Eddie Nash stood in the doorway while he shook the rain from his coat. Filthy morning! he thought. He hated this time of year. Everything cold and damp and depressing. Still, soon be Christmas. He chuckled at the thought. These days, people began saying soon be Christmas around the end of August.

He entered, allowed the door to close behind him and crossed the foyer to the desk where the receptionist signed him in with a happy smile. “Welcome back, Professor Nash.” How was the conference?”

“Had a great time, Betty, thanks. How was your sister's wedding?”

“It was lovely! Everyone was crying, even my idiot brother. When are you going to tie the knot, Professor? You and Teresa?”

“We broke up, I'm afraid.”

“Oh! Why?” The girl looked distraught, as if he'd said he was dying of cancer.

“She found out about my three other girlfriends.” He didn’t want to discuss his personal problems and hoped the joke would throw her off, which it did. She laughed, half in delight, half in shock, her hands over her mouth as if she half believed it might have been true. Eddie took the opportunity to slip away through the doors into the main ground floor corridor before she could quiz him again. As the door swung closed behind him he glanced back to see that she'd turned back to her computer and was staring intently at the screen, tapping at the old style keyboard now and again. Eddie had no idea what receptionists did on their computers, but they all seemed to have one wherever in the world he went. Probably updating her CV, he thought. Human receptionists were getting scarce. It was probably only a matter of time before Cambridge University replaced them all with automatic systems, just like everywhere else.

The Bragg building, the newest addition to the Cavendish Laboratories, was all steel and glass on the southern side, designed to let the sun shine in and allow everyone outside to see all the people working inside, although why they would want to was beyond Eddie. If they were expecting to see wild eyed scientists with untidy hair laughing as they threw huge circuit breakers to make electricity jump and arc across towering assemblies of equipment, they would be disappointed. What they would see instead was people sitting at desks tapping at touch screens and occasionally walking around with tablets and clip boards. All the exciting, expensive equipment was tucked away out of sight, to the rear of the building, where it couldn’t be seen by the people of Cambridge passing by in the street outside. The bits that could be seen were basically administration and clerical work.

Eddie climbed a flight of stairs to the first floor, then followed a corridor to where the modern, stylish decor gave way to functional plastic and wood. People gave him friendly greetings as he passed, which he returned with genuine pleasure. He liked these people, he liked this place, and he was looking forward to being in charge of it, although hopefully not too soon. Although he was well into his sixties, Andrew Stirling, hopefully, still had a good many years ahead of him yet.

He found the head of department in his office, along with his chief assistant Mandy Williams, affectionately known as Mop because of the usual state of her hair, something that she cared about not at all. She was making notes on her tablet as Andrew gave her a list of things he wanted her to find out for him, but they both broke off as Eddie appeared in the doorway.

“Well, ahoy there, matey!” said the Head of Department, grinning as he rose from his chair. “Shiver me timbers and splice the mainbrace. Thought I could smell salt. How's our jolly Jack Tarr?”

Eddie couldn’t help but grin back. “It wasn't exactly the Poseidon Adventure,” he said. “We stopped to pick up the crew of a container ship. We were a few hours late getting back to Harwich, that’s all. No fuss, no drama.”

“You said you collided with a wind turbine!” said Mandy.

“We slid along it for a bit, scratched a bit of paint off. I may have been a bit, er, overexcited when I made the phone call. I had no idea there were so many worse things happening all around the world.”

“Every time you turn on the telly, they're talking about something else. Some guy died in Alaska because the rescue helicopter couldn’t find him. Who knows how many other people didn't get help?” She gave Eddie a big hug. “Thank God you're all right!”

“We got lucky. So, what's been going on here? Any exciting news?”

“Nothing much,” said Andrew. “We can bring you back up to speed later. Tell us about the conference. How was it?”

“Incredible!” The grin returned to Eddie's face. “Everyone was there! Bill Lawry, Raman Singh, Ted Burge... Wally Grout's lecture on harmonic D-Branes was amazing! I've been reading up on the subject for years and it’s always just... I don't know. It's like I'm reading Chinese, it just makes no sense to me whatsoever, but the way he explained it... It's like it actually began to make sense. I was reading some texts on my tablet on the way back and it was like I was reading completely different articles. It's like he handed me the key! He made something happen in my head, you know what I mean?”

