The Spaceship Next Door (4 page)

Ed was pretty sure the protestors were mostly from out of state, and mostly positive he didn’t understand what made them do this sort of thing. The signs represented a startling array of opinions: aliens are bad and must be nuked; aliens are good and must be loved; the army is bad and the government is lying; the ship is a hoax; and Jesus died for our sins.

Morris noted Ed’s attention.

“I hear it used to be a whole lot worse,” he said. “More bodies, more anarchy. These folks are really pretty polite. Even the ones who think a man in a uniform is… well, pick your nightmare scenario. We’re either incompetent actors or masterful orchestrators of a super conspiracy hoax.”

“And in league with Satan, according to that last one.”

“Oh yes. Well, that’s true, of course.”

Ed laughed.

“You’ve only been here a few months, isn’t that right, general?”

“Four months. Long enough to get my bearings, figure out who’s who, not much else. Then all this happened.”

All this
was why Ed was there.

“Do you like it?”

“Sure. High-profile assignment with nobody shooting at me? Other than the winters—which I hear can get bad—it’s about the perfect assignment. I don’t even need to learn a new language or adjust to a weird cuisine.”

“As long as nothing changes about the ship.”

“You mean nothing else. Well sure. But front row for the end of the world’s a pretty good show too.”

I
t was
another twenty minutes of driving to get from the edge of Main to the ship. About half of that twenty was spent in the slow crawl directly before the ship.

Ed had to lean over the general to get a decent look at the campers on the right.

“There used to be more of them,” Ed said.

“There was more of everybody. That whole field used to be three-deep and looking like a hippie festival. I’ve seen pictures, it looked like the only thing missing was a stage.”

From Ed’s perspective, there
was
a stage. It was the obsidian black object on the other side of the fence. There would have been no fence in the first couple of months, nothing but armed men to keep someone from rushing the stage while the band was still setting up. It was a miracle nobody was shot trying to do that.

“Mostly all we have left over there is the crackpots,” Morris said. “Real nice, for the most part.”

When the band doesn’t play music, people go home,
Ed thought.
Except for the ones expecting to hear the most important song in history
.

The car cut a left turn through the inbound traffic, and after a show of identification, the gate was opened. Ed snuck a look over his shoulder at the trailer people, noting the excitement of activity his arrival signaled.

“Not many people go through here, I take it.”

“Not many. We make do with passive detectors set within the perimeter and mostly keep out otherwise. I’ve only been inside once myself, before today. Nobody wants to catch the space flu.”

Ed laughed.

“Is that what they’re calling it?”

“I like it better than space cancer,” Morris said. “I’ve lost folks to cancer. Doesn’t seem right to use that word. But soldiers aren’t an imaginative bunch.”

“I guess being succinct is more important than being accurate.”

They stopped the car and climbed out. Ed looked through the fence, and saw the bustle of activity atop the trailer roof system had only gotten worse. Binoculars and telescopes were being pointed at him, and now none of the people over there were likely to have an unguarded conversation with Edgar Somerville, reporter.

But he was facing the wrong direction. The most extraordinary object in history was only about thirty paces away.

“So here we are,” Morris said.

“It’s smaller than I thought it would be.”

“I think everybody says that.”

Everybody hasn’t been studying it for three years
, he thought.

“How many people can that even really hold?”

“People? Maybe one or two. But aliens? Depends on how big they are, doesn’t it?”

The ship was completely enclosed by the perimeter fence, which Ed began to follow. The grass was springy with patches of mud from a recent rain. Every effort to avoid the mud involved taking a step closer to the ship, which he was reluctant to do.

Morris trailed behind. The driver of the car stayed in the car, and looked entirely content to remain there.

“It’s not radioactive?” he asked. He knew perfectly well that it was not, but asked anyway.

“Nope. One of the sensors will tell us if one day it changes its mind and, I don’t know, develops a case of radiation. Not sure how it would work. But we’ve got stuff checking for it. You know how that goes.”

“I do, yes.”

