The Spaceship Next Door

⁸ ORDINARY PEOPLE

The vehicle Ed showed up in the following morning was a species of luxury town car Annie had never seen the inside of before. She passed them on her bike plenty of times around town, but had yet to come across one without tinted windows. She tended to spend a lot more time than was healthy speculating on the identity of the person inside.

“This is your rental?” she asked. Ed was standing at the passenger door, holding it open for her like a chauffeur who didn’t know the guest was supposed to sit in back.

“Of course. Not like I had time to trade up.”

She slid in. Plush seats, cushy. Computer in the dashboard. Localized air conditioning and heating for each seat. There was a butt warming function. It had Wi-Fi.

Ed hopped in the driver’s side.

“Better than getting driven around in an SUV?” he asked. Behind the wheel, he looked about 90% less geekish than he had at Joanne’s. She began to wonder just how well it paid to be a secret government expert on things.

“I don’t know what the interior of the SUV looked like,” she said, “but I don’t think I ever want to leave this car.”

“It was nicer. Had a bar in it.”

Ed started the car. She was so accustomed to the loud, complaining engine in Violet’s car she at first didn’t notice they were idling.

“I thought we’d start with the people in those campers,” Ed said. “Is that okay?”

“If that’s where you want to start, sure. I mean, what kind of weird are you looking for?”

“Two different kinds.”

“Great.”

He put the car in gear, and it felt more like gliding than driving. Ed saw her expression and laughed.

“It’s just a car. Spaceships are cooler.”

“Yeah, but I can’t get inside of that, and anyway it never moves.”

A right turn from the driveway took them to the junction with Spaceship Road, and all the traffic that came with that road. To the left was the ship. To the right was the army base. The road continued for several miles after that, out of town, until terminating at one of the Old Post Roads that striated the countryside.

Ed merged into the inbound traffic, and then it was stop-and-go for a while.

“When you said something’s not right about Sorrow Falls, what did you mean?” she asked. “Or is that top secret too?”

“It’s not. What I mean is, the town shouldn’t still be here.”

She laughed.

“Like, what, an impact crater?”

“No, I mean, have you ever asked yourself how you could be living within a mile of an alien ship?”

“Not really. I was here first.”

“It’s too dangerous, being this close. The correct reaction to this situation would have been to evacuate the area for as long as it took to ascertain the intentions of the craft.”

“According to whom?”

“Me, mostly. But I wasn’t the only one who said so. Every time someone with enough authority to act on that recommendation agreed with me, though, they were overridden.”

“Because that’s a crazy idea. The ship isn’t doing anything to anybody.”

“So far as we know it isn’t. Except I think it is. I think the ship wants the town to stay put.”

“That is one crazy theory, Ed. Do you get paid for that?”

“I get paid a lot for that. It’s not that crazy. We already know the ship can implant ideas aggressively, in self-defense. I experienced that first-hand yesterday. I knew what I was thinking didn’t really come from my own head, and yet I couldn’t stop. It was jarring. What if the ship has a more passive version of that technology impacting the area at large? I mean, nothing in Sorrow Falls is really right for this circumstance. You all went about your lives, pretty much.”

“I think you’re underestimating the unflappable nature of the New England native mindset. Besides, the people you’re talking about, the ones who would get to decide to evacuate the region, they don’t live here. They’re in Washington. Did the ship call them up or something?”

“Well that’s the thing. My first recommendation made it all the way to the desk of the president. He was ready to sign the order. He told me so.”

He glanced over at Annie to see what kind of impact this had, thinking possibly that the idea he had the president’s ear might be impressive. She knew about ten people who’d spoken to the president personally, and she once bussed his breakfast table, so she wasn’t overly impressed, but thought she probably should have been. To the rest of the world, it was undoubtedly a big deal.

“What changed his mind?” Annie asked.

“Sorrow Falls did. He came here to visit before signing the order, because someone who’d already visited convinced him to do it.”

“Maybe he decided against it after meeting all of us.”

“Maybe. And maybe the ship decided it for him.”

THERE WAS some confusion among the members of the rooftop camper city when Ed and Annie arrived.

Only one day earlier, a big black army SUV went through the gate, and out popped an army general whose name nobody seemed to know—he was new, everyone agreed—and a skinny city guy in faux rugged clothing and glasses.

