“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.”
9
PLEASE STATE YOUR EMERGENCY
Two weeks passed, during which the most exciting thing to happen was that Annie got her first paycheck. It was a decent enough sum to leave her wondering how long she could prolong things. To that end, she did not have a willing partner in Edgar Somerville.
It was hard to tell sometimes if they were even on the same side. She spent most of her days facilitating his introduction to various individuals, and then listening for clues as to what he was really after. So far, he hadn’t given her enough to assemble anything like a complete picture. She had tantalizing bits, but that was all. It gave each day a modestly adversarial angle, like they were playing a bad game of chess with one another.
In a lot of ways, she was learning more as a consequence of whom he was asking to speak with than she was by what he was saying to the people she lined up. They spent the first week at the campers, but the second week was with a subset of the Sorrow Falls population that consisted of all persons who lived in the town when the ship landed and hadn’t left it since.
The questions he had for the trailer park collective centered mostly around tell me your crazy and how you arrived at it, but the stuff he had for the other group suggested he was after a completely different thing. For the camper denizens it was all about what happened in the past six weeks. For everyone else—tacitly not the people in the campers, who arrived well after the ship landed—it was questions about what had changed in the town, overall, in three years.
Annie knew he had his theory that the ship was manipulating people at a distance, but these weren’t just that kind of question. He was after something specific.
It would have been nice if he could just tell her everything, and it was obvious it bothered him that he couldn’t. But apparently granting top-secret clearance to a sixteen year old was a hassle.
The second-most exciting thing to happen in the two weeks was that Annie got a chance on more than one occasion to hang out at the military base.
THE BASE WAS ESTABLISHED in a field originally owned by the Tarver family. Annie knew a couple of the Tarvers back before they sold the field and moved away. All she remembered about them was that they weren’t all that good at farming—they’d been at it for five generations by then—and didn’t much enjoy it. The spaceship was basically the best thing that could have happened for them. Last she heard they’d opened a string of boutique coffee shops in San Diego.
The Tarvers were pretty lucky, not only for owning land the government wanted, but for being happy to sell it. More than a couple of Sorrow Falls families were considerably less fortunate. Ed’s theory that the town was entirely too idyllic under the circumstances ignored the many times locals were briefed on eminent domain laws and the terms of the martial law agreement between the state and federal governments. Admittedly, it would have looked a whole lot worse if they’d actually evacuated the area like Edgar wanted to, but that didn’t mean everything in town was puppies and rainbows from day one.
Unlike where the ship came down—on hard, rocky ground that wasn’t being used for anything—the base was built on top of fallow farmland. The ground took in moisture well, grew things (weeds) with great aplomb, and didn’t offer the sort of bedrock support needed for large, temporary buildings on wheels. Those were the only kinds of structures at the base for the first year, lasting until someone decided everybody could exhale and expect the ship to spend a while not doing anything. Then they started putting up permanent buildings, with solid foundations. They also put up a taller and more imposing perimeter fence, and paved their auto yard. Most importantly, as far as Annie was concerned, they built a basketball court.
Annie was not, under all but a few circumstances, particularly girlish. This sort of hinged on her personal definition of the word, which relied heavily on how Beth behaved whenever someone attractive and theoretically age-appropriate was in the diner. It was only theoretically because Beth was both playing in a higher age bracket than Annie and because Beth liked men in a higher age bracket than she herself was. It was also higher than Annie was comfortable with. Beth would probably think Ed was too young for her.
Beth’s girlishness consisted of swooning, flirting, blushing, and gasping, and being just in general very Marilyn Monroe about everything. Annie wasn’t like that. She tended to adopt a sort of Katherine Hepburn-ishness on a day-to-day basis, and was straight-up Rosalind Russell when flirting, which was almost never.
(Beth wouldn’t have understood any of these references, except possibly the Marilyn one, which she probably would have liked. Annie didn’t have any friends who would have gotten them, actually, aside from Violet. Interestingly, Annie never watched movies with Violet aside from Vi’s favorite film, The Wizard of Oz, which they watched at least once a month together. Violet never explained why she found the movie so appealing, but since Annie never seemed to get bored of watching it with her, maybe there was no reason to explain.)
Annie made one exception to the girlishness rule, and that was the army compound’s basketball court in the summertime.
The court wasn’t exactly a secret, but it was right in the middle of the compound, which made it hard to see. What was known about it was that on certain days, men from the base would play basketball on the court, wearing camo pants and combat boots and hardly anything else. (Unstated and unknown was whether any of the women on the base partook as well. This may have been because there were hardly any women on the base, period. Annie wasn’t sure why this was so, but it was clearly so.)