Have you told him?
Rick’s question still hung in the air. It was suddenly an incredibly important question.
“Hey, was that a friend of yours?”
Ed walked in and headed straight for the burnt coffee.
“Who?”
“Guy I saw you talking to. Looked about your age, right?”
“That was, um… sorry, I’m a little distracted, that was Rick Horton. I forgot to ask your zombie timing question, but you can probably still catch him.”
“Oh.” Ed looked like he was considering it. “No, it’s okay. I should get you home.”
“Actually… I think we should go someplace and talk. Maybe eat, but also talk.”
“Okay. What do you want to talk about?”
“This, for starters.” She held up her phone so he could see.
He went a little pale. This was kind of amazing as he was pretty pale to start with.
“How did you get that?”
“Like I said. I think we should talk.”
THERE WERE many places to tie one on at night in Sorrow Falls. Annie wasn’t terribly familiar with any of them, being a minor, but she’d been inside one or two on certain occasions, such as when her dad was back in town and wanted to take the family out for a meal.
The family dinner establishments were mostly outside the town, in places like Oakdale, Mount Hermon and—in the other direction and somewhat further—Brattleboro. But there were a few quasi-family places, i.e., a place that served dinner and also alcohol, catering to adults but without anyone carding at the door or, if they were asking for ID, not before 10 PM.
One such place was Jock & Jill’s, a sports bar with a name that made it sound a tiny bit like an all-inclusive strip club. To get to it meant going from the diner parking lot (to which they were given a ride by one of the deputies) to the northern conclusion of Main and a dogleg left turn, up the hill on a road called Acorn, toward Durgin. Jock & Jill’s rested atop a small hill at the corner of Durgin and Acorn.
Ed looked about as uncomfortable as he could when he realized the kind of place Annie directed him to.
“This is a bar,” he said, pointing specifically to the onslaught of flashing neon.
“They have great appetizers here. And burgers. I hear good things about their drinks, too. The Martian Margarita’s supposed to be top notch.”
“You can’t go in here, can you? You don’t have a… I mean…”
“What good would a fake I.D. do me, Ed? Practically everyone knows me. Don’t worry, I can go in. The important thing is, the place is dark and loud.”
They took up a booth in a corner in the back of the place, with the waitress—Annie didn’t know her, but thought she looked familiar enough to be an older sibling of someone she did know—giving them the kind of uncomfortable glances people give when they think maybe, perhaps, possibly this older man is on a date with this young girl.
As soon as the waitress set them up with a couple of sodas—she was probably glad nobody at the table was drinking—Annie called up the photo on her phone and slid it to Ed.
“So tell me what I’m looking at here.”
“It’s a copy of a high resolution photo that happens to be incredibly classified. How did it end up on your phone?”
“You didn’t fully answer the question.”
“You’re right, I didn’t.”
“Ed, is this a handprint on the side of the spaceship?”
“It is. Keep your voice down.”
They were being bombarded on one side by white people classic rock, and on the other by the drone-speak of baseball announcers narrating two different games.
“I promise, nobody can hear us. I can barely hear us.”
“How did you get this?”
“I took it. This is a little embarrassing, but do you remember the day…”
“When you got the text from your mother,” he said, gasping. “I went to get my coat.”
“The folder was open on your desk. I didn’t even register what I was looking at. I just… I saw, and I… my phone was already in my hand. I didn’t even remember this until an hour ago.”
“Annie, you have to delete that immediately.”
“Now, hold on. I think you owe me some answers.”
“My answer’s the same as it always was. It doesn’t change just because you took a picture of something you shouldn’t have.”
“You do realize I’m a teenage girl with multiple social media profiles.”
“Annie…”
“It would seriously take me about ten seconds to post the image, and it’s no secret I live in Sorrow Falls. It’d probably go viral in a day, maybe two.”
“Seriously, you can’t.”
“Do you think you’d get arrested as soon as I posted it, or would they wait a week or two?”
“I can’t believe you’d do that to me.”
“Dammit, Ed, just tell me. I can make it so it looks like you already did, so you may as well.”
She was bluffing, and was about 80% sure he knew she was, but she also knew he was dying for an excuse to give up everything he had.
“All right, fine.”
He took a long sip of his soda, which was amusing only because he clearly preferred for it to be something much stronger.
“Do you know what Cherenkov radiation is?”
“Sure. It’s blue, right? It’s when something travels through a medium at a speed faster than light through that medium.”
Ed stared at her. “That’s almost exactly right, how did you know that?”
She shrugged. “I just do. So go on.”
“All right. A few weeks back, for less than a second, one of the sensors picked up Cherenkov radiation emanating from the ship.”
“That’s… interesting, but not really possible, is it? What was the medium? Air?”
“Air.”
“Something was transmitted that reached the ship at a speed greater the speed of light through the atmosphere. That would be a technology… ohhhh. I understand. That’s some alien technology going on.”
“We still don’t know whether the ship transmitted something into space or something out there sent something to the ship. In Washington, they’re pretty split on which possibility is worse.”
“You guys are always fixated on the worst idea imaginable when it comes to these things, aren’t you?”
“I do risk assessments. It’s my job to at least consider the worst case scenarios.”
“That’s kind of a crap job. No offense.”
He laughed. “You may be right.”
“So what happened next?”
“There’s a team of scientists attached to the spaceship project. There are twelve of them, and they’re very smart, reasonable people who didn’t deal well with this news. For a lot of reasons, I guess, one being that if it was Cherenkov radiation it should have killed some people around here and it didn’t.”
“How’d they detect it, then? If not radiation.”
“Spectroscope, I guess. I don’t really understand how they could tell the difference between a blue light and this, but they could. The upside was, they ordered a full rescan of the ship. That was conducted as quickly and as quietly as possible. An unmanned drone conducting an infrared scan of the hull picked up the handprint. By then I was already preparing to come here, so I missed the full-throated panic it had to have triggered.
“When I got here, my first job was to figure out if there was any observable change as a consequence of the… the message, or whatever was transmitted. The sensors are all pointed at the ship, basically, but nothing is pointed at the town. We needed to know if anyone here discovered something we were missing. But as soon as it was clear somebody actually touched the ship, the job got more complicated. That was how you ended up getting hired.”