The second man inspired a daylong debate between the rooftops regarding his possible identity and purpose. The easy, obvious answer was that he was a reporter working on a new story who’d pulled strings to get a close-up. But insofar as this was easy, and obvious, it was rejected unilaterally.

Secret government operative worked for most of them as a convenient catchall. What kind of operative was not agreed-upon, nor was the arm of the government he must have come from, nor even the government, but it fit most theories nicely anyway.

Brenda and Steve, for instance, had strong opinions regarding the United Nations, which was not in itself a government. But an operative working for the U.N. could be from any nation, nation-state, or territory. He could also be one of their nationless operatives, a super-secret police force whose members knew no allegiance to any one government. No such secret police force existed, and anyone who listened to Brenda or Steve for more than a few minutes realized they were really talking about the utterly mundane Interpol, if Interpol was bitten by an evil radioactive spider.

The trailer park collective had, conservatively, two hundred pictures of the operative, so a great deal of bandwidth was expended on facial recognition software. This same software gave them general Morris’s name in about ten minutes, but didn’t turn up any definite matches on the other man.

The matches rated the highest were: a background actor in the film Every Which Way But Loose (except he was too young); an ethicist from Manila (except he didn’t look Filipino); a retired Olympic gymnast from Kazakhstan (except he didn’t look like a gymnast.) Winston had an interesting theory involving the grandson of the joint chiefs and some minor plastic surgery, but this didn’t stick because nobody could quite justify using facial recognition software to identify someone as a person who didn’t look like themselves any more. It seemed like an explicit contravention of the logical basis of the program. Also, as more than one person pointed out, if he was the grandson of one of the joint chiefs, it made perfect sense that he would have access to the ship, perhaps even to write a story about it.

The matter remained unsettled for the entire day.

Equally unsettled was what the man and the general did while inside the ship compound.

There were one or two positions near the ship that were effectively invisible from the street. At night, it was usually possible to get an approximate idea, because people at night needed flashlights, and because the passive thermal imaging detection—two different campers had equipment that did this—could track their heat signature pretty well when the sun wasn’t out.

The men used an infrared emitter. That was established right off, because as soon as they began using it a half-dozen alarms went off on a half-dozen roofs. But nobody knew why, or what it meant.

By the end of the day the only thing any of them could agree upon was that they couldn’t agree on anything. This was more or less how they ended every day, though, so in that sense the strange man in the glasses and faux rugged clothing was just the latest in a series of debate topics.

But then came the next day, when the same man returned—new clothing, new car, same glasses—with Annie Collins in tow.

Nobody really knew what to do with that information.

“CAN YOU HEAR THE BUZZ?” Annie asked, as she joined Ed on the driver’s side of the car. There was no parking on Spaceship Road, so he just pulled over in front of the gates. When the soldier—who looked at Annie, confused, for several seconds—asked what they were doing, Ed showed him an ID that said, basically, he could put the car anywhere he wanted in Sorrow Falls.

“Not sure what you mean,” he said to Annie.

“Look at my people on the campers.”

A cascade of heads popping up to look down at them, a murmur of conversation, camera flashes. Annie felt like she was in a National Geographic special, except she was the animal being observed, and all the scientists were scrambling.

“I hear it now. This is going to be weird, isn’t it?”

“You have no idea. Let’s walk slowly, they’re going to need time to delete all the pictures they took of you yesterday.”

“You’re joking.”

“Not even a little bit. Welcome to Sorrow Falls.”

“Morning, Annie!”

Art Shoeman popped up and waved them over.

“Morning, Mr. Shoeman. How’s things? Anything exciting yesterday?”

“You should ask that fella next to you, he might give you a better answer.”

“This is Edgar Somerville. He’s a reporter. He had some questions for… well, everyone. Can we come up?”

“A reporter, is he?” Mr. Shoeman said. He gave Annie a wink he probably thought Ed didn’t see. “Sure, sure, come on up. Do you need me to make introductions?”

“THEY’RE GETTING in through the water supply!”

It was four hours later. Ed and Annie were on fifth trailer and eighth interview, and being shouted at by Earl Pleasant, a man whose surname was clearly ironic. Earl seemed both perpetually angry and permanently sunburned, giving his face a cartoonish shade that reflected his ardor.

“How do you mean?” Ed asked. Annie, who made this and every other introduction to this point, had perfected a kind of impassive expression, which projected some degree of belief and sincerity to these true believers. (This was a misleading phrase, as they all believed something different, but with great individual ferocity.) To Ed, her expression looked more like amusement.

