The Frequency of Aliens

by Gene Doucette

  Second, there was San Diego itself, which was perpetually beautiful. He was told—mostly by people who didn’t live there—to enjoy it while he could, because surely the next big earthquake would destroy the entire city. Oddly, the idea that he was living on borrowed time, for there would surely be a devastating event at any moment, made Dobbs feel more comfortable. He’d lived in Minnesota, and in Massachusetts, two places with nice summers and horrid winters, so the only way San Diego—with no winters to speak of—could possibly feel at home was with the sense of impending doom. It reminded him, in other words, of life in Sorrow Falls.

  The third thing to get used to was having a secretary, and the fourth was having meetings.

  He mostly went in and out of the office whenever he felt like it, but now and then there were meetings he was expected to attend. Half of these were of the consultation kind. The other half were of the celebrity meet-and-greet kind.

  The meeting he was late for was the latter sort. The name of the consulting company was Templeton-Barker, and David Templeton, the managing partner, had a tendency to dangle a meeting with Dobbs as incentive to companies interested in their services. Mostly, these involved people asking silly questions—often the same silly questions—for about half an hour, or long enough to determine that Dobbs wasn’t as interesting as they’d hoped.

  It was an unusual thing to monetize, but it made some sense. Oona and Laura dropped off the map within a month (they now showed up mostly by accident in media accounts, where they were treated like UFO sightings), Ed wasn’t ‘there,’ Annie was impossible to get to, requests to talk to Sam had to go through the military, Dill was in a nuthouse somewhere, and that kid who was with Dill clammed up as soon as he enlisted in the army. So, anyone with a pet theory about one of the many, many never-explained happenings in Sorrow Falls could go to only one person. And, unless they happened to run into Dobbs by accident at a San Diego coffee shop, or on the one-to-two occasions per month in which he was at the gym, they had to pay for his time.

  “Morning,” his secretary greeted, with a smile. Her name was Linda, and she looked like someone who would have been Dobbs’ boss in another life. “They’re waiting for you in Omaha.”

  This led to three seconds of confusion, as it always did. The conference rooms were named after different American cities, chosen for uniqueness of first-letter rather than anyone’s particular interest in visiting those cities.

  “Right,” he said, pretending he knew this. Then he pretended to know where Omaha was.

  “It’s the one near the kitchen,” Linda said.

  “Thanks.”

  The two guys waiting for him were very Southern California healthy. They had tans, they looked a little gaunt from certain angles, and they had ponytails. They looked ready to go sailing or hiking at a moment’s notice.

  “Hi, guys, sorry to keep you,” Dobbs said, in his Agreeable Voice. He’d been working on it for months and had gotten pretty good at it. Meeting new people was the sort of thing he had to teach himself to do well.

  He shook their hands. The tall, tan white guy with the ponytail was Williams, and the other tall, tan white guy with the ponytail was Davis.

  “What can I do for you?” Dobbs asked.

  Williams smiled. He had tan teeth too.

  “We had some questions for you about that night,” he said.

  “The night with the ship,” Davis clarified.

  “Sure, I mean what other night could you mean, right?” Dobbs said with a laugh that no one echoed.

  Tough crowd, he thought.

  “What do you fellas do?” Dobbs asked.

  He used to ask for briefings on the people he was meet-and-greeting, until he learned he could burn a lot of time he’d otherwise have to spend failing to answer their questions and otherwise disappointing them, by getting them to talk about themselves for part of the allotted period.

  “We’re astrophysicists,” Davis said.

  “Really? I don’t meet a lot of those.”

  This was true, and oddly so. The people who wanted to meet with him typically had the word amateur in front of whatever their enthusiasm happened to be. Amateur astronomer, for instance.

  “And we have questions,” Williams reiterated.

  “I gotcha. Go ahead.”

  “We understand on the night, you hijacked a signal from the vessel. Can you explain how you did that?”

  Wow, jumping right in, okay.

  There was The Story, which he told every time someone asked about the night of The Incident. Usually, these conversations began there.

  “The equipment on the trailer had already detected it, it’s just that nobody knew what it was. I was the guy to put it together.”

  “And use it?”

  “Well, kind of. We figured out the zombies had a sensitivity to certain auditory ranges. It messed them up. A woman screaming in the right pitch hit the same range. That was how Annie got away a lot of the time, before we found her.”

  This was true, but only because Ed Somerville was there to hit the zombie in the head with a stick after Annie screamed. Even though it was Ed’s insistence that they leave him out of it, Dobbs still hated having to tell the story this way.

  “Yes, Annie Collins,” Williams said.

  “Right.”

  Dobbs had never been the best judge of body language in other humans, but these guys were off. He decided the reason why was that they were too still. Most people had little bits of unconscious body movement, but Williams and Davis only moved exactly what they wanted to move and everything else stayed put.

  “But I meant later than that,” Davis said. “When you pulsed the others so that they would sleep, and again when you healed them. We’ve been working this out and we think you had to have used some of the technology aboard the spaceship. The equipment on the trailer couldn’t have done that.”

  “That seems quite impossible,” Williams agreed.

