“The main lab is an ultra clean room,” said Ben, showing Eddie into the changing room. “No contamination of any kind, not even hairs and flakes of skin, can be allowed in there, so everyone has to shower, scrubbing hard to exfoliate, and shave all parts of their bodies except the groin and head. We do that in pairs so each can get the hard to reach parts of the other. Then we wear skin tight breeches and hairnets under our cotton lab clothing.”

Eddie nodded, staring around the gleaming white, porcelain room curiously. He'd accepted Ben's invitation to visit the lab where the spaceship was being studied and the whole group had flown straight to England from Martinique. The others had gone ahead while Ben helped Eddie to get through the strict security procedures. He was now wearing his newly minted identity badge, which had the word ‘Visitor’ printed across it in big white letters. His finger still itched where the blood sample had been taken to get his DNA fingerprint, and he had to keep stopping himself from rubbing it against his trouser leg.

“So,” said Ben, gesturing towards the showers. “Shall we get washed and changed? The sooner we get it done, the sooner we can go through to where it all happens.”

"As long as you're sure it's okay for me to be here, " Eddie replied. "I don't want to be taken out and shot or something."

"I'm in charge of this place," said Ben with a broad smile. "I get to decide who gets to go in there and I get to decide who gets shot. "

Eddie nodded nervously and began getting undressed, while wishing it was one of the women who was here with him. He grinned ruefully to himself. Grow up, you idiot! he scolded himself. It's not as if you’ve never showered with a woman before! Pleasure later. For the time being, stay professional. It would certainly be easy to remain professional in present company, he reflected as he watched the older man undressing on the other side of the room. Ben was one of those people who really should wear clothes.

An hour later, their skins red raw and itching from the razor and the exfoliating brush, they rubbed themselves with cream to keep flakes of skin from floating away into the air. “You do this every day?” asked Eddie.

“Every time we want to go through there,” replied the other man, indicating the door opposite the one they'd come in through. “We don't actually go in there much, though. We have samples, scans and photographs, and they allow us to do most of the actual work in the labs upstairs. We only go in to where the ship itself is stored when we need to access the source material, and that might only be once every couple of weeks. Our first priority, though, the one thing we absolutely have to make sure of, is that the source material isn't contaminated. It could render invalid any test or experiment we want to run in the future.”

“If it was buried in a coal seam for three hundred million years, I think it’s a little late to worry about contamination.”

“It was sealed all that time. One of the first things our predecessors did, though, was cut their way into it, letting air circulate freely throughout the vessel. Thankfully, they had the foresight to put it in a sterile, pure nitrogen atmosphere first. It's breathable in there these days, but every bit as sterile.”

After the armed guards, security checks and barbed wire fences they'd passed to enter the building, Eddie expected to have to pass more barriers to go into the presence of the ship itself, but all Ben did was open the door and gesture for the new recruit to precede him in. Eddie passed through warily, his imagination conjuring up automatic defences that some overworked operator had forgotten to inform about him. Were there hidden weapons targeting him even now? Perhaps poison gas dispensers, designed to kill without releasing blood and other contaminants into the air. The sudden gust of air made him jump, therefore, but when he spun around he saw that Ben was perfectly relaxed and grinning with amusement. Just air replacement, he realised. Expelling the dusty outdoor air that had come in with them laden with spores and pollen grains and replacing it with filtered air.

The wind stopped, and Ben opened a hatch in the wall where two piles of folded cotton clothes were stored. They got dressed, and Ben handed Eddie a face mask, fitting another over his nose and mouth. Along with the hairnets, the rubber gloves and the cloth booties, it made them look like crime scene investigators about to enter a murder scene. Ben then gestured to another door in the far end of the chamber. Eddie took hold of the cold, metal handle turned it and pushed the door open.

There was a hiss of air as the pressure equalised. On the other side was a chamber the size of an aircraft hanger with dozens of electric lights on the high ceiling high and a clutter of equipment against the walls, some on tables, more just piled on the floor. The rest of the team were already there, waiting for them, dressed the same way as the two new arrivals. Eddie barely noticed them, though. His attention had been seized by the object that sat in the centre of the huge room.

