The Frequency of Aliens

by Gene Doucette

  “You’ll forgive me if I think that sounds like an easy connection.”

  “Easy would have been if the Latvian government admitted any of this. Since they didn’t, I’m relying on nuggets of useful information embedded in enormous piles of useless information. I’m surprised they even let us into the country.”

  “Great. I just became really aware of the fact that I’m not armed right now.”

  Ed laughed.

  “We’re on a UN-sanctioned diplomatic mission,” he said. “A gun would just make this more complicated. Relax, I’ve been on dozens of these trips, we’re gathering information is all. Just keep your eyes open.”

  “I’ll try, but this soldier only knows how to be a soldier.”

  “One other thing that’s always true for this kind of trip is that the locals will go out of their way to be helpful while at the same time doing their best to keep us from finding out anything useful.”

  “They’ll lie to us, you mean.”

  “Everybody lies a little,” Ed said. “It’s an instinct. The sooner you figure that out about people, the further you’ll get in life.”

  Ed was less than a decade older than Sam, but he had a habit of sounding a lot older sometimes.

  “Thanks, grampa,” Sam said.

  It was a long, long, long drive, from Riga to Wherever, Latvia. Once they got to the mountains their ride settled into a certain familiarity that made Sam feel a lot more comfortable than he expected to be on his first trip to Europe. Evidently, trees in the hills feel like trees in the hills regardless of where you were.

  But, the road was narrower, the drivers more reckless, and the experience was, overall, far more harrowing than he would have liked. The plane felt safer, and this was the first time he really felt that way regarding air travel versus ground transport. Also, the flight didn’t have any techno music playing on what seemed like a loop in the background.

  Because he had little else to do—he and Ed knew one another well enough to hold a casual conversation for only about two hours, and the drive was more than twice that—he noticed little variations, like when the opposite-lane traffic stopped coming, and when the air cooled with the increase in elevation. Then he thought he could smell the Baltic, and he knew they had to be pretty close.

  “Here we are,” Ed said, a few minutes later. He wasn’t looking at the road, but at the coordinates on a satellite phone. Then the SUV rounded a bend and entered a town that wasn’t where it was supposed to be.

  It was really a bad excuse for a town regardless of what country they were in. The buildings were only a couple of steps up from army-designed Quonset huts, set in neat rows along paved streets. Half the windows were boarded up, and about a quarter of the ones without boards on them were broken. It didn’t look like this had happened due to a singular event of some sort—not a winter storm or a hurricane or a riot. It was just decay. And the fact that a portion of the windows were boarded up suggested this decay began long before the town had been abandoned.

  Sam was raised poor, in a Virginia countryside full of people who were also poor. This looked a lot like a town hit by poverty. The isolation made it that much stranger. Like someone decided to build a model town and then let it deteriorate without bothering to put people in it first.

  “You say this telescope was abandoned recently, right?” Sam asked.

  “Within the year.”

  “This ghost town of yours has been empty a lot longer.”

  “It has, yes. The Soviets built this along with the telescope. It housed the military, and some families. Used to be fences at the edge of town signifying the limits of the occupation force. Nobody’s lived here since the Latvian independence.”

  Sam didn’t know enough of his European history to know when that was, but he knew when the Soviet Union collapsed, and figured it was close to that.

  They drove down the little village’s main drag, until reaching an intersection, at which stood a man in a three-piece suit. He looked as if he’d perhaps been standing there the entire day, awaiting this moment of drama, in which an SUV bumper stops inches from his shins as he smokes a pipe with style.

  Ed hopped out. Sam climbed out slowly, stretched his legs for about a week, and then sauntered around the car.

  “Sam,” Ed said, “This is General Jansons. He’s going to be taking us the rest of the way.”

  “Valdis, please,” Jansons said. “We are all civilians today, I think perhaps.”

  They shook.

  “It’s a pleasure, sir,” Sam said.

