The Spaceship Next Door

² ON A PALE BIKE

There were about seventeen different ways to get to Main Street from Annie’s front door by bicycle. Annie had tried all of them, and liked to brag about it under circumstances in which such bragging was appropriate, which wasn’t all that often. She never listed out what the seventeen or so routes actually were, and also never bothered to count them, so the number was likely closer to ten or eleven.

It was still a large number, but that number became less impressive when broken down mile-by-mile. The problem was there were only five ways to get within a half-mile of Main Street before the warren of side streets and petty tributaries complicated the process of reaching the central drag. Two of those ways were over bridges on either side of Main that would have been impossible for her to use without having begun on the wrong side of the Connecticut River. Two others came from the Northern and Northwestern side of the valley. She could have counted one of those as a valid route if she first went an extra fifteen miles out of her way, looping northward via some minor highway before turning back south in an entirely impractical detour. She hadn’t ever done this, but thought about trying it someday, maybe when she was older and in possession of a bike that was more forgiving on steep hills.

That left one practical road leading into town. She could jump off of that road at any number of places and cut through side streets before intersecting with Main, and that was where most of the variance she ascribed to her route came from.

She had two ways to get to this one practical road—it was called Patience Road, named after one of the original settlers, not the virtue one had to have to drive on it—but she always ended up taking the same one. The first option was to go left from her front door, uphill, until hooking up with Liberty Way. Liberty took her through the farmlands belonging to about six extremely private families whose names she didn’t know but whose cows she was intimately familiar with. It looped down below the farmland, flattened out into a dirt road that was impassible in rain (at least on a bike) that connected with the lower end of Patience. It was the longer route of the two in terms of miles-traveled, but the shortest on the clock.

The second route began as a right turn from her front door and down the hill to connect with a road that used to be called Tunney back when it was one-and-a-half car lengths wide. It was four cars wide now, newly paved, and a dead straight shot to Patience (which had also been widened since, although not as much.) Three years ago it was the nearly as fast a route as Liberty, but now it had traffic lights, and traffic.

And now it was called Spaceship Road.

Annie had witnessed every last iteration of this road, because as much as she knew the Liberty route would ultimately be more efficient, she preferred the path down Spaceship Road, so she took it almost every day.

She preferred it because it was more scenic. Liberty had cows and pastures, which was nice and all, but Spaceship Road had a little bit of everything. It had become a legitimate major thoroughfare, of sorts. The problem with it as compared to most large roads was that it didn’t actually go anywhere special. It went past something amazing, but the spaceship and the surrounding territory wasn’t officially a destination for anyone who didn’t wear an army uniform. There was no tourist center or lookout point or souvenir shop around the ship, because the government’s approach was to treat it as an unexploded bomb that might or might not be nuclear.

The road had been widened and paved for exactly two reasons: one was to get large, heavily armored vehicles to the spot quickly to defend the nation and the world against an impending alien attack that was exceedingly tardy; and two, so all the campers had a place to park.

Traffic in front of Spaceship Base One—this is what the army called it, despite the notable absence of a second ship to occupy a theoretical Base Two—was a constant tangle of slow-going rubberneckers trying to catch a glimpse of the alien vehicle on a road cut down to one-and-a-half lanes (roughly the width of the original Tunney Way) because of the unofficial trailer park taking up the rest of the street across from the fence. It was fair to say that in the event of a daytime extraterrestrial attack, humanity’s initial defenders would be a cross-section of self-appointed alien experts, mill employees heading to or from work, a farmer or two, and whatever army soldiers had the misfortune of being on gate duty that day. That would be about it, because there was no way the big guns stored in the semi-permanent base two miles up the hill would ever make it through traffic.

Also available to defend the world—for about ten minutes each morning and ten minutes every evening—was Annie Collins, atop a pale yellow cyclocross bicycle.

“ANNIE!” greeted Mr. Shoeman from the top of his RV, with a friendly smile and a wave. “C’mere!”

He gestured her over from the other side of the road. Heading downhill toward Main put her and her bike on the side of the army’s fifteen-foot tall chain link fence and the inbound traffic, which wasn’t moving much. (In the same way Annie had alternative routes down, so did every car stuck on the road. They drove past anyway.) It was an easy enough matter to steer the bike between cars along here, since the cars were traveling slower than she was. The civilian trailers were camped out across the street, on the shoulderless side of the road and at least partway onto farmland that used to be owned by old Mike Pequot, up until the state claimed part of it to build the road. Now it was mostly owned by summer mosquitos and rented by alien watchers, protestors and the occasional Jesus freak.

She hopped off the bike and walked it between the immobile cars.

“Any news?” she asked.