“It's a talent some people have,” said Andrew. “I tried to hire him once, but he was getting offers from every institute large enough to have its own topocosmology department. A guy like that can pick and choose, and it’s no wonder he made the choice he did. I envy you. I'd have given anything to have been there.”

“It's on the web. I'm surprised you haven't seen it already.”

“I have, but it’s not the same as actually being there. That’s how the magic happens, the magic you described. Did you manage to get into the Crane lecture? That was the one you really wanted to get into, wasn't it?”

“Yes, I got there early enough to get a seat. By the time Crane himself got there, people were having to stand along the walls and there were even people in the corridor outside, looking in through the open door! They kept him for nearly three hours afterwards with their questions, including one from a guy who didn’t seem to know the difference between scalars and vectors. I felt a bit sorry for him really, you could feel the whole room tensing up with annoyance. There wasn't a person there who didn't have about five degrees, except for this one guy who seemed to have learned everything he knew from the Discovery channel.”

“Probably a groupie, just wanted to talk to the great man. You know, we might finally be getting to the point where scientists are the new pop stars.”

“I don't think we're quite there yet. Hey, I had a job offer! Ben Wrexham was there, and he offered me a job.”

“Professor Ben Wrexham?” said Andrew. “There's a name I haven't heard for a while. I thought he'd retired.”

“He said he's part of some kind of secret research project. Couldn’t tell me much about it, but he wanted me on it.”

“The Tadcaster Project?” said Mandy with a smile, and Eddie chuckled back. The Tadcaster Project was an urban myth that had grown up over the last couple of decades, concerning an alien spaceship that was supposed to have been found buried in a coal mine back in the twentieth century. The modern successor to the Roswell myth. Every denial issued by the British government only seemed to strengthen the convictions of the conspiracy theorists, though.

“For all I know,” he said. “Seriously though, I'm sure it was a real project, and I’m sure it was pretty big and important. He was totally sincere and he wasn’t trying to pull my leg or anything.”

“He's supposed to have a wicked sense of humour,” said Andrew, though. “There's a story they tell about him. He worked at CERN for a few years, and he’s said to have convinced a couple of colleagues to help him persuade a fresh faced new assistant that he'd proven the existence of the Star Wars Force. They showed him a huge stack of particle collision images and said that one of the tracks was made by the Force particle. He even rigged up some magnetic coils to levitate a lump of superconductor and then pretended to be using the Force to lift it.”

“I heard about that,” said Eddie. “It all backfired on him a bit, didn't it?”

“You could say that. The poor kid swallowed it so completely that he got blind drunk later that day and told a bunch of locals. The papers got hold of the story, ran with it... Ben Wrexham ended up in hot water with the administrators for making CERN a laughing stock. They were already under fire from the general public who were scared they'd create a black hole that would swallow up the earth. This kind of publicity was the last thing they needed. Some say that that was why he left CERN a few months later. They decided he was a liability they didn't need. Didn't do his career any harm, though. He got a job at Princeton and in less than five years he’d risen to become head of theoretical physics.”

Eddie smiled. “I experienced his sense of humour first hand.” He told them the story that Ben Wrexham had told him, the ferry whose final voyage had been entirely uneventful. “I think, if he was trying to pull my leg about this job offer, though, he'd have gone into more detail. Tried to convince me they really had found a flying saucer or something. Maybe I'm just gullible, but I think there really is a secret project of some kind and he really wanted me in on it.”

“Would you be interested?” asked Andrew, frowning with concern. “If it was real?”

“Interested, yes. Am I going to sign up for it, no. He's invited me out for an all expenses paid trip to Martinique in a couple of weeks to meet the other members of the team and try to pique my interest a bit more, but they can’t tell me what they're actually working on unless I actually sign up.”

“Martinique!” said Mandy, staring at him enviously. “I always wanted to go there! Are you going?”

“To Martinique? Hell yes! Unless I’m needed here. Think you can spare me for a few days longer, Andy?”

“I think so. You can keep in touch with our results online. There’s actually very little you can do here that you can't do from a thousand miles away, assuming they get the satellites sorted out.”

“Even if they don't, the internet'll still work without them. Slower, but it'll still work. What else do you know about Ben Wrexham, Andy? Apart from what everyone knows, of course.”

“Used to be really big in the world of strong force interactions. He's the guy who solved the neutron decay paradox.”