“Through the water table. I have maps, I’ll show you!” Earl disappeared into a back area, ostensibly the bedroom of the camper, behind a sliding door.

The inside of Earl’s trailer smelled like laundered sweat and turned fruit. But it was cool and out of the sun, which was a welcome respite.

“You holding up okay?” Annie asked.

“I had no idea,” he said. “I thought these guys were just waiting for something to happen.”

“Well they are, but they also want to be the first to know it’s happening.”

“It’s like they’re all making decisions based on some kind of dream logic.”

“I’m not with you.”

“They aren’t getting any feedback from the ship, or the government, or anybody with the necessary scientific background, so their imaginations are just rolling along, ignorant of anything attached to reality.”

“Yeah, don’t let them hear you talk like that. And try to avoid the word ‘ignorant’.”

“Here!”

Earl returned with a topographical map and slapped it down on the table in front of Ed. This was accomplished with an unsettling degree of violence.

“This is a USGS water table survey of the area. As you can see, the ship’s location is just about the ideal spot for a well.”

Without knowing a lot about the provenance of the map—it could have been a map of any part of the country, as there was no key or date stamp attached, only a magic marker dot marking the location of the ship—it still looked like there were a dozen excellent places in the area for a well.

“What would be the goal?” Ed asked.

“I told you, this is how they’re getting in.”

“Earl, I think what Mr. Somerville is asking, is what do they do once they’ve gotten into the water supply? What happens next?”

“Well we don’t know that. But that’s why nothing’s happened for so long, it takes a while to get down there, do what they gotta do. If you ask me, it’s about turning us.”

“Turning…”

“Species conversion! You might be part-alien right now, if you’ve drunk the water round here. I drink only rainwater, just to be sure. They’ll probably get the livestock first. And the pets. But it’ll move up the chain.”

“Okay. Thanks, that’s really good stuff.” Ed stood and offered his hand, which Earl looked at but didn’t take.

“Sorry, I don’t touch people,” he said. “It’s not personal.”

“I understand completely.”

“This is for what magazine, again?”

“The Atlantic,” Annie said. “It’s big deal story, Earl.”

“Well that’s good. People need to know.”

“They’ll know,” she said.

She led Edgar out of the trailer by the elbow.

“You need a break?” she asked. “A cigarette or something?”

“Do you smoke?”

“No, but I think Mrs. Chen does, a few campers over. We could get you one.”

“No, thanks, that’s… an oddly specific offer.”

“You look like a guy who needs a cigarette.”

“I smoked in my twenties, but it’s been five years.”

“There, see? I have you pegged. C’mon, then. Laura and Oona are a trip, you have to meet them.”

Laura Lane and Oona Kozlowsky, in the trailer next to Earl’s, were indeed a ‘trip’, as archaic as that description was. They were dressed in a peculiar kind of battle armor that looked like it was borrowed from the set of a Mad Max film. They appeared to be under the impression that the apocalypse had already transpired and they were the only ones who fully understood this.

That opinion was actually shared to a certain degree by everyone there. A kind of cognitive dissonance was taking place among these (as Annie called them) experiencers, whereby the spaceship actually had done a thing and they were already living in the aftermath of that thing. In that sense, they had a little more in common with Ed—who thought the ship actually was having an impact on the collective psyche of the town—than he was fully comfortable admitting to. But their version of ‘done something’ and his varied drastically.

One particularly impressive iteration of this theme was espoused by a man named Gunter, who was convinced the world effectively ended when the ship landed and everyone was living in a kind of Matrix-like artificial reality. His proof was that he could find no proof, which proved the program was so seamless it could only be designed by a superior alien intellect.

Laura and Oona were a little less dramatic, but only a little. Their camper, normal-looking on the outside, was a reinforced tank on the inside, with a bomb-shelter store of canned goods and at least ten guns. Ed didn’t know much about guns but was pretty sure two or three of the ones they had weren’t legal for private ownership.

Annie made the introductions, and then went into the preamble.

“Mr. Somerville is doing a story on the ship, but what he’s really looking for is the whole picture. Everything, just from your perspectives. Like, when you got here, what you’re here for, what you’ve seen, what you think. All that stuff.”

“Sounds like a goof hunt,” Oona said.