Art Shoeman was of the alien watcher variety, which was actually the only kind of squatter still around consistently. Protestors tended to turn up only for a few hours every day, and the religious zealots mostly confined themselves to the end of Main Street, where they could command more eyeballs.

Mr. Shoeman was in cargo shorts and a Polo shirt with old stains from at least two different meals on it. Scruffy and suffering from what he insisted was premature balding (“I’m not as old as I look!”) he had the same kind of non-threatening vibe as a schoolteacher or a priest. Never mind that one of the first things her mother told her when she started to blossom was to be careful around schoolteachers and priests. Such was the world.

“Dobbs thinks it moved,” he said.

“No kidding!”

Dobbs, a younger, chubbier, slightly weirder version of Art Shoeman, poked his head over the side of the trailer. “Swear to God,” he said.

“I’m coming up.”

Dobbs vanished, as Annie leaned her bike against the side of the trailer and headed up the ladder. Dobbs had a tendency to sit in his lawn chair on the roof in boxers and not much else, for basically the whole summer. As a tubby thirty year old with a perpetual sunburn, there was a lot to be said for him keeping his shirt on, and about a year ago—approximately when Annie started to display the more outward effects of puberty—he arrived at the same conclusion. So as she climbed up, he was undoubtedly grabbing a shirt and making himself slightly more presentable.

It was a little weird, because she could see him from the road every morning. It was like he only cared how he looked if he knew he was being looked at.

Standing on top of the camper was like discovering a new layer to the world: camper rooftop city. Each roof was a singular collection of makeshift furniture—a preponderance of folding chairs and card tables—and gonzo electrical equipment, telescopes or binoculars, antenna arrays, and laptop computers. About half of it was equipment invented by the inhabitants of the rooftop city, to test one theory or another regarding the spaceship. In the unlikely event any of them had a verifiable claim to make, they would first have to prove that the device they used did what they thought it did. The last detail was probably insurmountable.

Like Mika and Morrie, two roofs over. They’d taken an old Geiger counter, attached it to something they promised would amplify its range—somehow—and adjusted it (again somehow) to detect auras. If they ever made a discovery, they would have to prove the thing did what they said, and then they would have to prove auras were real.

Annie was pretty sure the last part was going to be tough. Already, at sixteen, she had a mature appreciation of the degree to which adults could delude themselves about things. She’d also learned not to take a whole lot of what she heard on Spaceship Road all that seriously.

Mika and Morrie were just one example. There were dozens of others, all doing what they could to study an object that was perhaps a quarter of a mile away and only partly visible through the tree line for most of the summer. (In the fall and winter, when the trees had fewer leaves, it was easy to see.)

Mr. Shoeman’s roof was kind of homey in its way. He had a green Astroturf carpet that smelled only a little like mildew, a few comfortable chairs, and a cooler with a surprisingly robust variety of beverages. And snacks. Lots of snacks. The alien trailer park collective was fueled primarily by pizza delivery and salty snacks, although on weekends in the summer they liked to have a big cookout, combining the forces of all the trailer neighbors. It was festive. Sometimes a few of the soldiers even came.

“So it moved?” Annie said, once she gained the high ground. Dobbs was (of course) now wearing a shirt, and standing in front of an array of electronic equipment that looked a lot like what happens when Radio Shack has a yard sale. There were three cameras slaved to a laptop, something that may have been a seismometer at one time, and a fourth camera with a telephoto lens mounted on a small tripod. The entire collection was on top of a table with tiny springs beneath it and under a roof made up of plastic sheets. The springs were supposed to be shock absorbers to keep local events such as a sixteen-year old climbing up the ladder from causing a tremble in the equipment. The roof and plastic were to protect the equipment when it rained.

“Maybe as much as two inches!” Dobbs said.

“No kidding!”

“Here, I’ll show you. Hang on.”

Dobbs started tapping away on the computer he used to collect information from the other computers.

“Pretty exciting, huh?” Mr. Shoeman said. He was on the other side of the roof tweaking one of the solar panels.

Power was always an issue. The campers weren’t near any sources of electricity and to refill their gas tanks they had to move, which at least half of them hadn’t done in two years. They made do with a combination of reusable generators, gas trading, and makeshift solar paneling. In perspective, it was funny, only because these were people at risk of running out of power and food and—in the winter—heat, while only a few miles from an ample supply of all of those things. The aliens would have made everyone’s lives a whole lot easier if they’d only landed across from a hotel.

“Sure. Two inches?”

“It’s not nothing.”

“No.”

Pretty close to it though, she thought.

She looked across the road. Mr. Shoeman’s trailer was in a prime location. Whenever news people showed up, they were guaranteed to take at least one photo from the spot where Annie was standing. The trees framed the ship almost perfectly, and nearly all of it was in view.

