The Spaceship Next Door

by Gene Doucette

  A lot had been written about that year, some of it good, most of it pop psychology of the worst sort. All the analyses worked with the same thesis: the modern psyche was more fragile than anyone imagined, and all it took to reveal that was an alien ship that didn’t even do anything. Mostly, they proved only that the best history was the kind written long after the fact.

  Three years later, there was still a higher-than-average suicide rate internationally, and one or two major religions continued to cope poorly—do aliens have souls was becoming a large enough topic of dispute to cause a philosophical schism in Christianity, and was the basis of two new major cults—but overall there was no longer the sense that the entire planet was resting on the edge of a cliff.

  Ed thought that was probably healthy. He also thought it was a little soon to stop worrying about the ship.

  * * *

  Main Street did sort of sit on the edge of a cliff, if one looked at it from a purely geographic perspective. The SUV—in a slow crawl down the street thanks in part to a traffic light every fifty feet—came to just past the halfway point, where southern edge of the gigantic Hollis Paper Mill could be seen on the left.

  Viewing the mill from Main meant looking directly at the top floor of the building and the base of one of five smokestacks. This was because everything on the Eastern side of Main was built on a steep downhill, which was part of the Connecticut River valley. The drop was more than seventy-five feet before it hit water.

  The mill was built to jut out over the river, supported by great wooden pylons that looked structurally suspect in every picture Ed saw of the place. He expected to read one day about the building being swallowed up whole by the rushing water, with follow-up stories declaring aliens had destroyed the mill, and not gravity and fluid dynamics.

  Falling into the river would be bad for a lot of reasons, as the building wouldn’t last very long. About a half mile from the mill, downstream, was a waterfall that was also called Sorrow Falls. (According to one version of the town’s history, the town was named after the waterfall. The other version involved the word “falls” as a verb, and was more interesting.) Ed wasn’t sure exactly how steep that drop was, but it was steep enough to wreck a canoe.

  There were four blocks of neighborhood between Main and the mill. Not so long ago, each one of those blocks held low rent row housing for employees of both the mill and the local retail shops. Since the ship landed many of those buildings had either been taken down and replaced by prettier versions of the same thing or renovated with the same approximate goal in mind: capitalize on a burgeoning local interest. This ended up being wishful thinking. About half of the world expected the ship to destroy all life on Earth at any given second, and nobody possessed of that opinion was interested in moving closer to said object. The other half of the world was mostly curious, but the number of that half who could see themselves living next to it turned out to be smaller than the number of available condos in town. As a consequence, the property values dropped—or more precisely failed to rise—and soon the owners of those buildings were renting the spaces to the same families they’d been trying to evict, and for about the same monthly charge.

  Basically, everyone ended up with a Jacuzzi and marble kitchen counters thanks to the spaceship and some unwise speculation.

  “Here’s all we have on the second anomaly,” General Morris said. In his hand was a tightly packed manila folder. “I’m told you haven’t seen it yet. We’ve got an office set aside for you at the base, so you don’t leave this lying.”

  Morris was speaking of the hotel room Ed rented, because a reporter wouldn’t stay at the army base. Reporters also didn’t have classified folders lying around for maids to find.

  “Thank you, I’ll look at it later,” Ed said. He slid the packet into his messenger bag. “I’d like to see it for myself first.”

  They reached an Army checkpoint. This was another reason traffic on Main moved at a perpetual slow crawl: there were checkpoints every half mile from the northern bridge into town on the far end of Main, up Patience and onto Spaceship Road, all the way to the base. At no time had they been anything other than open and allowing traffic to pass unobstructed through town. (Except, of course, for passage through the fence to see the ship, and passage onto the army base.) However, they were ominous-looking, toll-both-like structures staffed by armed soldiers whose existence demanded that cars slow for them.

  The checkpoints were reminders of the extremely peculiar legal nature of the town of Sorrow Falls as compared to every other American municipality in the history of the country.

  In a decision that was no less controversial after nearly three years, Congress—with the backing and signature of the president—suspended the Posse Comitatus Act as it applied specifically to the town surrounding the spaceship. The groundwork for the modification was actually laid a few years earlier in response to concerns about large-scale terrorist acts on domestic soil. Essentially, “acts of invasion from a non-terrestrial source” were lumped in with terrorism, which in turn shaped the nature of the government’s response: from that point forward it was assumed that the aliens were hostile. A not-insignificant number of people had issue with that assumption, and for every year in which nothing continued to happen, their voices got louder.

  Ed wasn’t one of those voices. His first official recommendation as an employee of the federal government was the complete evacuation of the area, and this remained—in his opinion—the correct choice, albeit the least politically savvy one.

  The local suspension of Posse Comitatus only legalized something that had already happened in Sorrow Falls, more or less the minute enough people were convinced that this thing was real: the army rolling into town and taking over.

  In hindsight, this went pretty well, which was to say it could have gone disastrously wrong and it didn’t. There were protests—some from residents, many more from local non-residents, and many more still from non-local non-residents a great distance away and expressed only on Internet pages—but the overall sentiment, from local law enforcement up to the town council and the governor of the state was: here, you deal with this, we don’t know how to.

  The potential for an adversarial relationship was, essentially, mitigated by the presence of a common enemy. And since the enemy was silent and apparently peaceful, the result was sort of the best of all possible worlds. The locals and the soldiers both agreed to act like members of the human race together.

  It helped that the army didn’t bow to what ended up being significant pressure to take more extreme actions. Few realized that in the first few months all it would have taken was a stray rock thrown at the head of someone drawing a government salary for the entire town to end up evacuated. (An evacuation that would have followed a plan drafted by Ed, since he was the one who wanted to do it in the first place.) The rock never got thrown, though, and the military was able to push back and avoid the P.R. nightmare that would come from seizing twenty square miles of public and private land and displacing an entire community.

  In the end, the army claimed only two plots: a half-acre perimeter around the ship (which was on public soil), and three acres a mile up the road. This was purchased rather than claimed, from landowners who otherwise would never have made anything like the kind of money the government was throwing around.

  So everyone got along really well, and pretended to ignore the fact that the United States Army was the actual law in this prototypically sleepy Massachusetts town. The town council still functioned as one would expect in a democratically structured civic arrangement, and private property was still treated as private property by all the people making gobs of money off owning land there, but the reality was that if the Army decided to disband the council, seize all the businesses on Main Street, and lock up everyone, legally they could do it.

  They just hadn’t.

  Past the checkpoint, the SUV reached the end of Main: east would have taken them to another bridge over the Connecticut Rive
r, while west sent them uphill and toward the ship. This was the effective termination point of ‘downtown’ Sorrow Falls, a Y junction that was a favorite for protestors. Every car reaching that point had to commit to a slow turn in one direction or another, which gave them plenty of time to read a poorly spelled sign or two.

  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.”

  * * *

  It 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.