He didn’t know yet what the end was going to look like. His current theory was that the ship was an unmanned probe that was reporting information on all of them via a means that science simply didn’t understand and could not detect.
Or, they could detect it, and the government was keeping it to themselves. Dobbs went back and forth on this a lot. Art was inclined to believe in the super-competence of governments when it came to conspiracies, so it was his opinion that they knew a lot more than they were letting on. He spent as much time watching the army as the ship, for exactly this reason. Dobbs often leaned in the other direction, toward a government that was so incompetent they didn’t notice anything, but it was hard to tell if this was conviction or an instinct to present a contrary opinion for the sake of variety.
He made it to the trees. It was a cool night, but he was covered in sweat by the time he got there. That’s my workout for the day, he thought. A walk to the poop-trees.
He had a pattern, a system that involved visiting the trees in a certain order. This was to allow his prior contributions to the environment to dry (he covered them, but that didn’t always do much good) so he didn’t inadvertently step in a fresh something of his own making. This night’s visit was to tree number five, and he was on his way there when he thought he heard someone moving around in the woods.
“Hello?” he called.
It was unlikely anybody else from the trailers was out there; he’d have seen them walking.
“Someone there?”
He stood motionless and listened carefully, at first just to his heartbeat and to his breathing, but then to the woods around him.
There.
He heard it again, to his right. A rustling. Dead twigs, dried leaves… something with a little weight to it was moving around in the copse other than him.
It occurred to Dobbs for the first time that there might be wolves. He’d never heard of them out here, but that didn’t mean they weren’t there.
Wolves, or coyotes or bears. Or a giant deer.
But it wasn’t a wolf, or anything else on four legs.
A man stepped from behind one of the trees, mostly hidden from the starlight by the shadows.
“Oh, hi,” Dobbs greeted. “Um, sorry, I’m just… these aren’t your trees, are they?”
The man didn’t move or speak. Or necessarily even breathe, as far as Dobbs could tell. It was a little unnerving.
“Of course they aren’t your trees, the government owns… I’m Dobbs. I live in one of those trailers over there. I’m expected back soon.”
Silence. In the trickle of moonlight and starlight and lights from the spaceship perimeter, Dobbs could see enough to tell the man had a suit on, which was just weird on top of weird. Who would go walking around in the woods at night in a suit?
“Aaand, you are?”
“Are… you?”
The man had a dry, deep voice. It sounded like speaking caused him pain. Dobbs jumped three feet when he spoke and nearly did the thing he was there to do, only in his pants.
“What?” Dobbs asked. “Am I what?”
“Are you?”
The creepy guy in the suit was either asking Dobbs if he was someone, or he was reciting the international country code for the Russian Federation. Dobbs was pretty sure it was the former, but the two words by themselves didn’t make any sense.
“I don’t know what you’re asking.”
“Not,” the man said.
“I am… not?”
“Not.”
“Okay. Okay, so… I’m going to go now?”
The man didn’t move. Dobbs was covered head to toe in goose bumps and had dropped the roll of toilet paper somewhere it wasn’t worth hunting down.
The man could have been one of the trees, or a cardboard cutout. He’d never seen a person so still before.
It was inexplicably terrifying.
“Nice meeting you, goodbye,” Dobbs said.
It took five strides to get out of the trees and back into the open field. They were the most anxious five strides of Dobbs’ life. And when he was back out into the starlight he more or less ran to the middle of the field before looking back over his shoulder.
The man in the suit wasn’t following. Dobbs didn’t know why he expected him to.
“All right,” he said. “I’ll clean the toilet from now on.”
8
Ordinary People
The vehicle Ed showed up in the following morning was a species of luxury town car Annie had never seen the inside of before. She passed them on her bike plenty of times around town, but had yet to come across one without tinted windows. She tended to spend a lot more time than was healthy speculating on the identity of the person inside.
“This is your rental?” she asked. Ed was standing at the passenger door, holding it open for her like a chauffeur who didn’t know the guest was supposed to sit in back.
“Of course. Not like I had time to trade up.”
She slid in. Plush seats, cushy. Computer in the dashboard. Localized air conditioning and heating for each seat. There was a butt warming function. It had Wi-Fi.
Ed hopped in the driver’s side.
“Better than getting driven around in an SUV?” he asked. Behind the wheel, he looked about 90% less geekish than he had at Joanne’s. She began to wonder just how well it paid to be a secret government expert on things.
“I don’t know what the interior of the SUV looked like,” she said, “but I don’t think I ever want to leave this car.”
“It was nicer. Had a bar in it.”
Ed started the car. She was so accustomed to the loud, complaining engine in Violet’s car she at first didn’t notice they were idling.
“I thought we’d start with the people in those campers,” Ed said. “Is that okay?”
“If that’s where you want to start, sure. I mean, what kind of weird are you looking for?”