It looked like a gleaming silver cigar, pointed at the ends and wide enough in the middle that an average sized house would have fit inside. It had no features or markings, just the smooth, silvery surface unbroken except where holes had been cut into it by the researchers. Those holes, although they were smooth and regular, looked like ugly wounds to Eddie, a violation of the ship's geometric perfection, but his discomfort at what had been done to the vessel was eclipsed by his fascination with what could be seen inside. A jumble of machinery, a tangle of pipes, threads and tubes, some of it dangling freely like the entrails of a beast savaged by a predator. He moved closer to get a better look.

“Well, there it is,” said Ben, following behind. “What do you think?”

Eddie was too awestruck to reply, though. He continued to walk towards the ship until he was under its curving hull and reached a hand up to touch it. The surface looked like a sheet of mercury and he expected his fingers to sink into it, sending out ripples. It was solid, though, and even the most casual glance was enough to tell him that it was more perfect than any metal surface ever made by man.

“It's smooth to within one nanometre,” said James, as if guessing his thoughts. He drove his chair closer. “It’s pure iron, but the atoms are arranged in an amorphous, non crystalline manner. Iron glass. Humans have been making metal glasses for decades, of course, but no matter how carefully we do it there are always pockets of crystal here and there. We've been studying parts of the hull and we’ve never found even the smallest trace of crystalline structure anywhere. Or rust for that matter. It's not even steel, no other elements alloyed with it, and yet it somehow didn’t rust away to nothing during its time in the swamp.”

“It also seems to have had some kind of self-healing ability,” added Jasmine. “You'd expect it to be pretty banged up after all those millions of years, but the only marks on it are those we’ve made since discovering it and even they seem to be trying to heal. The machine marks the circular saw left while cutting it open have vanished, leaving the edges of the holes mirror smooth. It's clearly a lot more than just ordinary iron. It's active in some way. I’m tempted to use the word ‘alive’. The original power source must have long since depleted, though. Maybe it’s scavenging energy from the environment in some way.”

“James and Jasmine are our materials specialists,” said Ben. “They're the ones trying to figure out what the ship's made of and, if possible, how to duplicate it. They've made great progress with superconductors and mimetic materials, but there are components in there that don’t seem to be made of atoms at all.”

“Back in Martinique you said something about coherent matter,” said Eddie.

“Yes. Protons and electrons arranged in a regular pattern, like atoms in a crystal. Which is impossible, of course, but it’s hard to interpret the x-ray diffraction patterns in any other way.”

“It would be neutron star density, wouldn't it?”

“You’d think so, but it has the density of water while being harder than diamond. You'll have to talk to James about it sometime, but I have to warn you. If you don't come away with a headache afterwards, you weren't paying attention.” James smiled at him and Eddie smiled nervously back.

Eddie walked along the hull until he came to a flight of steps that had been erected beside it. He climbed them until he came to a railed walkway and followed it until he came to one of the holes that had been cut in the hull. This close, the ship's innards looked even more like the entrails of a slaughtered animal. There was a wet appearance to them, although they felt perfectly dry through the thin rubber of his gloves when he reached out tentative hand to touch them. There was a faint smell that reminded him of wet dog. “That's where we, our predecessors, found one of the mass dampeners,” said Ben. “You can see a lumpy tube that comes to an end. It was attached to the end of it.”

“How did you, they, know to cut right here?”

“There was a magnetic anomaly right here. Something under the hull was generating a powerful magnetic field. They were looking for a place to cut and they chose here.”

“And the hull is just iron? Glass iron but iron nonetheless? Just five centimetres thick? What kind of protection is that for an interstellar craft? I assume it reached a good percentage of the speed of light?”

“The mass dampener again. We have reason to believe that its area of effect reached several metres out from the surface of the hull, so any interstellar gas and dust that hit it would be effectively massless, incapable of causing damage. Right, Frank?” The other man nodded.

“You said the engines were on poles, jutting out from the hull.” Eddie looked along the smooth surface of the ship. “Where are they?”

“They can be extruded when needed, like the eyes of a snail. We've seen it happen. We were able to power up some of the ship’s systems with fuel cells. Ask Jessica, she'll show you later. She's the one looking into the miniature ion drive.”

“So, what does Alice do?” asked Eddie, looking down at the small, black woman grinning back up at him.

“Everything else,” said Ben. “Anything she can think of, really. Anything none of the others are looking at.”