Oona described herself as ‘the big butch dyke of the Sorrow Falls’, which appeared to be a deliberate attempt to embrace what might be said about her behind her back. She was a heavyset woman with a buzz cut, wearing an appreciable quantity of studded brown leather.

“It’s not a goof hunt,” Annie said. “He’s talking to everyone in town, I just brought him here first.”

“What’s your part in this sweetie?” Laura asked. Laura introduced herself as a ‘lipstick lesbian’, but was only stereotypically effeminate in contrast to Oona. She was more petite, certainly, and kept her hair longer. The hair even had a barrette with a plastic flower. But she favored the same leather clothing; she just wore it a little better.

“Tour guide. Mr. Somerville’s interested in the people nobody’s talked to before, and not the ones everybody’s talked to. I know everyone, so…”

Laura laughed. “You sure do.”

“Still sounds like a goof hunt,” Oona said.

“I’m sorry,” Ed said. “What is a goof hunt?”

“It’s when a reporter shows up and promises a fair perspective, then goes on back to New York or wherever they’re from and writes up a goof piece. Look at what these dummies believe. That’s a goof hunt.”

“Oh. No, this won’t be anything like that. Promise.”

“Well I don’t trust you, mister.” Oona turned to Annie. “This is on you, girlie.”

“You won’t see any goof stories coming from Ed,” Annie said. “I promise.”

“All right. So what do you want to know?”

“Hey, we should tell him about the thing,” Laura said.

Oona glared at Laura. Laura was either oblivious or deliberately ignoring her partner.

“Something cool started happening about six weeks ago,” she said to Annie and Ed.

Annie said, “we can just start at the beginning and—”

“Actually, let’s start there,” Ed interrupted. “What happened six weeks ago?”

Annie shot Ed a look, and all of a sudden there were three conversations going on at once in the trailer, and only one of them was a verbal conversation.

“Nothing,” Oona said, her eyebrows screaming at Laura.

“Oh, for goodness sake, if we keep secrets we’re just as bad as they are.” The ‘they’ was conveyed as meaning the government but, tellingly, she pointed at Ed when she said it. “Come on, you guys, let’s go to the roof, I’ll show you.”

THE ONLY WAY to the roof was up an internal ladder, which distinguished Oona and Laura’s trailer from all the others Annie was familiar with.

It was easy to understand why the women preferred this design: their roof was a gun tower. A three-foot wall augmented the edge, making it possible to crouch down and—assuming the wall could stop bullets—hide from an attack on the ground, and there were four rifles mounted on hooks at strategic points. A Gatling gun would not have been entirely out of place.

Annie had never been to their roof before, and only really seen it from a distance, from Gunter’s roof two spots over. (Gunter was nuts, but he was also really nice.) It drove home the paranoia she’d seen in small doses before from the women.

“It’s over here,” Laura said, attracting the attention of a suddenly eager Edgar Somerville. This was an enormous annoyance to Annie, although she couldn’t say why. She already knew he wasn’t telling her things, because he told her specifically he couldn’t, so there were no surprises here. Still, this was the first time he’d responded this way. Dobbs thought the ship moved two inches a few days ago, Johnny Nguyen insisted he saw the ship alter the migratory patterns of geese ten days ago, and Mika and Morrie said the ship’s aura turned ‘more purplish’ fifteen days back. Ed didn’t even raise an eyebrow then.

What happened six weeks ago, Edgar? she thought.

“What’s all this do?” Ed asked Laura, referring to a large bank of equipment. Already, they had seen multiple arrangements of electronic toys. Ed asked the same question each time, and the answer was almost always disappointing. Either what the equipment did wasn’t all that interesting, or it would have been interesting if it did what the owner thought it did.

Behind them, Oona lumbered up the ladder. She fit through the opening only barely. It was close enough for Annie to wonder if they had plans on either widening the hole or reducing the size of the owner any time soon.

“Well, it’s pretty basic. I know we’ve got, what, a hundred gadgets pointed at that thing, right? Altogether?” She looked to Annie for affirmation. She was still ignoring Oona, who was actively glowering in a way that would have made angry Earl proud.

“At least a hundred,” Annie agreed. “Plus the ones on the other side of the fence.”

“Right, the government sensors. That’s some state-of-the-art stuff, isn’t it Mr. Somerville?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“You should know if you’re going to write about it. You didn’t ask general Morris when you were over there yesterday?”

