The Spaceship Next Door (3 page)

“
W
as
that Annie Collins you were sitting with?”

This was the first thing Brigadier General Morris had to say to Ed, as soon as they were in the back of the car, at which point Ed began to wonder if he was losing his mind or if everyone else in this town had lost theirs and he was only catching up.

“That’s what she said her name was. Do you know her?”

“I know
of
her. We’ve never been introduced. You didn’t tell her anything, did you?”

Ed’s security clearance was actually higher than the general’s, so he wasn’t sure what to make of the question. Surely the man understood that
not
revealing classified information to a sixteen year old on his first morning in town was an expectation for someone with his permissions.

“Of course I didn’t.”

“No offense intended, son. She has a knack, that one.”

“Does she.”

“You spent any time in a war zone, Mr. Somerville?”

The general had a gosh-howdy sort of cadence, but it hid a shrewdness.

“Some might say I’m doing that right now, general.”

He laughed. “Sure, and you might be one of those people. I’ve read your papers. I mean a live ammo war zone. Well I’ll tell you. Every occupied village, town, and neighborhood has an Annie Collins. If you want to succeed at whatever it is you’re planning, you want to find that person.”

“To… to shoot them?”

“No, no, they’re too important. Besides, if you shoot ‘em someone’ll take their place. No, to get them on your side. My point, we know all about Annie Collins. We leave her be, and maybe someday we’ll need her help for something. So what did she know?”

Ed remained convinced either he or everyone around him was going mad.

“She knew I was going to see the ship.”

The army man nodded slowly.

“I guess that’s okay.”

“I didn’t tell her that.”

“Never said you did, son.”

The SUV was taking them down Main, a doublewide road with the kind of retail variety that only came from organic growth over time. It had the sort of homey, old-next-to-new-next-to-old series of façades that most open-air shopping malls had been trying to replicate for years without success.

Maybe the most interesting thing about how the spaceship impacted the local economy and industry of Sorrow Falls was that it had had almost none. One of the most consequential events in history happened right up the road, and that event brought in a lot of money, yet more than half of the real estate of Sorrow Falls Main Street looked the same, and by all accounts
was
the same. Lots of owner-occupied shops (residences above the storefront were very popular in these parts) with the only difference being most of these owners now had a big vacation house to head off to when they wanted.

The sudden influx of cash to the local economy did have consequences, though, most obviously in the half of Main that flipped: it now had a Denny’s and a McDonalds and a Marriott and a lot of other things that made no sense in most mill town communities. Likewise, a fair number of the original witnesses didn’t even live in town any more, thanks to the money they made telling their stories and the dearth of large estates in the immediate vicinity. If Ed wanted to interview the sheriff from that night, he’d have to travel to Nantucket, for example.

But Sorrow Falls still felt and looked an awful lot like the Sorrow Falls of old, according to just about everyone. It was Ed’s first time in town, but he’d been studying the place from afar for three years.

In this, he was almost completely alone. The others focused on the ship, and he did too, but he considered the town a part of the whole. Even now, seeing in person how normal it all was, he was sure there was something
wrong
somehow with this town.

It would have made for an interesting story angle, if he were actually a reporter.

I have to get better at pretending to be one,
he thought.

If there was one thing he learned from his exchange with Annie, it was that Sorrow Falls town had a lot of media savvy people, and those people knew how real reporters acted, which was more than Ed could say. He was definitely going to have to work on his cover if he was going to get any answers.

A
lot
more had changed outside the town line than inside. The first time Ed really appreciated this was when he drove into town, because crossing the river to Main felt like entering a different Disney World kingdom—which only reinforced the notion that the homey-ness of Sorrow Falls was being maintained artificially somehow. In contrast, the border towns saw franchising as the only way to capitalize economically on the random good fortune of their neighbor, and so the number of hotels and motels and chain restaurants and souvenir shops and so on increased almost exponentially the further one got from downtown Sorrow Falls.

Of course, beyond
that
was the rest of the world, which suffered a global nervous breakdown shortly after the President’s instantly famous “We Are Not Alone” speech, and had calmed down only a little bit since.

The first outward manifestation of collective insanity was the spate of mass suicides. These quickly became so routine that they stopped being newsworthy after a few months. It turned out there were an awful lot of people who—individually and in groups—decided the world was either ending or already had, and wanted to beat the rush to the afterworld. There was also a significant increase in religiously motivated terrorist acts. Ed never really understood the connection to those and the ship, but nobody else seemed to either. And of course there were riots, which happened all over the place, with the bigger ones in such disparate locales as New Delhi, Perth, and Cincinnati.

A lot had been written about that year, some of it good, most of it pop psychology of the worst sort. All the analyses worked with the same thesis: the modern psyche was more fragile than anyone imagined, and all it took to reveal that was an alien ship that didn’t even do anything. Mostly, they proved only that the best history was the kind written long after the fact.

Three years later, there was still a higher-than-average suicide rate internationally, and one or two major religions continued to cope poorly—
do aliens have souls
was becoming a large enough topic of dispute to cause a philosophical schism in Christianity, and was the basis of two new major cults—but overall there was no longer the sense that the entire planet was resting on the edge of a cliff.

Ed thought that was probably healthy. He also thought it was a little soon to stop worrying about the ship.

M
ain Street
did
sort
of sit on the edge of a cliff, if one looked at it from a purely geographic perspective. The SUV—in a slow crawl down the street thanks in part to a traffic light every fifty feet—came to just past the halfway point, where southern edge of the gigantic Hollis Paper Mill could be seen on the left.