“Yes, that was the subject of his lecture. You said you thought he'd retired.”

“Yes. About ten years ago he quit his job at Princeton and went to work at a much smaller, less well known facility here in England. I forget the name. He still publishes papers now and then, mainly on the subject of nuclear physics, but nothing ground-breaking. He lives mainly on his reputation these days.”

“I wonder if other top scientists have done the same thing? That might tell us who else is on his team.” On impulse, he turned on his tablet and entered some search parameters into Aristotle. There was a noticeable pause before the results popped up, a sign that the internet was still struggling to cope with the crisis, but then the screen filled up with a list of names. “There’s Ben Wrexham, half way down. Hmm. Karen Karr, Habib Attari, Marumar Yaya, James Buckley.” He chuckled. “Your name's down here.”

“Well, my job is mainly administration now. Most of those people are probably the same.”

Eddie nodded and added some more search parameters to narrow down the list. “No, that took Ben's name off. I'll play around with it a bit more when I've got some time.” He switched the tablet off, rolled it back up onto its case and popped it back into his pocket. “If there really were some kind of secret project, something that's been going for at least fifty years, wouldn't something have leaked out by now? Someone would have talked, even if it was just to his wife or girlfriend. You can't keep a secret these days. There would be stories, rumours. Why aren't there stories?”

“There are stories,” pointed out Mandy, smiling. “The Tadcaster Project.”

Eddie stared at her. “You think he actually was pulling my leg? Playing the long game, laying the groundwork for a major prank he's going to play on me in Martinique? Make me believe they've found a flying saucer? But why would he? He doesn't know me. We've never met before. You might play a prank on a work colleague, or someone who’s pissed you off, but why would you go to that kind of effort to fool a complete stranger?”

“Are you sure you’ve never met him? You say he gave one of the lectures in Pharmakon. Did you ask a question afterwards, something that may have annoyed him, made him want revenge?”

“No. The lecture was brilliant! I told him so on the ferry.”

“Well, even if he is playing some kind of prank on you, at least you're getting a trip to Martinique out of it. Just play along with whatever he tells you, pretend to believe it and enjoy the holiday. That way, you get the last laugh.”

Eddie chuckled. “That's what I'll do,” he said. “And so, if I'm only going to be here for a couple of weeks you'd better tell me what you've been up to while I've been away. How’s the cobalt experiment going?”

“Pretty good. We've been getting some promising results...” The intercom on his desk beeped and he reached over to touch the screen while looking up at his assistant apologetically. “Yes?”

Konstantin Behzinga‘s face appeared on the screen, dressed in a white coverall complete with a hood pulled tightly over his head. Behind him, two assistant researchers, dressed identically, were staring at a display screen on which text and numbers were rapidly scrolling upwards. Occasionally one of them would tap the screen of the tablet he was holding in his hands. At the back of the room was a small window against which the rain was lashing furiously. “The run’s going to take seventy two hours,” the Russian said in a strong accent. “That's the best we can do. If you want it done faster, you'll have to get us a bigger condenser. A model 300 would be nice.”

“Those things cost a hundred thousand each,” Andrew replied testily. “We're working on a budget here. Just do the best you can.”

“But if we had a model 300 condenser we could do the run in half the time...”

“Seventy two hours is fine. You'll have to learn to cultivate patience, Konstantin.”

“I will try to do that. In the meantime, the bifurcator is out of alignment again. If you are not busy, we could use some help with it. Your magic fingers seem to be the only thing that can fix it.”

Andrew cursed under his breath. “I’ll be right up,” he said and cut the connection. “You sure you want this job, Eddie?” he said as he rose from his desk. “Everyone constantly coming to you expecting you to have the answer to all their problems and constantly griping about things you can't do anything about?”

“I can't wait,” Eddie replied earnestly. “In fact I'm thinking of slipping a little hemlock into your earl grey to speed the day.”

Andrew chuckled. “A few days doing this job and you may regret it. Sometimes, I look back on my days as a humble researcher with aching nostalgia. Talk some sense into him, Mop.”

“Are you kidding? I can’t wait for the day when a man with manners and common courtesy takes over this place. The things I have to put up with...”

“There's gratitude for you. I take you in, out of the gutter. Clean you up, give you a square meal...”

