“Definitely an elevator,” I said, and stepped in. The others followed. We all stared at the column of buttons. Each button had a plaque beside it displaying alien script. Not much help to us, of course. I gestured at the one lighted button. “This would mean we’re on the second floor, or deck, or whatever. But that’s not possible. I wonder what the bottom button is for.”

“You can test it later,” Patrick said. Leaning past me, he jabbed the top button. “If this were a human ship, that’d be the important deck. Let’s start there.”

“I’m kind of amazed at how mundane this all feels,” Nat commented. “I guess the whole ‘common design requirements’ concept extends to everything.”

I shrugged. “Unless you’ve got antigravity shafts, how many ways are there to go up and down while taking up minimum space?”

“Speaking of alien design decisions,” Nat said as the doors closed and the elevator began to move, “doesn’t it strike you as odd that a ship this size appears to be empty? I mean, was Chewbacca the only occupant? If so, why?”

The elevator stopped, and the door slid open to reveal the same circular space, but no radial corridors. Instead, as we walked around the elevator cylinder, we found four doors with the ubiquitous buttons to the right. One entrance, however, was a double door, and much more imposing than the other three. It had a plaque dead center, engraved with the alien script.

“This looks important,” I said.

“Yup.” Again, without waiting for discussion, Patrick jabbed the “open” button. The door rumbled open to reveal a pie-shaped room with several workstations in a horseshoe pattern and a larger chair at the center of the horseshoe. At the far end of the room, a vertical blank space on the curved wall appeared to be a view screen. I looked up at the ceiling, then tracked it to the far wall. There was a definite curve, but it was far too shallow for an overall spherical shape. If this was the top floor, or deck, or whatever term they used, then the ship was definitely saucer shaped.

I found myself slightly offended at the idea. I’d always thought of saucer-shaped alien spacecrafts as something that people who didn’t know any better would think up. The whole idea had originally come from an offhand comment by a pilot who had seen some unidentifiable objects near Mount Rainier and described them as “saucer shaped.” From that day on, “flying saucers” became synonymous with aliens.

While I was ruminating on the subject, Nat and Patrick had been wandering around the room. “This has got to be the bridge,” Patrick said. “I can’t identify most of the stations, but it sure as hell reminds me of a Federation starship.”

“This looks like the pilot’s station,” Natalie said, tentatively touching a padded chair at the station closest to the view screen. “The conn?”