  “No, no! Not ‘sir,’ please, Sergeant Corning, I absolutely insist. You are famous man, it is my tremendous honor to call you sir.”

  “Oh, please don’t, just Sam is fine.”

  “Sam, and Valdis, and Edgar. Welcome to our little corner. You are wishing to see the telescope, and I am wishing to show you.”

  He barked an order at the two men who’d escorted them to this point, in a language Sam assumed was Latvian, although there was no telling. Could have been Martian and he would have had no clue. Probably not, though.

  The drivers stepped away from the SUV, and the general climbed into the driver’s seat.

  “What about them?” Sam asked.

  Valdis Jansons laughed, as if this was the silliest question imaginable, and then he didn’t answer it. Another general who didn’t concern himself with the circumstances of the foot soldiers unless he needed them, perhaps.

  Sam thought that whatever else came out of this day, he was going to end it disliking General Jansons.

  As he climbed back into the rear of the SUV—alone this time, since Ed claimed the shotgun seat—Sam caught some movement out of the corner of his eye, in a spot where there shouldn’t have been movement.

  “Hey, Ed?” he said.

  “What’s up?”

  Sam was looking through one of the intact windows on the nearest building on their right.

  “Ghost town, you said?”

  “Yeah, why?”

  “No reason, except if this is a ghost town maybe I just saw a ghost.”

  The general laughed.

  “This place, it plays tricks, Sam. On the mind. You think, this should have persons here, and there are no persons here, and so you start to see them anyway. I would like one day to tear the whole thing down, perhaps.”

  “Yeah,” Sam said. “That’s probably it.”

  The general laughed again. It set Sam’s teeth on edge. He couldn’t quite figure out why.

  Ed was beginning to think this was a mistake.

  That was a tough thing to admit, after spending a month setting up the entire adventure, but the truth was he had almost nothing to go on to suggest the events that took place nine months ago at this Latvian research facility were connected to the mystery of Project Algernon.

  In sum, they only had two things in common: both facilities had world-class radio telescopes, and both were currently vacant for reasons that were unclear. So far as Algernon was concerned, Ed knew a lot more, but had no idea if those details lined up with the Latvian incident, because he didn’t know if there was a Latvian incident.

  There had been chatter. It was the kind of back-channel whispering people in the intelligence community lived and breathed, and while Ed wasn’t a member of that community, he knew where most of the windows that peeked into it were located, and how to climb through them when he needed to. That chatter suggested that the official statement was untrue, and there were people in the Latvian government who were scrambling to understand what had happened.

  The official statement in question was that the telescope was closed for long-term repairs. This was the party line that had been repeated to Ed since his arrival in Riga a week earlier, and it’s what General Jansons was leaning into as their tour of the telescope began.

  Annoyingly, it happened to be a perfectly plausible explanation. As the military said quite a lot about late-era Soviet constructions, the telescope was old the day it was built. The need for ex
tensive repairs was not a surprise.

  “Are you enjoying our country so far right now, sergeant?” General Jansons asked the rear-view mirror, as he piloted them the last few miles to the telescope facility.

  Sam, looking about as unhappy as a man who’d been traveling for fourteen hours straight can look, said, “I haven’t seen that much of it, to be honest. It looks really pretty.”

  “Yes, up in the mountains, very nice. We will have to show you the view of the sea before you return.” To Ed, he asked, “You are going right back home after this?”

  “Our plans are pretty fluid right now,” Ed said. “We’ll decide later. Depends on what we see.”

  “Yes of course. But you know, there really is nothing to see, Edgar. Sam, I have been telling your compatriot for a week now, this is nothing but a telescope in need of repairs. Your friend, he chases rumors.”

  “What kind of rumors are those?” Sam asked.

  “Oh, you know, mysterious disappearances and all that. This happens often. Much in the same way as our little empty village, these old Soviet artifacts, they have ghosts as well. The West, I think, still see shadows on the other side of the Iron Curtain sometimes.”

