The Frequency of Aliens

by Gene Doucette

  “Better not, then.”

  “Fine.”

  The entrance from the parking lot was the only welcoming part of the building: glass doors that required a key card, with a guard desk on the inside. It could have been the entrance to just about any corporate building in the country. Visiting dignitaries were brought in this way. Everyone else tended to use the side entrances.

  Melissa held the door for him and then closed it and waited until she heard the lock engage before continuing. It was quiet enough inside for Ed to hear the hum of electricity.

  “Power’s up?” he asked.

  “Oh yeah, everything’s running normal,” she said.

  “Did you find it that way?”

  She stopped at the desk.

  “Is that important?”

  “I have no idea,” he said.

  “I don’t know, Ed, I wasn’t the one who found the place empty. I was in Washington at the time. You want me to find out?”

  “Yeah.”

  He noted that the security desk had some video monitors, so he sat down at the desk for a few minutes to watch it rotate through a couple of cycles.

  “Who did find it?” he asked.

  “Some sergeant back from leave, I don’t have his name.”

  “I might want to talk to him.”

  “All right.”

  The video monitors only showed the building’s exits and hallways. There wasn’t really anything to see.

  “What about the gate?” Ed asked.

  “What?” Mel was texting. Since she wasn’t the kind of person who would be chatting with a friend while in the middle of something like this, Ed assumed she was asking someone the same questions he just asked her.

  “The gate out front. When the sergeant arrived, was it closed or open?”

  “I’ll find that out too. The lock’s ours though. We put that on after. You done watching TV?”

  “Yeah, there’s nothing on.”

  The door on the other side of the guard desk was another keycard-only access, which Mel got them through. Ed made a mental note to ask about getting one of those for himself if this investigation took longer than an afternoon. He didn’t like the idea of getting stuck on the wrong side of one of the doors.

  They went past a few offices into the main part of the building, which was the radio telescope’s observatory room.

  Ed remembered the first time he was in this space. It was extremely disappointing. The problem was, when one is told one is going to be looking at a telescope, the mind fills in the usual details, i.e., an enormous optical device for looking at other galaxies and what-not.

  There wasn’t anything like that here, because radio telescopes were all about listening, and not seeing. There were five stations with equipment that did just that, and recorded all of it in aching detail. What it reminded Ed of, more than anything, was the devices the trailer people in Sorrow Falls used. This stuff was a lot more expensive, though, and probably worked better.

  “Really quiet in here,” Ed said.

  “The whole base is quiet.”

  “Yes, but, I mean that nothing’s running. Last time I was here, something was always beeping or clicking.”

  Mel laughed.

  “Is that the scientific term?”

  “No, but this isn’t my expertise. Actually, on that subject, we’re going to need to get someone in here who understands this equipment.”

  “Okay.”

  He sat down at a station and tried to activate one of the computers.

  “Do you know the password to unlock this?”

  “No. We’ll get that too. This is turning into a long list, Eddie. You haven’t even seen the interesting part yet.”

  “Don’t call me that,” he said, without even thinking. She used to call him Eddie specifically to annoy him, which oddly made it a term of endearment. “And what do you mean I haven’t seen the interesting part yet?”

  “Well, all right,” she said, putting down her phone. “Maybe I’m wrong. You think this is interesting?”

  “I see two different things happening at the same time. Did you look in some of those offices on the way here?”

  “A couple.”

  “I saw half-empty coffee cups, an open water bottle, and an uneaten lunch. There was a pad of paper with writing on one of those desks, and I’m willing to bet if I went back and looked, I’d see that whatever was written there was stopped in mid-sentence.”

  “Evidence that everyone left in a hurry. Yeah, I saw that too.”

  “Except for in here. I think the telescope has been shut down.”

  “You literally just said you don’t know anything about this equipment.”

  “Yeah, but I know what it sounds like when the telescope is active.”

  “Beeping and clicking.”

  “Yes, that. Nothing exciting, unless you’re an astronomer. Probably.”

  “Maybe it’s on and just pointed at a quiet part of the sky.”

  “I’m not a hundred percent sure, but I don’t think there’s such a thing as a quiet part of the sky. My point is, this whole space contradicts everything else.”

  “If you say so.”

  “So what are you not showing me?”

  “The interesting part, like I said. It’s upstairs.”

  The rooms on the second floor were for the kinds of meetings that happened when half of the attendees were in other locations. Each room had a videoconference link and a big screen television, with an assortment of tables, chairs, lecterns, and marker boards.

  Ed’s first time on the base was mostly spent in one of these rooms. He’d been there to watch someone pilot a drone at the Sorrow Falls spaceship. The drone got within five feet and then had the robot equivalent of a dissociative event. It was actually sort of hilarious, and the kind of thing that would go viral if it ever ended up online. It hadn’t, because it was a secret test. That was probably also the reason Ed was the only one who laughed when it flew straight into the ground, bounced five times, then up at a thirty-degree angle and directly into a tree trunk: again, assuming anyone in the army had a sense of humor was usually a mistake.