“Right now I'm studying the instrument panels,” said Alice. “Or at least the patches of interior wall where we think the instrument panels must have been.” She beckoned for him to come back down, then led him around to the other side of the ship where there was another flight of steps. She climbed up to a hole that went right through the hull into the interior of the ship, while Eddie followed her.

The interior was much the same as the exterior. Bare, silvery metal, gleaming and perfect except the floor, which was textured to allow their feet to get a grip on it. The chamber they found themselves in was about the size of a small garage, with circular openings in the walls, but not the floor or ceiling, to give access to neighbouring rooms. Against one bulkhead was a human made fuel cell, looking out of place in the alien setting. A power cable ran from it to where a hole had been cut in the iron wall. Eddie squinted close and saw it connecting with part of the ship's piping.

“It’s divided into decks, with a clear up and down,” said Eddie, staring around the chamber in wonder. “They had gravity in here. And down is not aligned with the long axis. They didn't get the gravity from accelerating.”

“Unless they accelerated that way,” said Alice, pointing up and grinning. “You see a cigar shape and you assume it moved pointy end forward, but for all we know it moved sideways. They were aliens, after all. Who knows how they did things?”

“Was there anything inside?” asked Eddie. “Furniture? Equipment? Anything like that?”

“Some sludge on the floor, apparently. Water, metal oxides, organics, silicates. So totally corroded and decomposed that there’s no way to tell what it once was. Whatever it was that allowed the ship itself to defy the aeons apparently didn't apply to its contents.”

“Could some of that contents have been the crew?”

“Derek Pell didn't think so. He was a biologist, he worked on the ship about twenty years ago. You can read his summation when you've officially joined the project. You can catch up on all his research if you want. What it boils down to, though, is that he thought it extremely unlikely that anything in here was ever alive.”

She led the way through one chamber after another until they reached one with no more doors leading forward. The front of the ship, by Eddie's estimation. “This was the cockpit?” he said. Like every other room it was totally empty. The front bulkhead was flat, but totally bare. No dials or switches, no display screens. No cockpit seats. “Maybe they sat on the floor,” he mused. He fingered the front bulkhead where holes had been cut in it. “You took samples,” he said. “Looking for chemical differences? Evidence that information was displayed here?”

Alice nodded. ”We don't even know if vision was their primary sense, but whatever form the information took, textures or patterns of electrical charge, this is the logical place for it to have been displayed. We found nothing, though. Just the same glass iron with nothing to make it different from any other part of the ship.”

“It's possible that they used virtual displays,” said Jasmine, who'd followed them in. “The information fed directly into their brains. They would look at the bulkhead and see information displayed there, but it would all be in their heads.”

“We agreed not to indulge in flights of fancy,” said Ben, though. “We stick to what we know, what we can deduce directly from the evidence, otherwise there’s no telling how far astray our imaginations might lead us.” Jasmine nodded soberly, but when she looked back at Eddie there was an amused gleam in her eyes and a smile visible under her face mask. Eddie couldn't help but smile back.

“Can we go back to where you found the mass dampeners?” he asked.

“Sure,” said Ben. He led the way back to the entrance they'd made.

“The original entrance was on the lower deck,” said Frank. “There's a small room that can only be an airlock, but there’s no trace of a hatch visible from the outside. The metal healed seamlessly when it was closed.”

“But no interior doors, other then the inner airlock door,” added Karen. “They had no need for privacy or personal space, it seems.”

“Maybe it only had a single occupant,” said Jasmine. “They may not have been social creatures, like us. They might have been okay with being alone for years at a time. Yes, I know,” she said, seeing Ben getting ready to speak. “No speculation.”

Back outside the ship, they returned to where a section of the outer hill had been cut away. Eddie touched the exposed pipes and tubes again. “I wonder what they’d feel like if you touched them with your bare fingers?”

“Please don’t do that!’ said Jessica anxiously, taking half a step forward. “Your fingers are greasy. You’d contaminate it...”

“I know, I wouldn’t actually do it. I'd be scared the ship would do something nasty to me. Give me an electric shock or something.”

“There’s no power in the ship except what we're feeding into it from the fuel cells,” said Ben, “and the cell’s not turned on at the moment.”