  They reached the front gate. It was unlocked.

  “No guard?” Ed asked.

  “Who is going to come all the way out here?” Jansons said. “It is not like someone would be stealing our great big telescope. This way the repair teams can get in and out without so much of a hassle.”

  He stopped the car at a massively unattractive cement block of a building. It was the largest of several, all constructed with the same architectural flair.

  “Here we are. This, we keep locked of course. I’m told you will be seeing the telescope control room, yes?”

  What Jansons had been told was that Ed was to see whatever he wanted, but Ed didn’t think this was the time to be pushing that point.

  “We can start there,” Ed said.

  They got out. Jansons went ahead to take the padlock off the front doors, which were big metal things that suggested they were a fire exit and not the main entrance to the place.

  “Hey, you okay?” he asked Sam, who did not look okay.

  “Something’s wrong around here,” he said.

  “What kind of wrong?”

  “I don’t know. Something. I feel like I’m waiting for a gunshot to go off.”

  “Well that’s not a good feeling.”

  “This is what I’m saying. Hey, am I here because this guy thinks I’m a celebrity?”

  “I’m not that devious, no.”

  In truth, it actually had been a lot easier to get what he wanted once he added Sam’s name to the list of inspectors. (This was, technically, a UN inspection of a facility with international value, citing an obscure bylaw in an even more obscure treaty agreement.) At the time, Ed didn’t think anything of it. Now he was wondering if Sam had a point.

  “It’s this way, Edgar and Sam,” the general said, holding open the front door. “I hope you will not be disappointed right away, there is really nothing to see. We’ve only just begun the repairs.”

  Had it been fully assembled, Ed would have said the control room looked a lot like a movie set from a Seventies-era spy thriller: long steel surfaces covered with lights and switches; low-res screens; and enormous black squares, which looked like audio equipment that belonged on tour with a rock band.

  The fact that it wasn’t even put together any longer made the scene even more haphazard. The tops of the control panels had been lifted and set on the floor, revealing a warren of multi-colored spaghetti-wiring. It certainly did look like a place that was in the middle of being repaired. About the only thing that was off was that it didn’t look as if the wires in question were loose. Ed got the sense that, had they reattached the panels, the system would still work.

  “The old regime, they used cheap wires,” Jansons said. “Too thin. Too easy to fail. We went as long as we could before it became impossible, which was why the decision was made to close the facility and work on modernizing.”

  “I thought that work was already done,” Ed said. “Back when the telescope was reopened by the university.”

  “Oh yes! Some of it was! But not all. There are thousands of meters of wiring just in this room, and it was mostly left alone. That refurbishment before concerned itself with adding modern computational devices to the end-points, but the work was still being done by the old wires.”

  In addition to planning this trip, Ed had spent some of the past month learning more about how radio telescopes worked so that when he walked into this room he’d be more prepared to understand what he was looking at. That turned out to be a waste of time. Whether General Jansons (or whoever) ripped open the circuit boards so it looked to Ed as if the place was being repaired, or the place was actually being repaired, whatever information he might have picked up here looked to have been destroyed or removed.

  “So what was this used for?” Sam asked. “Before. You guys keep talking about the Russians building this telescope, but how come?”

  The general shrugged.

  “It was the cold war, Sam, there is no telling.”

  “Actually, there is,” Ed said. “They were using it to spy on NATO.”

  “I cannot confirm any such thing,” Jansons said.

  “I understand, general. Like I said, Sam, Sweden’s across the Baltic. There’s a radio tower or two over there, and there’s a satellite in low orbit. They were trying to use it to intercept Western communiques.”

  “Did it work?” Sam asked.

  “No idea. But when the wall came down, the Soviets learned how big a mistake it was to guard this place with mostly native Latvians. I understand the people using the telescope were Soviets, but basically everyone else was local.”

  “Yes, this I can confirm,” Jansons said.

  “And now a university uses it?” Sam asked.