  The first three rooms they walked past looked about as he remembered, and also like they hadn’t been used in a long time. Ed thought that was exactly true, as Algie hadn’t been the center of anyone’s attention since The Incident.

  The door was closed to the fourth room.

  “You ready?” Mel asked.

  “I was. Now you’ve got me all nervous.”

  She smiled.

  “I think you said that on our first date. It’s not a Confederate ghost, if that helps.”

  She pushed open the door and turned on the light.

  The thing that jumped out immediately was the writing on the wall. Somebody had taken the black marker for the marker board and spread out what they were working on all over the room’s white walls.

  Also, somebody had clearly been sleeping in the room.

  “Wow. Who did this?” Ed asked.

  “We haven’t a clue. Someone with some advanced math skills, obviously.”

  “Maybe.”

  What was written on the walls was an equation of some kind, but repeated over and over.

  “Just maybe?” Mel asked.

  “I mean that I don’t know enough math to know if this is gibberish or not.”

  “But you agree this is some advanced stuff.”

  “Like I said: maybe. If it was done to work out a proof there’d be more variety. I don’t know what this means, but I know just repeating it isn’t going to make a difference. This looks more like the room of someone who suffered a nervous breakdown.”

  “The sleeping bags sure lend credence to that,” she said, pointing to the roll-ups in the corner. “There are plenty of beds in the next building, and I think they have cots for anyone who needs to stay up late for… whatever reason scientists need to do that kind of thing.”

  “Working in radio astronomy isn’t strictly nocturnal
,” Ed said. “Not like with a regular telescope. But that doesn’t mean you can listen just any time. Why do you think they let whoever did this stay here in these conditions?”

  “That’s way down on the list of questions, but yeah, I don’t know. Did I ever tell you I worked out of USAMRIID for a while?”

  “Don’t think so.”

  He toed the edge of one of the sleeping bags, half expecting something to come crawling out of it.

  “I remember this one time a scientist there ended up exposed to a pathogen. Like, one of the bad ones. They had to put him in solitary for a month before they were sure he wasn’t going to manifest any symptoms. I got to see the room after he was cleared. He spent the whole time working out problems on the walls, basically. Just to keep from going nuts. It looked a little like this.”

  “So, you think whoever was in here was being quarantined,” he said. “Is that what you’re saying?”

  “Yeah, pretty much. I know; I took the long way to get there. This room bugs me.”

  “Me too.”

  Mel talked when she was nervous. Since Ed was someone who habitually listened and observed, it meant their first date went extremely well. It was definitely the high point of their relationship.

  Ed sat in one of the conference table chairs, taking note that the quarantined person—or people, as the bags indicated at least two—had also written the equation on the glass tabletop.

  “So… none of this adds up,” he said.

  “Yeah, I could have told you that.”

  Melissa was lingering at the door. He could see she greatly preferred to have this conversation in a different place. Ed did too, but he wasn’t done with this room yet.

  “Everyone leaves the base, either in a panic or calmly, depending on which room we’re standing in. I’m just assuming at this point nobody’s heard from any of them since, is that right?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How many people are we talking about?”

  “Counting all scientists, soldiers, and staff, twenty-three.”

  “No blood anywhere?”

  “No blood, no bodies,” she said. “No gravesites.”

  “Seven cars out front, but twenty-three people would own more than seven cars. Maybe they drove out of here in something else.”

  “We’re still chasing that down. I get what you’re saying, maybe there were fourteen cars and they piled into seven of them and drove off, and now they’re drinking Kool-Aid somewhere.”

  “Or they rented a bus or something. It’s either that or they’re all out in the woods, wandering about. I assume you checked that too.”

  “That’s ongoing. Lots of trees. You could hide a battalion in this hillside, and we’re mostly doing aerial searches. Anything more direct and we’d have to admit we misplaced twenty-three people on American soil.”

  “Then there’s this room, which looks like it belongs at an entirely different crime scene. I can’t even imagine how this fit in. I mean, clearly whoever was in here was working through a little bit of the crazy. Do you know which of them it was?”

  “Nobody from forensics has been here yet. I think they’re waiting on you for that.” Her phone buzzed. “Hang on.”

  Melissa stepped out, the phone to her ear. Ed decided this was a good time to start taking pictures of the graffiti, for what good that might do. He didn’t personally know any mathematicians with top-secret status, but there were a few who’d been attached to the spaceship monitoring team. He could probably tap one of them.

  “Definitely crazy,” he said aloud, because it made him feel better to hear his own voice in this space. He understood why Mel lingered at the door. The room felt colder, somehow, than the rest of the building. It was surely a psychosomatic response to the disquieting nature of the conference room. “Didn’t even bother to use the actual marker board.”

  That, he decided, might not be true. The board was in the corner of the room, and the wooden backing was facing out. They may have run out of space on that board early. Just to verify, Ed flipped it over.

  The board was nearly empty. The equation was written only once, at the top. And then, four words.

  WE ARE A MULTITUDE.

  “Hey,” Mel said. Ed jumped a thousand feet straight up, and died twice.