Viewing the mill from Main meant looking directly at the top floor of the building and the base of one of five smokestacks. This was because everything on the Eastern side of Main was built on a steep downhill, which was part of the Connecticut River valley. The drop was more than seventy-five feet before it hit water.

The mill was built to jut out over the river, supported by great wooden pylons that looked structurally suspect in every picture Ed saw of the place. He expected to read one day about the building being swallowed up whole by the rushing water, with follow-up stories declaring aliens had destroyed the mill, and not gravity and fluid dynamics.

Falling into the river would be bad for a lot of reasons, as the building wouldn’t last very long. About a half mile from the mill, downstream, was a waterfall that was also called Sorrow Falls. (According to one version of the town’s history, the town was named after the waterfall. The other version involved the word “falls” as a verb, and was more interesting.) Ed wasn’t sure exactly how steep that drop was, but it was steep enough to wreck a canoe.

There were four blocks of neighborhood between Main and the mill. Not so long ago, each one of those blocks held low rent row housing for employees of both the mill and the local retail shops. Since the ship landed many of those buildings had either been taken down and replaced by prettier versions of the same thing or renovated with the same approximate goal in mind: capitalize on a burgeoning local interest. This ended up being wishful thinking. About half of the world expected the ship to destroy all life on Earth at any given second, and nobody possessed of that opinion was interested in moving closer to said object. The other half of the world was mostly curious, but the number of that half who could see themselves living next to it turned out to be smaller than the number of available condos in town. As a consequence, the property values dropped—or more precisely failed to rise—and soon the owners of those buildings were renting the spaces to the same families they’d been trying to evict, and for about the same monthly charge.

Basically, everyone ended up with a Jacuzzi and marble kitchen counters thanks to the spaceship and some unwise speculation.

“Here’s all we have on the second anomaly,” General Morris said. In his hand was a tightly packed manila folder. “I’m told you haven’t seen it yet. We’ve got an office set aside for you at the base, so you don’t leave this lying.”

Morris was speaking of the hotel room Ed rented, because a reporter wouldn’t stay at the army base. Reporters also didn’t have classified folders lying around for maids to find.

“Thank you, I’ll look at it later,” Ed said. He slid the packet into his messenger bag. “I’d like to see it for myself first.”

They reached an Army checkpoint. This was another reason traffic on Main moved at a perpetual slow crawl: there were checkpoints every half mile from the northern bridge into town on the far end of Main, up Patience and onto Spaceship Road, all the way to the base. At no time had they been anything other than open and allowing traffic to pass unobstructed through town. (Except, of course, for passage through the fence to see the ship, and passage onto the army base.) However, they were ominous-looking, toll-both-like structures staffed by armed soldiers whose existence demanded that cars slow for them.

The checkpoints were reminders of the extremely peculiar legal nature of the town of Sorrow Falls as compared to every other American municipality in the history of the country.

In a decision that was no less controversial after nearly three years, Congress—with the backing and signature of the president—suspended the Posse Comitatus Act as it applied specifically to the town surrounding the spaceship. The groundwork for the modification was actually laid a few years earlier in response to concerns about large-scale terrorist acts on domestic soil. Essentially, “acts of invasion from a non-terrestrial source” were lumped in with terrorism, which in turn shaped the nature of the government’s response: from that point forward it was assumed that the aliens were hostile. A not-insignificant number of people had issue with that assumption, and for every year in which nothing continued to happen, their voices got louder.

Ed wasn’t one of those voices. His first official recommendation as an employee of the federal government was the complete evacuation of the area, and this remained—in his opinion—the correct choice, albeit the least politically savvy one.

The local suspension of Posse Comitatus only legalized something that had already happened in Sorrow Falls, more or less the minute enough people were convinced that this thing was real: the army rolling into town and taking over.

In hindsight, this went pretty well, which was to say it could have gone disastrously wrong and it didn’t. There were protests—some from residents, many more from local non-residents, and many more still from non-local non-residents a great distance away and expressed only on Internet pages—but the overall sentiment, from local law enforcement up to the town council and the governor of the state was:
here, you deal with this, we don’t know how to
.

The potential for an adversarial relationship was, essentially, mitigated by the presence of a common enemy. And since the enemy was silent and apparently peaceful, the result was sort of the best of all possible worlds. The locals and the soldiers both agreed to act like members of the human race together.

It helped that the army didn’t bow to what ended up being significant pressure to take more extreme actions. Few realized that in the first few months all it would have taken was a stray rock thrown at the head of someone drawing a government salary for the entire town to end up evacuated. (An evacuation that would have followed a plan drafted by Ed, since he was the one who wanted to do it in the first place.) The rock never got thrown, though, and the military was able to push back and avoid the P.R. nightmare that would come from seizing twenty square miles of public and private land and displacing an entire community.

In the end, the army claimed only two plots: a half-acre perimeter around the ship (which was on public soil), and three acres a mile up the road. This was purchased rather than claimed, from landowners who otherwise would never have made anything like the kind of money the government was throwing around.

So everyone got along really well, and pretended to ignore the fact that the United States Army was the actual law in this prototypically sleepy Massachusetts town. The town council still functioned as one would expect in a democratically structured civic arrangement, and private property was still treated as private property by all the people making gobs of money off owning land there, but the reality was that if the Army decided to disband the council, seize all the businesses on Main Street, and lock up everyone, legally they could do it.

They just hadn’t.

Past the checkpoint, the SUV reached the end of Main: east would have taken them to another bridge over the Connecticut River, while west sent them uphill and toward the ship. This was the effective termination point of ‘downtown’ Sorrow Falls, a Y junction that was a favorite for protestors. Every car reaching that point had to commit to a slow turn in one direction or another, which gave them plenty of time to read a poorly spelled sign or two.