“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.
“Breathe normal,” Morris said. “We aren’t close enough yet.”
“You’ve done this before?”
“Sure. First thing I did when I got here was try and touch it.”
“Really?”
Morris laughed. “Yeah. I’m not the only one who’s tried over the years. My predecessor tried at least once a month.”
“There isn’t anything in the reports about it.”
“Nope. We keep it to ourselves.”
“But the sensors…”
“They have their little brown-outs from time to time. Lightning storms’ll knock out half of them just from atmospheric charge. It’s not monitored a hundred percent reliably, I’m saying. One of us wants to give it a go, we know where the switch is, nobody’s the wiser.”
“They might be aware now, don’t they have audio equipment out here?”
“You know as well as I do, the system’s designed to filter out human noise. Plus the ship sucks up sound.”
“I’m just a little surprised to hear you’re all disobeying orders.”
“Funny thing, nobody’s issued a command not to touch the ship. I’ve checked. They just figure we won’t. And hey, nobody’s done it. It’d be a much bigger deal otherwise.”
Ed wondered if Morris was either exaggerating the frequency by which this was attempted or, if not that, understating the impact a successful incursion would have. It was a little like checking the safety on a gun by holding it to your head and pulling the trigger. The safety never failed, but if it did the consequences wouldn’t offset the importance of proving it faulty.
Or not. They didn’t know the consequence of touching the ship because, supposedly, nobody ever had. The very fact that nobody seemed capable of doing this meant great import was attached to the performance of this act, which was where the gun-safety analogy became important. It could also explain why even military men who should know better were lining up to give it a try.
They got closer, and Ed began to think about what he had for breakfast, grew concerned that this wasn’t him thinking this at all, then took a deep breath and tried lowering his heart rate.
All in my head, he told himself.
“We usually do the infrared scans at night, by drone,” Morris said. “We’re doing this manually during the day, so like I said I can’t promise we’ll see anything.”
“How close does the drone get?”
“About ten feet. They get any closer and they’ll malfunction. We crashed a few on purpose to see what that malfunction would look like. It’s pretty awesome.”
“Is that something you do once a month too?”
“No, the drones are too expensive. But if you want to watch, we have video footage of it. It’s not the bug zap, though. You gotta fire a high-impact projectile to experience that. The drones lose attitude, flip around and crash. Like their on-board instruments got hacked.”
“A virus.”
“You’d think. But we broke down one of the ones that came out intact and didn’t find anything. Anyway, the first anomaly triggered a new round of tests, and that included a new infrared search, and here we are. But you know all about this, don’t you?”
He did. Even the drone tests, which he’d actually witnessed via videoconference one time.
“Yes, but I’m finding the longer you talk the easier it is to keep walking.”
Another five paces, and Morris turned on the flashlight, and nothing happened.
“Oh, hang on.”
He rummaged around in his jacket pocket and came out with two sets of plastic eyewear. They looked like the 3-D glasses handed out at movies.
They both put the glasses on. It made the sunlight look much more impressive, but only made the ship look blacker. It occurred to Ed for the first time that perhaps the hull of the vessel was more than just black. As if the light absorption rate was higher than it should be.
“If they can see us from those camper roofs right now…” Ed said.
“Ah, don’t worry about them. Nobody puts much stock in what they have to say.” He looked up and toward the road. “But I don’t think they can. The angle’s poor and we kept the trees near the road intact for a reason.”
Morris waved the flashlight around. This time the termination point of the beam was visible. He directed it toward the ship, but the light became too diffuse too quickly to make a difference.
“Little closer,” he said.
They went another five paces. The end of the beam began to coalesce into a wide circle on the side of the ship.
Four more paces. The beam began to tighten and brighten, and then Morris began probing the surface looking for… something.
Ed realized he hadn’t called his mother in nearly two months.
It wasn’t really a big deal—they went much longer than that routinely, especially since the divorce. She’d been kind enough to wait until well after Ed had moved out and established a life of his own before telling both him and her husband—his father—how unhappy she was. A whirlwind divorce that devastated Ed’s dad, and bewildered Ed, resulted in her relocating to Florida, opening up a yarn store, and cohabitating with “aunt” Linda, a long-time friend of the family and (apparently) the lesbian lover of the former Mrs. Somerville. Then Dad died of congestive heart failure, because he never took care of himself, and that caused more than a little friction between Ed and his mom, but they patched that up a couple of years back and now he was used to hearing her voice semi-regularly.
She didn’t even know he was in Sorrow Falls! Sure, it was supposed to be something like a secret, but not a big secret, not necessarily. Not the kind of thing a man should have to keep from his mother. It wasn’t like he was going to tell her why he was there. He could say he was on vacation or something. But she’d get a kick out of it, knowing he was there, and he was standing right near the ship. Because in a way it was the ship that helped them reconnect. When it landed, and everyone thought the world was going to end, he picked up the phone and called her and ended up settling the mess that had gone on with dad and the divorce and everything else. She should know where he was standing.