“There must be some power coming from somewhere if the hull’s still trying to heal itself. Maybe not electrical power. Maybe photons being absorbed and emitted by electrons, passed from atom to atom. Maybe even direct mechanical vibrations.”

“We've explored every possibility we can think of and found nothing,” said Ben. “You can read up on everything we know, everything we're tried, when you join the project properly.”

“When?” said Eddie, smiling in amusement. “Not if?”

“I'm more confident now than I was when I first met you, on the ferry, and I was pretty confident then. I can see the way you're looking at the ship, the tone of your voice. You're hooked, Eddie! No point trying to deny it any longer.”

Eddie stared in anger, the denial already forming itself on his lips, but then he saw the others all looking at him, the smiles evident even behind their face masks, and the anger evaporated. It was true, he realised. He needed to know more about the ship. He needed to know everything they'd learned about it over the last fifty years. He needed it the way a man lost in the desert needed water. Having seen the ship, he knew he could never just go back to his former life and forget about it. He was going to join the project. The others all knew it, and now he knew it as well.”

“Okay,” he said with a sigh of resignation. “Where do I sign up?”

☆☆☆

An hour later, once again dressed in their normal clothes, they were sitting in the senior staff lounge with cups of tea and a tray of biscuits that Ben had brought from the neighbouring kitchen. Mounted on the wall behind them was a large television, currently turned off, its screen reflecting the view of a central, shrub filled courtyard visible through the window. Along the opposite wall was a bar, currently unoccupied, where someone could serve stronger drinks to the others. In one corner a pair of junior technicians were chatting quietly to each other, so Ben had chosen a table at the other end of the room. “How many people know about the space ship?” asked Eddie.

“About fifty people here, in this building. Probably another fifty out and about across the world. Politicians, soldiers and so on. Most of the people in this building don’t know about it. The guards, even most of the scientists and researchers. Wilson’s does some genuine weapons research here, as a cover. This room is reserved for people who do know, though, so we can speak freely here.”

“But even so, a hundred people...”

“You're wondering how we maintain security? We do have the occasional leak, it's true. Someone bragging to their significant other or getting drunk and telling everyone in their local watering hole. We pass it off as an urban legend. The Tadcaster UFO. We occasionally add our own rumours, just to muddy the waters. A portal to an alien dimension, a secret time travel project, that sort of thing. We've reached the point when you only have to mention the name Tadcaster and everyone just dismisses whatever you say next as nonsense and pseudoscience. Tadcaster has become a place that everyone's heard of but nobody takes seriously, like the Bermuda Triangle. If one of us did decide to go to the press and tell everything, the reporter would slam the phone down before you reached the end of the first sentence.”

“Funny how we still use expressions like ‘slam the phone down’,” said Karen with a smile. “Amazing how these sayings persist even after the technology moves on.” Stuart nodded his agreement but no-one else commented on the observation.

“Have any other artefacts been found?” asked Eddie. “Ancient artefacts, I mean. Millions of years old. Clearly the product of an advanced technology.”

“Do an internet search and you'll find thousands of them,” replied Ben, “but none of them stand up to scrutiny. Hoaxes for the most part. Some are intriguing, but natural explanations can't be entirely ruled out. The corrugated spheres of South Africa, for example. Found in rocks three billion years old, but they look manufactured, all identical. No-one can think of any natural process that could have produced them. They first started turning up about a hundred years ago and the miners have been digging them up regularly ever since. Then there’re the Narada objects. Microscopic, intricately detailed objects found in the Narada river, near the Urals. Dated at around two hundred thousand years old. Even today, we lack the ability to duplicate them. There's a collective name for these things. Enigmaliths. There are dozens of them, but they’ve never been regarded as anything other than curiosities. When the Tadcaster UFO is made public, as it inevitably will be one day, these objects might be studied properly and perhaps we’ll discover something astonishing, but until then...” He shrugged.

“I was just wondering if there was any evidence that the people who made the ship actually occupied this planet. Maybe just a small research outpost, maybe cities of millions of inhabitants. I suppose there’d be fossils if there’d ever been any great number of aliens on Earth.”

“Not necessarily,” said Alice, though. “On average, one fossil of a large land animal gets created every ten thousand years. Millions of them might have inhabited the Earth for that long and not left a single fossil.”

