“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.