He got to his feet and turned to the nearest deputy.
“Somebody get me the president,” he said.
Of all the embellishments surrounding the events of the morning of first contact, one thing remained true: he actually did say that.
CALLING the President of the United States was not something the sheriff’s department of a small Massachusetts mill town could just do, it turned out. There were steps to take, and jurisdictions to consider, and people to convince.
Convincing people was a big hurdle. It didn’t much matter how sane and level-headed any one person in this chain of reportage was, the person on the other end of each link was going to begin with, no really, why are you calling? and there wasn’t much anyone could do about that.
Compounding the problem was that as far as anybody was concerned, alien spaceships didn’t simply land at the edge of little towns in the Connecticut River valley, and if they did, they didn’t land only there. Admittedly, that opinion was colored by Hollywood movies and science fiction books, but actual military history and tactics further informed those stories. If the ship was the vanguard of an invasion, it was in the wrong place. If it were part of a fleet, there would have been other ships. If it was lost, it would have moved, or asked for directions. If it was disabled—it didn’t look disabled, but how would anybody know? —somebody would have asked for help or a wrench. Or something.
In other words, once past the whole spaceship thing, the hardest part about getting the right people to believe that this remarkable event had happened in Sorrow Falls was that the spaceship hadn’t done anything.
It just sat there. Sure, it could make bullets disappear, but someone had to shoot the gun. That wasn’t so much a thing it did, as it was a thing it did in response to someone else doing a thing. It was not in any real sense—after landing—a proactive spaceship.
Still, the president was eventually notified. It happened about two weeks after the ship landed and approximately six hours before the media was to go live with the story. By the time of the media announcement, the army had already cordoned off the field and taken over about a third of the town. (In fairness, this was not a lot of space in terms of pure acreage, and the land they claimed was fallow farmland, and the army was, on the whole, extremely polite about the entire thing.)
That evening, the president held a press conference confirming that the planet had been visited by aliens, and Sorrow Falls became the most talked about place in the world.
That was three years ago.
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.