“Two different kinds.”
“Great.”
He put the car in gear, and it felt more like gliding than driving. Ed saw her expression and laughed.
“It’s just a car. Spaceships are cooler.”
“Yeah, but I can’t get inside of that, and anyway it never moves.”
A right turn from the driveway took them to the junction with Spaceship Road, and all the traffic that came with that road. To the left was the ship. To the right was the army base. The road continued for several miles after that, out of town, until terminating at one of the Old Post Roads that striated the countryside.
Ed merged into the inbound traffic, and then it was stop-and-go for a while.
“When you said something’s not right about Sorrow Falls, what did you mean?” she asked. “Or is that top secret too?”
“It’s not. What I mean is, the town shouldn’t still be here.”
She laughed.
“Like, what, an impact crater?”
“No, I mean, have you ever asked yourself how you could be living within a mile of an alien ship?”
“Not really. I was here first.”
“It’s too dangerous, being this close. The correct reaction to this situation would have been to evacuate the area for as long as it took to ascertain the intentions of the craft.”
“According to whom?”
“Me, mostly. But I wasn’t the only one who said so. Every time someone with enough authority to act on that recommendation agreed with me, though, they were overridden.”
“Because that’s a crazy idea. The ship isn’t doing anything to anybody.”
“So far as we know it isn’t. Except I think it is. I think the ship wants the town to stay put.”
“That is one crazy theory, Ed. Do you get paid for that?”
“I get paid a lot for that. It’s not that crazy. We already know the ship can implant ideas aggressively, in self-defense. I experienced that first-hand yesterday. I knew what I was thinking didn’t really come from my own head, and yet I couldn’t stop. It was jarring. What i
f the ship has a more passive version of that technology impacting the area at large? I mean, nothing in Sorrow Falls is really right for this circumstance. You all went about your lives, pretty much.”
“I think you’re underestimating the unflappable nature of the New England native mindset. Besides, the people you’re talking about, the ones who would get to decide to evacuate the region, they don’t live here. They’re in Washington. Did the ship call them up or something?”
“Well that’s the thing. My first recommendation made it all the way to the desk of the president. He was ready to sign the order. He told me so.”
He glanced over at Annie to see what kind of impact this had, thinking possibly that the idea he had the president’s ear might be impressive. She knew about ten people who’d spoken to the president personally, and she once bussed his breakfast table, so she wasn’t overly impressed, but thought she probably should have been. To the rest of the world, it was undoubtedly a big deal.
“What changed his mind?” Annie asked.
“Sorrow Falls did. He came here to visit before signing the order, because someone who’d already visited convinced him to do it.”
“Maybe he decided against it after meeting all of us.”
“Maybe. And maybe the ship decided it for him.”
* * *
There was some confusion among the members of the rooftop camper city when Ed and Annie arrived.
Only one day earlier, a big black army SUV went through the gate, and out popped an army general whose name nobody seemed to know—he was new, everyone agreed—and a skinny city guy in faux rugged clothing and glasses.
The second man inspired a daylong debate between the rooftops regarding his possible identity and purpose. The easy, obvious answer was that he was a reporter working on a new story who’d pulled strings to get a close-up. But insofar as this was easy, and obvious, it was rejected unilaterally.
Secret government operative worked for most of them as a convenient catchall. What kind of operative was not agreed-upon, nor was the arm of the government he must have come from, nor even the government, but it fit most theories nicely anyway.
Brenda and Steve, for instance, had strong opinions regarding the United Nations, which was not in itself a government. But an operative working for the U.N. could be from any nation, nation-state, or territory. He could also be one of their nationless operatives, a super-secret police force whose members knew no allegiance to any one government. No such secret police force existed, and anyone who listened to Brenda or Steve for more than a few minutes realized they were really talking about the utterly mundane Interpol, if Interpol was bitten by an evil radioactive spider.
The trailer park collective had, conservatively, two hundred pictures of the operative, so a great deal of bandwidth was expended on facial recognition software. This same software gave them general Morris’s name in about ten minutes, but didn’t turn up any definite matches on the other man.
The matches rated the highest were: a background actor in the film Every Which Way But Loose (except he was too young); an ethicist from Manila (except he didn’t look Filipino); a retired Olympic gymnast from Kazakhstan (except he didn’t look like a gymnast.) Winston had an interesting theory involving the grandson of the joint chiefs and some minor plastic surgery, but this didn’t stick because nobody could quite justify using facial recognition software to identify someone as a person who didn’t look like themselves any more. It seemed like an explicit contravention of the logical basis of the program. Also, as more than one person pointed out, if he was the grandson of one of the joint chiefs, it made perfect sense that he would have access to the ship, perhaps even to write a story about it.
The matter remained unsettled for the entire day.
Equally unsettled was what the man and the general did while inside the ship compound.