  “It was rebuilt,” the general said. “But as I say, it was only rebuilt to a certain extent. It has since failed, and thus the repairs. Once again, gentlemen, I fear you’ve made a trip for no purpose. I am of course glad to have met you both—especially Sam, the great hero of Sorrow Falls! In fact, I am hoping once this is concluded you will stay over as my guest. I would like to ask… many questions.”

  Sam stiffened visibly.

  “Pretty sure I’m out of here as soon as we’re done with this, general,” Sam said.

  “Oh, but I absolutely insist.”

  “General,” Ed said, “we can talk about all of that after. Let’s have a look at the offices first.”

  Sam looked about ready to crawl out of his own skin, which was curious. Ed didn’t know if he should be concerned or not. Jansons, meanwhile, mostly just looked confused. In his case, it was an act, and not a particularly sincere one.

  “I am so sorry, Edgar, but this is all I was told would be available for you on this day.”

  “Then I’m sure there’s been a miscommunication. I have copies of the authorization papers with me, if you’d like to re-examine them. Or we can make a few calls.”

  “You know? I am sure it will be fine. For my part I was told only this room, but what the heck, yes? There’s nothing to see, and I would much rather you appreciate this now. Come!”

  He led them out of the room to a back staircase.

  “Will you be returning home once we are done here, Sam?” the general asked.

  “I don’t know that yet,” Sam said.

  “Perhaps you will be going to see your friend!”

  The stairs led to a landing, and a locked door, which Jansons opened.

  “Not sure I know what you mean,” Sam said.

  “Ah, I make a poor joke. I mean Ms. Annie Collins, of course. She is your great friend.”

  “General, Annie Collins isn’t any of your business,” Sam said. “Why don’t we keep her out of this?”

  Jansons dramatically gesticulated mortification.

  “Oh, but no! I only… a
bad joke! We are all very interested in Ms. Collins, and her spaceship. And here you are, one who knows her as well as anyone, so of course I have to ask about her, and I do it clumsy. Please don’t be offended.”

  He clapped Sam on the shoulder and headed down the corridor.

  “I don’t like him,” Sam said under his breath.

  “You don’t have to like him,” Ed said.

  “Good. Let’s get this over with, I need a nap and a lot of beer.”

  Jansons brought them into the office area, which was considerably less formal than the one in Algernon. This wasn’t a huge surprise.

  It was clean and mostly empty, a big bullpen space with desks from the 1950’s, computers from the 2000’s, and a couple of unused whiteboards.

  “You see, nobody really calls this space an office of their own,” Janson said. He was walking around the room, opening cupboards along the wall. In one, he found a radio.

  “Ah,” he muttered, fiddling with the volume.

  “More of that techno?” Sam asked.

  Ed thought he’d been hearing the local music for so long now that he wouldn’t even notice it any more, whereas Sam appeared ready to jump in the Baltic if he heard another note.

  “I am sorry again, Sam. You don’t like this? It’s very popular. I forget the name of the band. My sons love them.”

  “Turn it off. Please.”

  Jansons did so. Ed was trying to take in the room properly, which was becoming a challenge. Sam looked ready to come to blows with their tour guide, and Ed couldn’t figure out exactly why.

  “Where does that door go?” Ed asked.

  There was one door at the far end of the room that didn’t appear to lead anywhere obvious. He could tell by the layout that the other doors all led back into the hallway. This one was different.

  “Oh, that?” Jansons said. “That is only a maintenance closet. I don’t think I even have the key.”

  “I’d like to see what’s on the other side.”

  “Yes, but as I said, it’s only a maintenance closet. A mop and a bucket. It’s nothing.”

  Ed was about to say that he loved mops and buckets, simply could not get enough of them, especially old Soviet mops and buckets, and so if Jansons had no key to the door, he was simply going to have to find a way to break it down so Ed could examine the mop—and also the bucket—in all its former Communist glory.