  “Did you do that?” Davis asked. “Did you hack into the ship’s controls to facilitate that change? And if you did so, with only the rig atop the trailer, how did you do it?”

  “You know what, it was a confusing night,” Dobbs said. “A lot happened, and we were tired and scared. Some details are a little fuzzy. You understand.”

  This was the essence of Dobbs’ answer to any question like this. If you did it, then how? It was why so many people were ready to assume the final two steps—zombies sleep; zombies heal—should be credited to Annie and not Dobbs.

  The problem, as anyone who studied it carefully would figure out, was that it didn’t line up with Annie’s account of things. She didn’t say whether she did or didn’t do this, but at the time all the zombies went to sleep, Annie had just begun to engage in a dialogue with the being inside the ship. The alien didn’t leave the ship until an hour before Annie climbed out, which meant at least an hour passed between the time the zombies were knocked out and the time she claimed to have taken control of the ship.

  That either meant she was able to convince the alien to do it—and she’d never claimed this—or someone else did it. This was how the needle kept bouncing back toward Dobbs.

  The real problem was that this part bothered the hell out of Dobbs too. He would love it if someone figured out how he did this, because he didn’t know. But if he didn’t, and Annie didn’t, and the alien didn’t, who did that leave?

  Williams and Davis seemed equally dissatisfied with Dobbs’ explanation. They stared at him for an uncomfortable silence he hadn’t experienced since that time he ran into a zombie in the Sorrow Falls woods, and that was not a thing he enjoyed being reminded of.

  “He didn’t do it,” Williams said. It was addressed to Davis, clearly, given the pronoun of choice, but he was looking at Dobbs.

  Dobbs wasn’t sure, because he wasn’t good at this, but he thought this probably qualified as rude.

  “The girl, then,” Davis said. “Can you tell us more about Annie Collins?”

  “Not sure.�
�

  Dobbs was starting to feel really uncomfortable around these guys. Also, he could feel a migraine coming on, which was really weird because he didn’t get migraines.

  “What do you want to know?” he asked.

  “It’s said she is still in communication with the spaceship.”

  “Yes, I’ve heard the same thing.”

  “Do you know how she is doing that?” Williams asked. “From the surface, with no equipment, it doesn’t seem possible for humans.”

  “For people like us,” Davis added.

  Dobbs was about to crawl out of his skin, and he couldn’t tell why that was. In part, it felt like a low hum had been introduced to the room recently. It was subtle, but he could feel it, like pressure slowly getting applied to his head, or like the pressure in the blood vessels in his eardrums suddenly increasing. He remembered hearing about a sonic weapon being directed at an American consulate a year or two ago, and wondered if that was happening at this moment, but only to him.

  Also, when Williams said ‘humans’, Dobbs flashed back on just about every sci-fi show ever, involving aliens impersonating humans badly. Yes ha-ha, we are also human, let us grasp hands and sway them rhythmically.

  “I don’t,” Dobbs said. “You’ll have to ask her. I mean, if you can get to her. I guess she’s sort of retired from the public life.”

  “Can you ask her for us?” Davis asked. “You know her well, don’t you?”

  “I know her, sure. I mean, she’ll take my call. But like I said, she’s… she’s in school now, you know? She’s moved on. I think she’s answered enough questions, don’t you?”

  “Can you give us her number?” Williams asked.

  “Sorry?”

  “You said you can call her, can you give us her number?”

  “Ahhh, no. No, I can’t.”

  Davis appeared to be more aware of how creepy they were currently being, and was looking for a way to defuse the creep-factor.

  “Of course you can’t!” he said, with a smile that didn’t reach his eyes. “Look, Mr. Dobbs, we are just interested in information theory.”

  Dobbs knew a little about information theory.

  “Really. What’s this have to do with that?”

  “Well, information! If she can send information to the spaceship, how is she doing that?”

  “How can we do that?” Williams asked.

  “How can anyone!” Davis added.

  This was at best a tenuous connection to information theory.

  “I’m afraid I don’t know. And honestly, guys, if I didn’t know better, it would sound like you were trying to hijack the spaceship or something!”

  Davis laughed. It was an inappropriately timed laugh that one performed when one was a bad actor and the line in the script read laugh here. But it was a laugh. Williams just smiled a little, reluctantly. Dobbs was pretty sure Williams would have said hijacking the ship was exactly why they were there, if Davis hadn’t jumped in with the laugh first.

  “Look guys, I’m afraid our time is up,” Dobbs said. This was only true if he pretended he’d arrived on time instead of fifteen minutes late, but he had to get out of the room. “If you have any more questions, just drop a note to my assistant, and I’ll be happy to get back with you.”

  Dobbs stood, and they stood, and this was the part where he was supposed to shake hands again, but that wasn’t happening. They just stood there.

  He was down the hall before they could say another word.

  “Linda,” he said, on his way into the office, “I need a couple of things.”

  “Go ahead.”

  She had a notepad in-hand already. There were maybe two occasions when he’d asked her for something specific that needed to be recorded in a notepad, other than when they placed a lunch order. It was amazing she was so ready, then.

  “I need to know who those two people were and how they got a meeting with me, and I need that by the end of the day.”