There were one or two positions near the ship that were effectively invisible from the street. At night, it was usually possible to get an approximate idea, because people at night needed flashlights, and because the passive thermal imaging detection—two different campers had equipment that did this—could track their heat signature pretty well when the sun wasn’t out.
The men used an infrared emitter. That was established right off, because as soon as they began using it a half-dozen alarms went off on a half-dozen roofs. But nobody knew why, or what it meant.
By the end of the day the only thing any of them could agree upon was that they couldn’t agree on anything. This was more or less how they ended every day, though, so in that sense the strange man in the glasses and faux rugged clothing was just the latest in a series of debate topics.
But then came the next day, when the same man returned—new clothing, new car, same glasses—with Annie Collins in tow.
Nobody really knew what to do with that information.
* * *
“Can you hear the buzz?” Annie asked, as she joined Ed on the driver’s side of the car. There was no parking on Spaceship Road, so he just pulled over in front of the gates. When the soldier—who looked at Annie, confused, for several seconds—asked what they were doing, Ed showed him an ID that said, basically, he could put the car anywhere he wanted in Sorrow Falls.
“Not sure what you mean,” he said to Annie.
“Look at my people on the campers.”
A cascade of heads popping up to look down at them, a murmur of conversation, camera flashes. Annie felt like she was in a National Geographic special, except she was the animal being observed, and all the scientists were scrambling.
“I hear it now. This is going to be weird, isn’t it?”
“You have no idea. Let’s walk slowly, they’re going to need time to delete all the pictures they took of you yesterday.”
“You’re joking.”
“Not even a little bit. Welcome to Sorrow Falls.”
“Morning, Annie!”
Art Shoeman popped up and waved them over.
“Morning, Mr. Shoeman. How’s things? Anything exciting yesterday?”
“You should ask that fella next to you, he might give you a better answer.”
“This is Edgar Somerville. He’s a reporter. He had some questions for… well, everyone. Can we come up?”
“A reporter, is he?” Mr. Shoeman said. He gave Annie a wink he probably thought Ed didn’t see. “Sure, sure, come on up. Do you need me to make introductions?”
* * *
“They’re getting in through the water supply!”
It was four hours later. Ed and Annie were on fifth trailer and eighth interview, and being shouted at by Earl Pleasant, a man whose surname was clearly ironic. Earl seemed both perpetually angry and permanently sunburned, giving his face a cartoonish shade that reflected his ardor.
“How do you mean?” Ed asked. Annie, who made this and every other introduction to this point, had perfected a kind of impassive expression, which projected some degree of belief and sincerity to these true believers. (This was a misleading phrase, as they all believed something different, but with great individual ferocity.) To Ed, her expression looked more like amusement.
“Through the water table. I have maps, I’ll show you!” Earl disappeared into a back area, ostensibly the bedroom of the camper, behind a sliding door.
The inside of Earl’s trailer smelled like laundered sweat and turned fruit. But it was cool and out of the sun, which was a welcome respite.
“You holding up okay?” Annie asked.
“I had no idea,” he said. “I thought these guys were just waiting for something to happen.”
“Well they are, but they also want to be the first to know it’s happening.”
“It’s like they’re all making decisions based on some kind of dream logic.”
“I’m not with you.”
“They aren’t getting any feedback from the ship, or the government, or anybody with the necessary scientific background, so their imaginations are just rolling along, ignorant of anyt
hing attached to reality.”
“Yeah, don’t let them hear you talk like that. And try to avoid the word ‘ignorant’.”
“Here!”
Earl returned with a topographical map and slapped it down on the table in front of Ed. This was accomplished with an unsettling degree of violence.
“This is a USGS water table survey of the area. As you can see, the ship’s location is just about the ideal spot for a well.”
Without knowing a lot about the provenance of the map—it could have been a map of any part of the country, as there was no key or date stamp attached, only a magic marker dot marking the location of the ship—it still looked like there were a dozen excellent places in the area for a well.
“What would be the goal?” Ed asked.
“I told you, this is how they’re getting in.”
“Earl, I think what Mr. Somerville is asking, is what do they do once they’ve gotten into the water supply? What happens next?”
“Well we don’t know that. But that’s why nothing’s happened for so long, it takes a while to get down there, do what they gotta do. If you ask me, it’s about turning us.”
“Turning…”
“Species conversion! You might be part-alien right now, if you’ve drunk the water round here. I drink only rainwater, just to be sure. They’ll probably get the livestock first. And the pets. But it’ll move up the chain.”
“Okay. Thanks, that’s really good stuff.” Ed stood and offered his hand, which Earl looked at but didn’t take.
“Sorry, I don’t touch people,” he said. “It’s not personal.”
“I understand completely.”
“This is for what magazine, again?”
“The Atlantic,” Annie said. “It’s big deal story, Earl.”
“Well that’s good. People need to know.”
“They’ll know,” she said.
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