Dill looked over her shoulder.

“Right now I am looking past the fence at some little twerp who stands on his porch every damn day watching us. What’s his name?”

She laughed. “I don’t even need to turn around. That’s Dougie. I’ve known him most of my life. You guys must be bored if you care that much about him, he just wants to grow up and join the army like any red-blooded American boy.”

“Aww, come on, I don’t even have a way to check if you’re right.”

“Should have thought of that sooner,” Annie said.

Her cell phone vibrated with a new message. She snuck a peek at it.

“Hey, guys, I gotta go.”

E
d spent
a lot of time on a lot of army bases, and for some reason had it in his head that the Sorrow Falls base would be different in some way from the others. That it felt exactly the same despite a fundamentally different mandate just made his head hurt.

The army didn’t know exactly what to do with the soldiers. They had daily drills, and an obstacle course, and important duties both public and private. (Publicly, for instance, they guarded the ship and manned the checkpoints on the roads. Privately, they had ten lightly manned outposts ringing the town, which hardly anyone knew about.) What they didn’t have—or know how to provide—was training for the thing that brought them there.

It was true nobody had any idea what to expect on the day the spaceship finally executed whatever directive it was there to complete, so having drills along the lines of “how to reload a laser gun” or “what to do if there’s an alien attached to your face” didn’t make a lot of sense. At the same time, Ed could think of no better example of the axiom: generals are always fighting the last war.

One of the things Ed hoped to accomplish in his visit was to give everyone an idea of what to expect, and then maybe the base outside his window would be full of people knowing what to do with their time aside from pickup games of basketball.

He turned back to the desk, which was large—thankfully—and overfull of documentation. Between the two weeks of notes from the interviews, the documents provided when he arrived, and everything he brought with him, there was a decent amount of material. Granted, if he wished he could stack all of it together and form only a very small pile, but that was somewhat contrary to his method.

The material was arranged in something approximating a collage. It was the only effective method he’d ever found when collecting disparate bits of information that had to be arranged in a comprehensive whole.

It was failing to arrange, however.

Nothing connected. He had the event of eight weeks past sitting next to the notes from the interview with Laura and Oona, even though Ed put almost no weight on the latter and a great deal on the former. Everything else sat in an unassociated pile, an archipelago of independent territories associated only by virtue of existing on the same desktop. There was the folder holding photographs of the handprint on the outside of the ship, alone on the corner of the desk. It should have been associated in some way with at least one of the resident interviews he’d conducted, but it wasn’t.

There were all the rooftop trailer people, but none of their theories crossed, or went anywhere near anything else. They also contradicted one another and sometimes contradicted themselves. He had little post-it notes attached to each file, summarizing the contents: zombie, hybridization, Matrix, David Bowie, and so on. In cases where there was no theory, he wrote the specialty of the interviewee. When that didn’t work, he just wrote their first name and ‘???’ and left it at that.