They weren’t close. Sure, in the event the spaceship one day rose up and began attacking the citizens of planet Earth, they were entirely too close, but putting aside that potential outcome, they weren’t meaningfully nearby. Certainly, they were not close enough to make a potential two-inch movement—in a thing that hadn’t budged since it landed three years ago—more likely than a measurement error in Dobbs’ equipment. Assuming Dobbs was measuring what he thought he was.

“Here, here, here,” Dobbs said excitedly. “Look!”

He turned the laptop around so she could see the screen. It showed a graph with a notable spike. The graph had no context.

“Two inches caused that?” she asked.

“The Y-axis… yeah, it’s in millimeters.”

“Oh, really cool,” she said, mustering a little enthusiasm. “What do you think it means?”

Mr. Shoeman laughed. “Who knows? We have so much more to do first. We have to wait and see if it does it again, and then we’ll see about any patterns and then maybe something. We’re publishing our results in a few days. Could be somebody caught the same thing, or something different at the same time. We’ll know soon.”

Publish our results meant tell everyone else about it at the weekend barbecue. These were enthusiasts, not scientists. All the actual scientists were either working with the government (and tacitly not sharing their findings if they had any) or had already gone home.

“That’s really exiting, guys,” she said with a little smile. “You’ll let me know, right?”

“Of course!” Mr. Shoeman clapped her on the shoulder while Dobbs mostly blushed. “Maybe soon the whole world will know!”

“Fingers crossed!” Annie said.

IT WAS difficult to muster up the kind of enthusiasm they were looking for from her. Not so long ago, every burp, tweet, and shrug ostensibly discovered by the members of the trailer park collective was a landmark event. Annie would hear about it and tell her friends and her mom, often out of breath and wide-eyed with the anticipation of a thing to come.

The thing never came, though, because the ship never moved.

There were only two things that could be easily verified from the distance of the roof city: the ship still existed; it was warm enough that snow melted off of it.

The second thing was extremely interesting, but it seemed like most times the people in the campers focused on the first thing, since that was why they were there in the first place. An alien spacecraft had landed in Massachusetts, and this was something to bear witness to.

The problem appeared to be that nobody knew what to do after having borne witness, aside from continuing to do so routinely.

When the ship first landed Annie couldn’t get enough of the entire experience. Excited people showed up every day with weird equipment and wild theories and none of them cared who they told about it: a reporter from NBC or an inquisitive thirteen-year old girl, it was all the same to most of them. Listen to us, they said, over and over, as often as possible to as many people as would stop to hear.

There was a breathlessness to the whole thing, as surely any minute something would happen, and the world lost its collective mind just thinking about the possibilities. It was crazy and intoxicating, and Annie loved the whole thing.

She also believed a lot of what she was told. At thirteen, the idea that adults could be thoroughly and completely wrong-headed about anything was just a growing notion. So if Derinda Lake wanted to tell her the aliens had burrowed from underneath the ship and walked among them, Annie was inclined to believe her, even if it contradicted Carter Kent’s calm assertion that the machine was clearly an unmanned probe presaging the arrival of a space fleet. Likewise, Loonie Larry and his zombie theory didn’t fit the first two theories—or any other sane theory—but she was willing to take him seriously too, for a little while.

Dobbs and Mr. Shoeman didn’t have a strong theory, or not one they were willing to share. They were more interested in collecting evidence first and then developing a conclusion.

That was all fine, except there was no evidence to collect, and every day that passed without real evidence was a day that made Mr. Shoeman and Dobbs seem that much more desperate, and more like everyone else out there in the camper rooftop city. They were all as friendly as ever, and she still liked talking to them, but she was approaching a point where her interactions were more out of pity than interest. One day she was going to grow up and leave Sorrow Falls. The only way any of them—Dobbs and Mr. Shoeman or, really anyone else in the campers—were going anywhere was if the ship did something, and Annie was growing convinced that this would never happen.

ANNIE CLIMBED down from the ladder, hoping the display of modest enthusiasm she’d given was sufficient. It was unfortunate that once the camera crews and print reporters stopped coming around on a weekly basis, the only people who would still listen were people like Annie, which meant in a weird way that they needed her affirmation.

Or something.

It was a dynamic she didn’t really understand. Mr. Shoeman was retired, his wife died a decade earlier, and if he had children and grandchildren, he didn’t talk about them. (His relationship to Dobbs was a complete mystery. They weren’t related by blood and that was all she knew.) It was possible he had adopted her in his own way.

She already had a grandfather. Her mom’s dad. He died when she was seven, and she only remembered seeing him one time. He spent ten minutes trying to make her laugh and impressing her by making it look like his thumb was detachable. The smile on his face when he performed this trick was a little like what Art Shoeman did when he had something new to tell Annie. She didn’t quite know how to tell him she knew his thumb wasn’t really coming off, especially when he seemed to believe it was.