There were dozens of electronic gadgets in the field around the ship, powered by solar panels and battery packs. They transmitted information wirelessly to a receiver in a tiny black box on the other side of the fence. From there the information was sent via secure landline to the base, and from there it was shared with a small collection of scientists around the world on a heavily encrypted site that was an example of the finest application of online security in the history of computing.

According to the publicly distributed quarterly reports from the committee responsible for monitoring these sensors, there was nothing happening. This was, in fact, the entirety of the last five reports:
Nothing to report
. It was perhaps the most to-the-point document ever submitted by a government-sponsored committee in the history of government-sponsored committees, and so nobody believed it.

A whole lot of people thought the scientists were hiding something important, and not just the people who made it their life’s work to stand outside the compound and point equipment at the anomaly from the roof of a camper. For example, there were people who knew about the space flu, or whatever they wanted to call it. It had no official name because it hadn’t been officially acknowledged. It hadn’t been acknowledged because nobody could detect it, measure it, and define its scope. Because of
that
, as far as hard science was concerned, it didn’t exist, or it existed but was purely psychosomatic. Nobody was lying about that, they just couldn’t prove it was real, basically.

Despite the lack of scientific rigor, Ed was well aware that the army chose not to station any men inside the perimeter fence out of concern for what might happen to them if they remained in close proximity for long periods. Army-speak on the subject was remarkably similar to the language employed when discussing radioactivity:
length of exposure
and
long-term impacts
and so on. Rumor was, this was the real reason they’d built a base so far from the landing site.

“Hold up,” Morris said. Ed had managed to make it all the way around to the back of the craft, staying within arm’s reach of the fence the entire time. He felt no effect from the perhaps-nonexistent space flu, but didn’t know if that meant everything or nothing.

Morris stepped past him, looked left and right, and up.

“Yeah, about here. This is where we think the incursion must have begun.”

“How can you tell?”

He shrugged, and pointed to the sensors. “Ask the fellas jacked into those things.”

“There would have been a lot of foot traffic to sort through.”

“Oh, I agree.” He pointed to the land on the other side of the fence. “Three years back, there were more trees. We cleared a lot of ‘em out to put up the fence and clean up sightlines for the guards. Maybe it was a terrain assessment, I don’t know.”

“Not much to tell about it now.”

“No, we can’t get anything from the site, we know that. Just saying, this is where they probably came up to it. Useful information or not, that’s up to you.”

Ed stopped at the point Morris identified, turned and faced the ship.

It was a known thing that the ship looked more or less the same from every angle. It had four landing feet, and six distinct spotlight-sized indents, so obviously there were differences of perspective when looking at them, but the vehicle’s torso had little in the way of distinguishing features. If there was a hatch, nobody knew where it was.

“We gotta get closer,” Morris said.

He pulled out a thing that looked like a flashlight but which was actually a slightly modified flashlight.

“Do we really?”

“No we do not. We have pictures in that folder I gave you. But you said yourself you want to go in this order, and look at the anomaly with your own eyes, so here we are. I can’t even promise we’ll see it, but we can try.”

“But…”

“Just walk with me, son. It’s not so bad.”

They took ten paces toward the ship. With each step, Ed found himself interrogating every stray thought as if it didn’t belong. He’d heard so many stories from the people who’d come close to the craft regarding what,
exactly
what, they were thinking in those moments. He knew approximately what to expect. He didn’t know what it would feel like, though.

It turned out when one expected one’s mind to begin to wander inappropriately, one’s mind began to wander inappropriately. It was exactly the kind of self-fulfilling prophecy which made arguments that the effect was real sound so nutty.

“Breathe normal,” Morris said. “We aren’t close enough yet.”

“You’ve done this before?”

“Sure. First thing I did when I got here was try and touch it.”

“
Really
?”

Morris laughed. “Yeah. I’m not the only one who’s tried over the years. My predecessor tried at least once a month.”

“There isn’t anything in the reports about it.”

“Nope. We keep it to ourselves.”