The woman looked at Eddie, then rose her eyes to the ceiling before walking out the door with infinite dignity, but she looked back once before passing out of sight and her eyes were sparkling with humour.

“I really don't know what I'd do without her,” Andrew admitted when she'd gone. “Eddie, if there’s one thing you absolutely must do when you take over here, it’s make sure she stays on as your assistant. She's easily worth ten times what she lets me pay her.”

“I'd already come to that conclusion,” admitted Eddie.

“Good. So, Konstantin Behzinga. Want to come along? I'll fill you in on what you've missed while we’re walking.”

“Let's go,” said Eddie.

☆☆☆

Samantha Kumiko was also arriving back at work, at the astronomy department of Bristol University, after having dropped her daughter off at the day care centre. She made a careful note to remember to pick her up at four in the afternoon, not wanting to have to endure another stern reprimand from Mrs Forwell. Samantha had a tendency to get lost in her work, studying photographs of the moon's surface and poring over computer analyses of the data sent back by the Copernicus probe, and Mrs Forwell had threatened to ban little Lily if her mother left her there too late again, once well after nine in the evening. What had stung Samantha worse than the tongue lashing, though, was the implication that she considered her daughter to be nothing more than a distraction from her work, and the thing that really scared her was the possibility that it might be true. The other scientists and astronomers often pulled all nighters when there was something really important and exciting going on, like the landing of the Chinese astronauts on the moon, but Samantha couldn't stay with them unless she’d made arrangements for Lily, and if there was no-one to look after her she had no choice but to go home and have the others tell her all about it in the morning.

Fortunately, astronomy was going through a bit of a quiet spell at the moment, if you discounted what was coming to be known as the Scatter Cloud, the enigmatic cloud of ultra dense objects that had disrupted the world’s satellites, but since the individual objects were far too small to be observed even through the most powerful telescopes and travelling too fast to be intercepted, there was nothing to study, nothing they could use as a source of data. The cloud was only detectable by the gravitational effect it was having on small objects around it, which allowed them to track it and plot its future course (out of the solar system, never to return) but told them nothing more about it. Until the Europa probe reached the surface of the jovian moon and deployed the submarine with which it would explore its deep ocean, therefore, there was nothing to do in the world of astronomy but study the data that had been provided by earlier experiments. Luckily, there was enough of that to keep all the scientists and astronomers of the world busy for centuries yet.

She entered what they'd come to call the Bullpen to find everyone engaged in their own pursuits, therefore. Neil Arndale was talking to someone on the telephone, a silver haired gentleman who looked to be in his sixties and whose face on the screen was holding an expression of forced patience as Neil explained something for what, to judge by the tone of his voice, was at least the third time. John Paul was studying his tablet and Sandra Willoughby was scratching her head in frustration as she stared at a page of computer code on the Acorn’s diagnostic screen. Only Josh, the intern, looked up as Samantha hung her coat on the hook and strolled over to her desk. Then he returned his attention to his tablet and the work he was doing for his masters degree.

Sam took her place at her desk and woke up her desktop computer, whose screen lit up with a summary of all the websites she'd told it to keep an eye on. She spent the morning scrolling through them, bringing herself back up to speed with everything that had happened over the weekend. Some of it she was already familiar with. She looked at her tablet as often as she could while at home, often with Lily sitting in her lap, reading it with an interest equal to hers and with an understanding that would normally be considered beyond that of a six year old. The latest data from Copernicus wasn't available on the open internet, though, and she had to wait until she was here, with access to the University’s secure network, to see what the Acorn had done with the data since Friday.

One result in particular made her sit up straight in her chair, grinning with excitement. “The titanium analysis is in!” she said to no-one in particular. She was just too thrilled to keep silent. “The isotope ratio is consistent with Hortensius seven erupting only two million years ago!”

“So you were right,” said Josh, looking up and smiling.

“Consistent, I said. We can't get ahead of ourselves. Even so, this is huge! The most recent confirmed lunar eruption happened forty million years ago, and that caused so much controversy it made the front pages of daily newspapers. Imagine what they'll say at the very suggestion that there might have been an eruption the moon only two million years ago. Our ancestors would have been able to see it! Well, our homo erectus ancestors, but they were easily intelligent enough to look up at the sky and wonder at it. I wonder what they thought it was. The moon's face is unchanging from generation to generation, and then suddenly a tiny little speck of light appears, maybe growing brighter and dimming again from day to day as new lava flows appear and spread. I wonder what they thought of it.”

