Much Ado About Nothingness

Sidey’s Weekend Theme is “nothing much”…

**************************************************

The door hissed open and Captain Kirk, yawning widely, stepped onto the bridge.

“Good morning, Spock,” he said, slumping into his chair and swinging it idly from side to side. “Anything to report?”

“Nothing much, Captain,” replied Spock, “although we have spotted an M-Class planet two million kilometres away.”

Kirk stopped swinging and sat up. “Might there be life there?” he asked.

“I have no data on that,” said Spock.

“Speculate,” said Kirk.

“I’d say the odds are approximately 24.7225675434 billion to one against it,” said Spock.

“Good enough for me,” said Kirk. “Uhura, see if you can make contact.”

“Yes, Captain,” sighed Uhura. For two years she had been sitting with her long legs crossed and her earpiece in her ear, trying to make contact with anyone out there. For two years she had had no success. She was beginning to feel like Bell must have when he owned the world’s only telephone.

They were bored. All of them. They were fed up with exploring strange new worlds and finding them unpopulated. Expendable crewmen would be brought along on such occasions, and instead of dying horribly would return alive with rock samples (the ship was now so full of rocks that it could no longer travel faster than Warp 4), shrubs and, on one occasion, a collection of small berries that had made everyone fart soap-bubbles for two days.

They had studied red giants, dark matter, and nebulas. Spock had told them that they were called nebulae, and Bones had told him that he was a pointy-eared pedant. Spock had knocked Bones out with his Vulcan nerve-pinch.

They had flown into a worm-hole on one occasion, simply for something to do. There are some very big worms in space.

Kirk had started an affair with Yeoman Rand. Then with Uhura. Then with Nurse Chappel, then with a girl from Astrophysics, and currently with twin sisters from Payroll.

Bones, with no patients with anything more serious than colds, had set up a meth-lab in Sickbay. Scotty, unable to complain about misuse of the engines since the Enterprise never had to chase or flee from anything, had taken instead to complaining about the food, the décor and lack of tartan in the star-fleet uniform. Sulu had tried to commit hari-kari, though fortunately had left his phaser on stun. Spock had started dressing in an elf costume in his room, and pretending he was Orlando Bloom in Lord Of The Rings. Chekov had taken to writing sad plays about the futility of the aristocratic lifestyle.

The rest of the crew had formed chess clubs, poetry readings and flash mobs.

Even the ship’s computer was now bored, had switched herself off and, to everyone’s annoyance, was using Microsoft’s Starfield as a screensaver.

Everyone longed for the chance to fire a missile, to learn a different language, to be ravished by beautiful, green-skinned alien women. None of these things had happened, and there were still three years of the five-year mission left.

The problem with going where no-one has gone before is that there’s no-one there when you get there.