Ed blushed. Annie nearly laughed out loud. She warned him.

“No, it’s… it’s all classified.”

“Everyone loves that word,” Laura said. “Classified. Anyway, we’re all playing the same game of ‘let’s see what the invaders are going to do’, like it’s going to make a difference.”

“It isn’t going to make a difference?” Ed asked.

“Maybe I’m being naïve or… help me out.”

“Fatalistic,” Oona said. She was settling into a beach chair near one of the rifles. “That’s what dear old daddy called us.”

“My daddy, not hers,” Laura whispered.

“Go on, give up the whole story. I’ll just be over here cleaning the guns.”

Ed had the good sense to look alarmed.

“Don’t worry about her,” Laura said. “She’s a big teddy bear.”

Oona giggled.

“Where was I?”

“You were being naïve,” Ed said.

“Yes, so everyone’s hung up on what they’re going to do, and from where I’m sitting, well, whoever the invaders are, they did something we may never know how to do. Interstellar travel, right? Who does that? Not us.”

“It doesn’t matter if we know what they’re going to do,” Annie said.

“Right, honey. Who are we to stop them? The ant doesn’t stop the boot, the ant gets out of the way of the boot.”

“You’re pretty close to the boot,” Ed said.

“Right, but we still want to know when it’s going to move.”

“Let’s dispense with the boot analogy,” Oona said.

“What we decided was that maybe we don’t care as much what the ship is here to do so long as we have a good idea when it’s going to do that.”

“That’s what this equipment can tell you?”

“It tells me about sound.”

Ed looked visibly disappointed. “Oh. You mean like what Art Shoeman’s doing?”

Oona laughed. She had a laugh designed specifically for maximum derision. “UFOMAN doesn’t know what he’s doing. Neither does that kid of his, Dobble.”

“Dobbs,” Annie corrected.

“Whatever. Every time a truck climbs the hill they’re running for the bunker. Metaphorically.”

“We don’t have a bunker,” Laura said to Ed. “Don’t write that we have a bunker.”

Annie was suddenly convinced they had a bunker.

“So let me show you,” Laura said, turning on a monitor. The markings of a three-by-three grid appeared on the screen. Laura pointed above her head.

“We have an array at the top of this pole. Right now it’s pointed across the street.”

The array she spoke of was nine parabolic microphones in a configuration that matched the screen grid.

“It’s not focused. This is… it’s like a wide angle shot if it were a video. You get it?”

“Sure,” Ed said.

“Now, we figure, everything makes noise, right? This is how we’ll know if the ship is about to do something. It’ll make a noise. Art’s thinking the same way, but he’s lousy at it. I’m gonna turn on the array.”

She flipped a switch. Nothing changed, aside from a light on the underside that turned red. The screen came to life, though.

“Each square in the grid is a different quadrant. You can see the sound waves.”

It looked like a black pond with green ripples from invisible stones.

“How sensitive is this?” Ed asked.

“It’s on a starter setting, so not very. The ship is the middle grid, though. Do you see it?”

The middle grid had little wave splashes at the corners, but nothing in the middle.

“It’s not making any noise,” Ed offered.

“It’s not that simple,” Oona said. “This is how we were goofed. Some ass from the Times wrote about how we flipped because the ship wasn’t making a sound, but that isn’t the point.”

“Even at this setting, everything makes noise,” Laura said. “Look top left. You know what that’s picking up? The wind through the leaves, or a bird, or cricket a thousand feet off. Everything makes noise. Except the ship. The ship is a hole in the sonic signature of this field.”

“Why is that?”

“It’s sucking up the sound,” Oona said. “Always has done. That’s why it pisses me off when people talk about how it’s not doing anything. The hell it isn’t. Something in there is absorbing sound waves.”

“It’s always done this?” Ed asked.

“Up until six weeks ago,” Laura said.

She punched a command into the system. The sound array expanded, the parabolic microphones spreading away from one another and refocusing on a single point.

“When we target just the ship the whole system goes silent,” she said.

The screen reflected the point, showing no ripples.

“Now let’s turn up the sensitivity.”

The screen remained uncluttered, until…

“Whoa, what was that?” Ed asked. A tiny ripple appeared on the top center grid. It dissipated quickly, and then recurred.

“It’s on a five second pattern. Silent for three, audible for two, and so on. Started six weeks back, like I said.”