“Are you going to publish?”

“When the analysis is complete. I need as much data as possible because they’re going to fall on this like a school of sharks on a Bond villain's incompetent henchman. I need to have so much data that they'll break their teeth on it.”

“Can you be certain that your conclusions are valid? You yourself said that a supernova might have contaminated the isotope ratios.”

“Not any more. The carbon and oxygen results all but eliminate that possibility.” She frowned. “That's the thing, though. All but. For some people, all but is a synonym for not. They'll say it’s not proved.”

“Of course they will, they're supposed to. You told me that, remember?” She nodded glumly. “But I think it'll be a very brave astronomer who argues with you about something to do with the moon. You are, after all, acknowledged as the foremost lunar authority by the greatest minds in the scientific world.”

“That counts for nothing, as you very well know. It's the data that matters, not who presents it. The analysis has to be enough to convince everyone on its own, or it’s worthless.”

“Nevertheless, I think that the fact that it comes from you will count for a lot. Remember when Agata Gazda tried to publish that helium 3 paper? No-one would touch it until you read it and gave it your seal of approval. Then they were climbing all over themselves to publish him.”

“His analysis was good. It's a pity they discounted it because he was relatively unknown. I'm not sure I did him any favours, though. He's now in my shadow instead of standing out on his own. People talk about Samantha Kumiko's helium 3 paper and forget he did all the hard work.”

“At least you gave him first billing on the paper.”

“I had to. It was the very least I could do.”

“He seemed grateful enough, and people publish his work now on his own credit. That might not have happened if not for you. When you've got the kind of reputation you have, you might as well try to do good with it.”

“If I had my way, all scientific papers would be published anonymously. That would guarantee that they would be judged solely on their quality and not by the reputation of their authors.”

“You know better than me how many papers get published every year. How would the reviewers know which ones to read? And the reputation of the authors is a good guide to the accuracy of the data. Even today, people fudge their results to make them fit the theory.”

“Anyone can download the Copernicus data. And anyone with a powerful enough computer can analyse it. They don’t have to take my word for it. You can't fudge astronomy data. We're long past the days when scientists scribbled down observations in a notebook and expected people to take their word for it.”

“There's more than one way to fudge data and you know it. A modern space probe like Copernicus sends back so much data it’s impossible to analyse all of it, so we pick and choose. Try to choose what we think is representative of the whole. Also, computer programs can he made to give extra weight to data falling within certain fields, and the cheat code can be very hard to find, or the programmer might have made an honest mistake that gives a bias to the analysis. And the mistakes get passed on. Writing a million lines of code takes time and effort, so universities borrow off the shelf code written by others...”

“Because it’s been shown to be reliable time after time. Later studies validate the earlier ones, so we know the code gives good results. The same basic patterns show up in nature all the time, whether it’s the currents in a gas giant's atmosphere or the flow of a nitrogen glacier, so you can use the same code to analyse both.”

“Or maybe that’s just an assumption people have been making. Who knows how many mistakes have been overlooked because people just assumed the code was applicable to the experiment? That's why reputation is important. Everyone knows Sandra writes our code, that she tailors it to every analysis, and they trust her to know what she's doing.”

“Doesn't stop them questioning it in every review,” said the redhead irritably without taking her eyes from the screen. She changed her voice to mock the reviewer. “This analysis used untested code, and so must be verified independently.”

“That's just good practice,” said Samantha. “You know that. And every verification has upheld our conclusions. Every single one. If my name is respected around the world, so is yours.” Susan looked around at this and smiled before returning to her work.

“Okay, I suppose reputation is important,” Samantha conceded. She looked back at the computer screen, her excitement returning. “Two million years!” she said, and Josh could suddenly see what she would have looked like as a teenager. Long black hair draped across her shoulders. A fringe almost covering her luminous dark brown eyes and a wide grin, not brought about by anything in particular but just by the simple, pure joy of being alive. “There was a volcano erupting on the moon just two million years ago! Isn't that just so cool?”

Her excitement was infectious and everyone in the room found themselves sharing it. There was a moment of shared camaraderie, a moment of friendship as everyone looked up from their own work to share in the moment, but then it passed and Samantha moved on to the next item on the computer screen.