  “Sorry, did I startle you?” she asked.

  “Yeah, a little. What’s up?”

  He took a picture of the message on the board, his hand shaking.

  “I got the name of the sergeant.”

  “This message is familiar,” Ed said.

  “Like, in a horror movie familiar?”

  “No… maybe, it is sort of right for a horror movie, isn’t it? Something else. Can’t remember what. It’ll come to me.”

  “Well, you got time. Sergeant’s an hour away. Said he was expecting to hear from you.”

  “From me? You gave him my name?”

  “No, but somebody did. He says he knows you.”

  “Personally?”

  “Yes, Eddie, personally. It’s Sam Corning.”

  3

  Bring Out Your Dead

  …And just who is this darling sensation of which I speak? Why, the angel of Sorrow Falls herself, the kiddo with all the buzz, the teen temptress from alien central: Annie Collins! She’s setting the world on fire, and thank goodness not literally, because I hear she can…

  …This pocket-sized charmer is tearing! It! Up! Message from Hilly to Annie: you’re doing great, sweetie! All the love!

  Hilly Scott, The Daily Gossip

  The complicated politics involved in just securing a dorm room for Annie were nearly enough to force her to back out of the deal with the college entirely. Wainwright wanted the publicity that was sure to come from her attending classes there—especially after the big-hitting Ivy League schools showed interest. What they didn’t want was the headache of actually having her on campus 24/7.

  Likewise, the Secret Service didn’t like the idea of Annie in a dormitory at all. They wanted her in off-campus housing, and they had plenty of ‘president’s daughter’ examples available to drive home the point.

  But Annie—perhaps more out of stubbornness than common sense—wanted to go back to being a normal kid, as much as that was possible. Being normal meant going to college and doing dumb things on her way to adulthood, like getting drunk and throwing up on herself, and dating the wrong boy, and… well, she didn’t know what else, but something. After all the chaos of the past couple of years, she figured she’d earned the right to make anonymous, stupid mistakes in a place slightly closer to the real world but not exactly the real world.

  And so, she wanted to live in the dorm, have a roommate or two, complain about the lack of space and the pile carpeting and the smell of the trashcan in the hallway, the heavy bass in the music the dude one floor down was blasting, and the awkward stairwell flirtations at three in the morning. All of that.

  But she couldn’t have that. Or, not exactly that.

  In the end, a compromise was reached that made everybody unhappy in equal measure. She got her dorm room, and roommates, but they lived on the top floor of a dormitory in a private apartment that was supposed to be occupied by a senior faculty member. Access to the entire floor was restricted.

  Her roommates were nice enough. They were unquestionably pre-screened down to their hair follicles, and they had essentially nothing in common with Annie or with each other, but Annie thought maybe that last part wasn’t so unusual. Not because there were so few people on the planet with whom she could say she had a lot in common—although this was true—but because every freshman on campus probably had to cope with this exact problem at the beginning of the school year.

  The housing experience was just another thing she had to deal with, or maybe to get over, in order to relax and enjoy the whole college thing. Some days she could, and she felt just like a regular kid. Those were good days.

  Then there were the days when she got back to the room and found a total str
anger sitting at the kitchen table.

  “Hi Annie,” the stranger said, getting to her feet and extending a hand.

  She was a tall, older woman in a pants suit and a tie, and flats. Annie knew without checking with Cora for confirmation that the woman was Secret Service.

  “Hi there,” Annie said. “Are you the voice in the van?”

  “I guess you could say that. I’m Agent Riviera. Wendy. Please call me Wendy.”

  “Super,” Annie said, shaking her hand. Some people had weirdly cold hands, and Wendy Riviera was one of those people. “Make yourself at home. Hey, we’ve got some of those cappuccino drinks in the fridge if you want. I was gonna crash, but you can probably let yourself back out, right?”

  Annie left the kitchen to deposit her book bag in the bedroom, and maybe to remain in there until everyone left.

  “I was wondering if we could talk,” Wendy said, around the corner.

  The apartment consisted of three decent-sized bedrooms, a living room, a full kitchen, and an unexpectedly large bathroom. It was just starting to feel like home—or at least a home—which was probably better than feeling like a dorm room.

  When Annie had study buddies over, they almost never got studying done, because everyone was too busy checking out the place. The view especially. The living room had French doors leading to a small balcony with a view of all of lower campus. It was pretty breathtaking when there was snow on the ground. The point was, Annie thought of it as enough of a home for the appearance of a stranger to feel like a legitimate intrusion, which she expected would not be the case if it were a standard dorm room.

  The apartment was also exactly large enough for total privacy and exactly small enough so a person in the kitchen could be heard from the bedrooms without having to raise her voice.

  Annie wondered where her roommates were. Lisa might have play rehearsal, but Viv almost always made it in by sundown. Perhaps the woman in the kitchen asked them to stay out.

  “Been kind of a long day, Wendy,” Annie said. She wondered what would happen if she just took off her pants and climbed into bed. Maybe they would leave?