Annie crowded in to get a better look, but there wasn’t much else to see.

“Never did that before?” she asked.

“We do a narrow scope check once a day and the first time we picked it up was last month. I can’t speak for what may have gone unnoticed before we got here.”

“What does it sound like?” Ed asked.

“Hold on,” Oona said. “How about a little quid pro quo?”

Ed looked at Annie, confused. She had nothing for him.

“What do you mean?” he asked.

“How about if you tell us what you were doing with that infrared scanner yesterday?”

Hello, Annie thought. Ed looked surprised. He was a terrible poker player.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“Nope, sorry, we’re done here. Annie, he seems like a nice man, but don’t you trust him.”

“Hold on,” she said. “Ed, why don’t you just tell them?”

“I can’t, it’s…”

“He’s embarrassed,” Annie said. “Ed had this stupid idea that the ship was… what did you call it? Glowing, but only outside of the visual range. And I was like, c’mon, I’m sure someone thought of that already, but he insisted nobody had. So then he goes out with the general yesterday and he was like, let me tell you what I think, and then he whips out these lights and…”

“And glasses,” Ed said. “Special glasses.”

“Right! And Morris was like, okay, whatever let’s get this over with. Funniest thing. I guess they were making fun of him all night. But, you know, everyone has their pet theory, right?”

“Well that’s stupid,” Oona said.

“That’s, like, the first thing anybody checked,” Laura said. “Who was it?”

“Larry was doing spectroscopic testing first, before, well, you know. Have you met Loony Larry yet?”

“Not yet.”

“He doesn’t do it any more, but trust me, someone else is. Laura and I don’t even bother, we’ll hear about it. Don’t remember who told us about your little infrared test. Did you find anything?”

“No,” Ed said.

He was lying. Annie could tell. She was a little surprised nobody else could.

“Like I said. It’s been done.” Oona bobbed her head at Laura. “Go ahead, play the audio. This’ll blow their minds.”

Laura typed in a couple of commands, and the audio kicked into life.

Ed leaned forward, squinting, perplexed, not quite sure of what he was hearing. Annie felt about the same.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “Is that… breathing?”

“That’s what it sounds like, yes.”

“You’re telling me the ship is breathing?”

“No, I’m telling you the first time sound has ever come out of the auditory black hole that is the ship, it resembled the sound of a person breathing. But the significance of this...”

“It’s a signal,” Oona said. “We don’t know what it means.”

“Maybe it means the ship has grown a pair of lungs,” Ed said.

“It’s not actual breathing, you dummy. It’s the sound of breathing.”

“Fine, it’s a signal. Who’s it for?”

“Well, we don’t know that either, do we?”

“WHAT WAS THAT?” Annie asked afterwards.

Ed was supposed to have a number of interview-like questions for Oona and Laura, to at least preserve the idea that he was doing a piece of journalism and not looking for a surreptitious way to question an entire town. Annie was becoming less comfortable with not being told things.

“I don’t know what you mean.”

“So many things. You didn’t tell me about the infrared, you didn’t tell me you were looking for something that happened six weeks ago, and those two no longer think you’re writing anything as far as I can tell.”

“I’m sorry, I went a little off script. But you said nobody was going to believe me anyway.”

“Right, but I have to pretend I do, and not look like a moron at the same time.”

“We don’t have a lot of time.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

“It means I’m on deadline, that’s all it means.”

“That’s not what it sounded like.”

“Look, I don’t know what to think. Either their sound equipment works correctly and the ship is now breathing, or it’s not working and they’re delusional. Or, they spoofed all of that.”

“They didn’t spoof any of it.”

“Then they know damn well I’m not a journalist, and a whole lot more.”

“Why do you say that?”

“They just showed us. If everyone was as curious about me as you said, well, they could have eavesdropped on my entire conversation.”

Annie thought about this.

“You talk about super top-secret stuff in the field?”

“Not really, no. Except for… mostly no.”

“All right, where were you standing when you were talking about super top-secret stuff?”

Ed looked across the road at the ship, same as it ever was.

“Behind it. We were behind it.”

“Then you’re fine. Like Laura said, that thing is sucking up all the sound.”

“Right. If their equipment does what they say, they didn’t hear me and the spaceship is breathing. Or, they might have heard me and the thing isn’t breathing. I don’t like either of those choices.”