  “All right. And?”

  “I have to talk to someone in the Pentagon. I’ll get you the number of his office, but he’s probably not there, so it’ll take some work to hunt him down.”

  “The Pentagon, right. I can just call the switchboard there if you have a name.”

  “I’ll get you a number, I’m not sure the name will get you to the right place.”

  “Okay.”

  “Oh, and get me something for my head.”

  He stepped past her desk and into his office, closing the door. This was probably the first time the office door had ever been closed with him on the inside of it. Irrationally, he thought Davis and Williams were now wandering the floor looking for him. Maybe George’s name would throw them off.

  He sat down in his extremely comfortable leather desk chair and took in the extremely lovely view from his window, while his mind took everything he remembered about the incident at Sorrow Falls, tossed it in the air, reshuffled it, and put it back into place again.

  There was another person there, he thought. Her name was Violet.

  8

  Who Hears a Horton?

  As much as Annie liked to say that the central appeal of Wainwright College—for her—was its isolation, combined with the New England familiarity, the fact that it was something of an underdog in the Massachusetts fraternity of higher education was probably just as much a factor. That, or the apparent fanaticism of its founder, which was exactly the sort of thing a girl raised in Sorrow Falls would find familiar.

  Wainwright was one of the oldest schools in the nation. According to the legend carved on the foundation stone in the middle of the campus, it was established in 1792 by Cotton Wainwright for “the advansment of understandings abt. the unyvers and all its heav’nly bodyes.”

  Almost every part of this was under dispute. Cotton Wainwright was, by all available measures, a crackpot. However, he was a crackpot of a very specific type, i.e., the kind with a significant amount of money. The Wainwright family was a foundational one in the history of the United States, albeit one whose members eschewed politics with the same fervor as they avoided direct involvement in the revolutionary founding of the country. Cotton was the oldest son, and in 1792 he was not founding a college anywhere: he was attending one.

  Cotton lasted barely a year at Harvard University. His professors were of the considered opinion that the young man was intelligent, but not nearly as intelligent as he thought he was. This opinion was echoed in 1793 by the educators at Yale, and again in 1794 by Princeton’s upper faculty.

  The problem was that Cotton Wainwright believed himself possessed of a higher truth, and he viewed the most prestigious institutions in the land as his opportunity to disseminate that truth, rather than have it challenged and disabused.

  This, again, was not all that unusual. What made Cotton different was that he had a large inheritance with which to exercise his nascent fanaticism.

  The first version of Wainwright College was no more than a two-room building on the side of a hill on land Cotton bought for this purpose. His goal was to attract young men such as himself: from wealth, at odds with the wisdom of their elders. More specifically, he was hoping to find men who would agree with his understanding of certain matters regarding the universe and God in general, and Cotton Wainwright himself in particular, and then get money from their families to expand his college.

  He was able to find enough young men who agreed that Cotton was a great person in possession of great insights. This was undoubtedly due to a personal charisma, as the insights themselves would have needed a tremendous amount of spin to be taken in any way seriously.

  Unfortunately, none of these impressed men came from families with money.

  After failing to convince the local bourgeoisie to send their offspring to him for the furtherance of their education, Cotton decided to open up admissions to the merchant class, and when that still didn’t attract paying students, he invented what appears to have been one of the earliest open scholarship programs in th
e nation.

  He got his acolytes, then, but the college would have to be built entirely on the back of his own family’s money.

  Nobody knew where the date 1792 that was carved into the foundation rock in the middle of campus came from. The rock itself was the cornerstone to the college’s first permanent building, but that building wasn’t erected until 1812. The best guess was that Cotton himself declared that the college was founded in the earlier year, because that was the year he decided Harvard had nothing for him.

  Cotton’s particular species of fanaticism was an interesting combination of ideas ahead of their time and some very old concepts. The central thesis could be boiled down to one provably incorrect idea: starlight cures disease.

  Getting there first required the acceptance of the foundational idea of astrology, i.e., that the stars and the planets were gods.

  The historical record was unclear as to precisely when Cotton fixated on this, but it was evident from his later writings that he never advanced beyond that, say to the point where astrology became the much more respected astronomy, with the revelation that these gods were actually suns and planets a great distance away. He understood this, but at the same time was unwilling to reject the initial assumptions made by prehistoric man and then passed down from there.

  He then made the leap from pantheism to monotheism, and declared that God—the Christian one—was literally up there in the sky. There was no metaphorical heaven (Cotton Wainwright didn’t apparently understand metaphors at all), only a literal one that any man could see into if they looked up at night and squinted a bit.

  In Cotton’s reckoning it only followed logically that starlight was a manifestation of God’s grace. Therefore, starlight cured disease, because that’s what the grace of God was supposed to do.

  In a few ways, this was an idea that was before its time. There would later be holistic cures—chiropractic, for instance, or reflexology—and discrete cure-alls that could be packaged and sold. There would also be more thoroughly religious ideas, such as Christian Science. What made Cotton’s starlight theory different was also what kept it from catching on: starlight couldn’t be bottled and sold, it required no special skill to apply, and the faithfulness of the recipient was irrelevant to the effectiveness of the cure.