“But there’d be other evidence, wouldn’t there? Unusual elements in rocks laid down at that time, for instance. Fission products, unusual isotopes, that sort of thing. Like the iridium in the KT boundary left by the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs.”

“A chap called Jake Tumwell took a few carboniferous rock samples back in the twenties,” said Frank. “Gave them to a lab for analysis. Just tell me if you find anything interesting, he said. They apparently didn't, though. At least, they never said so if they did.”

“Back when they burned coal for heat and power, the energy companies regularly analysed it, looking for contaminants,” added James. “They didn't want to get sued if their coal caused cancer or something. A lot of that coal came from the Kasimovian age, the age when the ship was buried. They never revealed their findings, though. Every so often we talk about getting the government to make them hand their results over, getting some experts to look at them. Who knows what we might find?”

“That would be of academic interest only, though,” said Ben. “We can't go to such lengths just to satisfy our curiosity.”

“It might be of more than just academic interest,” said Eddie, though. “It could tell us a lot about how much life there is in the galaxy. If they occupied this planet in great numbers, with no thought to how much damage they were doing to the ecosystem, that might mean that life bearing planets like Earth are common enough that they didn’t think they were worth protecting.”

“There was no particularly significant mass extinction happening at the time,” said Jessica. “Life was just ticking over like normal, before, during and after the time the ship landed in the swamp.”

“So perhaps they did protect Earth,” said Eddie. “If they made it here once, why not again? Why just one ship in all Earth’s history? If they protected Earth, that might mean that it’s rare and precious, that life, complex life at least, is very uncommon. We know that no other world in our solar system has life, at least.”

“You're trying to draw conclusions from almost no evidence,” warned Ben. “We may just have to accept that we may never know the answer to these questions. We're scientists. We can’t just go around making up whatever fairy tale takes our fancy.”

“I was just trying to explore the boundaries of what we can deduce,” said Eddie, though. “We now know that life emerged at least twice in the galaxy...”

“Actually, we don’t even know that,” said Jessica with an apologetic smile. “We don't have so much as a single alien cell. We don't have a single clue as to what their biochemistry might have been. For all we know, we might share a common origin with the aliens.”

“Interstellar panspermia?” said Stuart with a dismissive snort. “There isn't a planet within a dozen light years that was ever capable of harbouring life.”

“There might have been, four billion years ago. Something stirred up the solar system around then, moved the giant planets to their present orbits. Maybe it was the close approach of another star with a life bearing planet. An asteroid hits the planet, blasting chunks of rock out into space, rocks with microbes buried inside. Some of them land on Earth...”

“So you think life started on the other planet and was carried to Earth?”

“Or it could have happened the other way around. Who knows?”

“So how come life was never carried from Earth to Mars? We know Mars could easily have supported life three billion years ago. It had oceans, rivers, a dense atmosphere keeping it warm...”

“Maybe it was. There might have been life on Mars for millions of years before dying out. If we ever get around to sending people to Mars they might find fossils.”

“We've got plenty of mars rocks, a lot of it sedimentary. None of it has fossils. Not even microbes.”

“Life might have been confined to a brief window of opportunity just a few million years wide, and it might not have colonised the whole planet, not even during the most habitable era. Maybe only one in a thousand sedimentary meteorites has fossils.”

“The Mary Anning probe went there specifically looking for fossils. It found nothing.”

“They may have misjudged the age of the terrain it landed on. It may be hundreds of millions of years too young.”

“The landscape there was made by water, that's been confirmed, and on earth, where there’s water, there’s life. There are microbes on earth living miles down below the surface! If there was ever life on Mars, it would surely have colonised the deep rocks where it would be safe from any climatic change on the surface, and if any part of the surface ever became habitable again, no matter for now brief a period, the deep life would surely have come back up to colonised it...”

He was interrupted by a young man who threw the door open to stick his head through. “Turn on the telly!” he shouted. “Quick!” Then he ran off along the corridor, shouting the same thing to someone else, leaving the senior staff staring at each other in astonishment. “What the hell?” said James in astonishment.

“Television!” said Ben in a loud, commanding voice. “Turn on. BBC news channel.”

The screen snapped to life, showing an attractive young woman visibly trying to remain calm as she read something from a screen on the desk in front of her. The scientists listened to her, and their eyes widened with alarm...