Gene Doucette: The Spaceship Next Door

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.

She hopped off the bike and walked it between the immobile cars.

“Any news?” she asked.

Art Shoeman was of the alien watcher variety, which was actually the only kind of squatter still around consistently. Protestors tended to turn up only for a few hours every day, and the religious zealots mostly confined themselves to the end of Main Street, where they could command more eyeballs.

Mr. Shoeman was in cargo shorts and a Polo shirt with old stains from at least two different meals on it. Scruffy and suffering from what he insisted was premature balding (“I’m not as old as I look!”) he had the same kind of non-threatening vibe as a schoolteacher or a priest. Never mind that one of the first things her mother told her when she started to blossom was to be careful around schoolteachers and priests. Such was the world.

“Dobbs thinks it moved,” he said.

“No kidding!”

Dobbs, a younger, chubbier, slightly weirder version of Art Shoeman, poked his head over the side of the trailer. “Swear to God,” he said.

“I’m coming up.”

Dobbs vanished, as Annie leaned her bike against the side of the trailer and headed up the ladder. Dobbs had a tendency to sit in his lawn chair on the roof in boxers and not much else, for basically the whole summer. As a tubby thirty year old with a perpetual sunburn, there was a lot to be said for him keeping his shirt on, and about a year ago—approximately when Annie started to display the more outward effects of puberty—he arrived at the same conclusion. So as she climbed up, he was undoubtedly grabbing a shirt and making himself slightly more presentable.

It was a little weird, because she could see him from the road every morning. It was like he only cared how he looked if he knew he was being looked at.

Standing on top of the camper was like discovering a new layer to the world: camper rooftop city. Each roof was a singular collection of makeshift furniture—a preponderance of folding chairs and card tables—and gonzo electrical equipment, telescopes or binoculars, antenna arrays, and laptop computers. About half of it was equipment invented by the inhabitants of the rooftop city, to test one theory or another regarding the spaceship. In the unlikely event any of them had a verifiable claim to make, they would first have to prove that the device they used did what they thought it did. The last detail was probably insurmountable.

Like Mika and Morrie, two roofs over. They’d taken an old Geiger counter, attached it to something they promised would amplify its range—somehow—and adjusted it (again somehow ) to detect auras. If they ever made a discovery, they would have to prove the thing did what they said, and then they would have to prove auras were real.

Annie was pretty sure the last part was going to be tough. Already, at sixteen, she had a mature appreciation of the degree to which adults could delude themselves about things. She’d also learned not to take a whole lot of what she heard on Spaceship Road all that seriously.

Mika and Morrie were just one example. There were dozens of others, all doing what they could to study an object that was perhaps a quarter of a mile away and only partly visible through the tree line for most of the summer. (In the fall and winter, when the trees had fewer leaves, it was easy to see.)

Mr. Shoeman’s roof was kind of homey in its way. He had a green Astroturf carpet that smelled only a little like mildew, a few comfortable chairs, and a cooler with a surprisingly robust variety of beverages. And snacks. Lots of snacks. The alien trailer park collective was fueled primarily by pizza delivery and salty snacks, although on weekends in the summer they liked to have a big cookout, combining the forces of all the trailer neighbors. It was festive. Sometimes a few of the soldiers even came.

“So it moved?” Annie said, once she gained the high ground. Dobbs was (of course) now wearing a shirt, and standing in front of an array of electronic equipment that looked a lot like what happens when Radio Shack has a yard sale. There were three cameras slaved to a laptop, something that may have been a seismometer at one time, and a fourth camera with a telephoto lens mounted on a small tripod. The entire collection was on top of a table with tiny springs beneath it and under a roof made up of plastic sheets. The springs were supposed to be shock absorbers to keep local events such as a sixteen-year old climbing up the ladder from causing a tremble in the equipment. The roof and plastic were to protect the equipment when it rained.

“Maybe as much as two inches!” Dobbs said.

“No kidding!”

“Here, I’ll show you. Hang on.”

Dobbs started tapping away on the computer he used to collect information from the other computers.

“Pretty exciting, huh?” Mr. Shoeman said. He was on the other side of the roof tweaking one of the solar panels.

Power was always an issue. The campers weren’t near any sources of electricity and to refill their gas tanks they had to move, which at least half of them hadn’t done in two years. They made do with a combination of reusable generators, gas trading, and makeshift solar paneling. In perspective, it was funny, only because these were people at risk of running out of power and food and—in the winter—heat, while only a few miles from an ample supply of all of those things. The aliens would have made everyone’s lives a whole lot easier if they’d only landed across from a hotel.

“Sure. Two inches?”

“It’s not nothing.”

“No.”

Pretty close to it though , she thought.

She looked across the road. Mr. Shoeman’s trailer was in a prime location. Whenever news people showed up, they were guaranteed to take at least one photo from the spot where Annie was standing. The trees framed the ship almost perfectly, and nearly all of it was in view.

They weren’t close. Sure, in the event the spaceship one day rose up and began attacking the citizens of planet Earth, they were entirely too close, but putting aside that potential outcome, they weren’t meaningfully nearby. Certainly, they were not close enough to make a potential two-inch movement—in a thing that hadn’t budged since it landed three years ago—more likely than a measurement error in Dobbs’ equipment. Assuming Dobbs was measuring what he thought he was.

“Here, here, here,” Dobbs said excitedly. “Look!”

He turned the laptop around so she could see the screen. It showed a graph with a notable spike. The graph had no context.

“Two inches caused that?” she asked.

“The Y-axis… yeah, it’s in millimeters.”

“Oh, really cool,” she said, mustering a little enthusiasm. “What do you think it means?”

Mr. Shoeman laughed. “Who knows? We have so much more to do first. We have to wait and see if it does it again, and then we’ll see about any patterns and then maybe something. We’re publishing our results in a few days. Could be somebody caught the same thing, or something different at the same time. We’ll know soon.”