“But the sensors…”

“They have their little brown-outs from time to time. Lightning storms’ll knock out half of them just from atmospheric charge. It’s not monitored a hundred percent reliably, I’m saying. One of us wants to give it a go, we know where the switch is, nobody’s the wiser.”

“They might be aware now, don’t they have audio equipment out here?”

“You know as well as I do, the system’s designed to filter out human noise. Plus the ship sucks up sound.”

“I’m just a little surprised to hear you’re all disobeying orders.”

“Funny thing, nobody’s issued a command not to touch the ship. I’ve checked. They just figure we won’t. And hey, nobody’s done it. It’d be a much bigger deal otherwise.”

Ed wondered if Morris was either exaggerating the frequency by which this was attempted or, if not that, understating the impact a successful incursion would have. It was a little like checking the safety on a gun by holding it to your head and pulling the trigger. The safety never failed, but if it did the consequences wouldn’t offset the importance of proving it faulty.

Or not. They didn’t know the consequence of touching the ship because, supposedly, nobody ever had. The very fact that nobody seemed capable of doing this meant great import was attached to the performance of this act, which was where the gun-safety analogy became important. It could also explain why even military men who should know better were lining up to give it a try.

They got closer, and Ed began to think about what he had for breakfast, grew concerned that this wasn’t him thinking this at all, then took a deep breath and tried lowering his heart rate.

All in my head
, he told himself.

“We usually do the infrared scans at night, by drone,” Morris said. “We’re doing this manually during the day, so like I said I can’t promise we’ll see anything.”

“How close does the drone get?”

“About ten feet. They get any closer and they’ll malfunction. We crashed a few on purpose to see what that malfunction would look like. It’s pretty awesome.”

“Is that something you do once a month too?”

“No, the drones are too expensive. But if you want to watch, we have video footage of it. It’s not the bug zap, though. You gotta fire a high-impact projectile to experience that. The drones lose attitude, flip around and crash. Like their on-board instruments got hacked.”

“A virus.”

“You’d think. But we broke down one of the ones that came out intact and didn’t find anything. Anyway, the first anomaly triggered a new round of tests, and that included a new infrared search, and here we are. But you know all about this, don’t you?”

He did. Even the drone tests, which he’d actually witnessed via videoconference one time.

“Yes, but I’m finding the longer you talk the easier it is to keep walking.”

Another five paces, and Morris turned on the flashlight, and nothing happened.

“Oh, hang on.”

He rummaged around in his jacket pocket and came out with two sets of plastic eyewear. They looked like the 3-D glasses handed out at movies.

They both put the glasses on. It made the sunlight look much more impressive, but only made the ship look blacker. It occurred to Ed for the first time that perhaps the hull of the vessel was more than
just
black. As if the light absorption rate was higher than it should be.

“If they can see us from those camper roofs right now…” Ed said.

“Ah, don’t worry about them. Nobody puts much stock in what they have to say.” He looked up and toward the road. “But I don’t think they can. The angle’s poor and we kept the trees near the road intact for a reason.”

Morris waved the flashlight around. This time the termination point of the beam was visible. He directed it toward the ship, but the light became too diffuse too quickly to make a difference.

“Little closer,” he said.

They went another five paces. The end of the beam began to coalesce into a wide circle on the side of the ship.

Four more paces. The beam began to tighten and brighten, and then Morris began probing the surface looking for… something.

Ed realized he hadn’t called his mother in nearly two months.

It wasn’t really a big deal—they went much longer than that routinely, especially since the divorce. She’d been kind enough to wait until well after Ed had moved out and established a life of his own before telling both him and her husband—his father—how unhappy she was. A whirlwind divorce that devastated Ed’s dad, and bewildered Ed, resulted in her relocating to Florida, opening up a yarn store, and cohabitating with “aunt” Linda, a long-time friend of the family and (apparently) the lesbian lover of the former Mrs. Somerville. Then Dad died of congestive heart failure, because he never took care of himself, and that caused more than a little friction between Ed and his mom, but they patched that up a couple of years back and now he was used to hearing her voice semi-regularly.