She walked the bike back across the street through the slow-moving traffic of perpetual rubberneckers.

“Morning, Annie,” one of the soldiers said with a smile and a wave.

“Morning, corporal,” she said back, wheeling the bike over to him.

His name was Sam Corning. He was a twenty-four year old six foot four square jawed soldier with baby blue eyes and a smile that never went away even when he stopped smiling.

Annie was going to run away with him one day, to live on a ranch in the hills of Virginia, and make babies and fresh vegetables. That he didn’t know any of this had surprisingly little impact on her plans.

“You can call me Sam, you know that.”

“What, out here in the open? People will talk.”

Annie learned to flirt by watching old black-and-white movies. She couldn’t tell yet if she was any good at it.

He laughed. “It’s corporal if you need rescuing or something, otherwise Sam is just fine. We’ve been through this.”

Sam Corning was the only soldier she’d met from the base that didn’t like to be reminded he happened to be a soldier. Annie was pretty sure that meant something, but didn’t know what.

“How’s things? Quiet?”

“As always. Saw a bug earlier; pretty sure I never saw one like it before. Probably not an alien.”

“Probably not.”

“Killed it anyway, just in case.”

“With the gun?”

Sam had an M16A2 on his shoulder, a Beretta M9 handgun on his hip, and a Bowie knife on his belt. She knew this not because of any particular fascination with guns—she had no love for them—but because he’d given her a walkthrough of his weaponry in a prior conversation.

“I used my boot. Anything exciting going on over there?”

He nodded toward Dobbs.

“I’m afraid that’s classified, Corporal Corning. How about here?”

“Equally classified. Although rumor has it someone will be going through the gate in another hour or two. My orders are to let them in and close the gate behind them.”

“Truly, this is a challenging job.”

“You want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.”

Annie laughed. She quoted A Few Good Men to him one time and he never quite got over it.

“So who is it?”

“Classified.”

“The president? THE PRESIDENT IS COMING?”

“No, stop shouting.”

She turned to the trailers. “HEY, EVERYONE!”

“Stop!”

“So who’s coming?” she asked, turning back. “Spill.”

“Some journalist. Doing a retrospective. Time magazine or… one of them, I forget.”

“Oooh, that’s more exciting than the president.”

“Really? To whom?”

“Pretty much everyone.”

By the third year of the spaceship occupation, everyone in town had either met the president or met someone whose job it was to keep them from meeting the president, at least two or three times. Sorrow Falls also had its share of members of congress and visiting heads of state, plus a variety of religious dignitaries. It was an understatement to say the community was jaded when it came to famous people.

On the other hand, a journalist was someone who would stop and talk to the trailer city collective. That was much more important than any president.

“Well keep it to yourself anyway,” Sam said. “No idea if people are even supposed to know.”

“A retrospective, huh?”

“I think so. Probably just talk to the usuals. Billy Pederson and everyone.”

“Right.”

There were about a dozen people from Sorrow Falls who were legitimately famous. Billy was one of them, but there was also the sheriff and his deputies, the fire chief, the guy who drove the ambulance that day, the owners of the land adjacent to the ship, and one or two other people who had come about their fame honestly, which was to say they happened to be in the right place at the right time and this could be verified independently. A dozen other people were famous for the opposite reason: they claimed to be somewhere they weren’t, or do something they hadn’t done. They achieved a temporary fame, which devolved into a public shaming. Annie knew a couple of them, and didn’t find them to be all that regretful. Fame was the be-all and end-all for some folks.

What the famous people of Sorrow Falls had in common was direct interaction with the alien spacecraft. The early days before the army came in with their military cordon and their giant fence, and daily bomber runs over the no-fly zone above, and helicopter fly-by’s, and so on, were tumultuous. A lot of people had an opportunity to see the ship up close. Those that did eventually became famous for it, even if they had nothing to say.

“Probably looking for some story nobody’s told yet,” Sam said. “As you do. Pretty much no stories left, though, huh? Not until it does something.”

“Yeah, probably not,” she said. “But he’s getting a close-up of the ship, huh?”

“So I’m told.”

“That’s a little unusual, right? When was the last time that happened?”

Sam shrugged. “I guess. I don’t think about it much. Maybe he was just the first to ask in a while.”

“Maybe. Well, I gotta run, but thanks for the info. Now I know what I’m doing with my day.”

Sam laughed. “You’re going to track down the one reporter in Sorrow Falls in the next two hours?”

“Oh, I won’t need two hours. C’mon, Sam, who do you think you’re talking to?”

“Fine, well when you do find him, keep my name out of it.”

She kicked her leg over the bike and pointed it toward town. “Don’t worry, soldier. I always protect my informants.”