The Captain looked at the little green planet on the big screen.
He said “Do we look at this one?”
The First Officer said “Can’t.”
“Can’t, why not?”
He looked at his hand-held instrument. “We’re being jammed. Well, not jammed exactly. They have some sort of cabling system that‘s playing havoc with our instruments. Our tech boys say Earthlings have named it the National Broadband Network. It’s some sort of primitive technology they’re rolling out.”
“Can we wait it out?”
“Oh! No sir. They’ve been at it for years.”
The Captain frowned. “We have to come up with something. Some sort of record for Command.”
“What we’re getting is very scrappy.”
“What do you mean scrappy?”
“As far as we can tell, we are getting short wave signals on everything from average teeth cleaning times to the diameter of something called a football.”
“OK. Keep trying. Keep me informed. I’ll be glad when we move on from here. Nasty little system this one. Messy place.”
“Yes sir.”
The First Officer crossed the deck to the consuls, all buzzing away trying hard to gather information on the planet below. After a while he returned to the Captain.
“It’s pretty bad sir. I don’t think it’s going to be enough to make out a report.”
“What have you got?”
The Officer look down at his hand-held device again.
”OK. History seems to be a complete washout, although the planet’s habitation period seems to be quite short.” He shrugged an apology. “There is a very limited capability regarding the study of objects in space, and their units of measurement seem to vary for just about every land mass, no apparent attempt to standardise.”
“They need soft things for sleeping, most of them don’t like walking with bare feet, they use pronged forks for eating, they all have to clip their nails regularly, they grow grass so they can cut it down again, they draw pictures of flowers to put in their houses that have flowers just outside of them, many of them submit themselves to regular intoxication, their shops have tattered and torn clothes that they sell as new, they eat animals and sometimes each other, they seem to be very secretive about how they mate, there seems to be a general sense that most of them are trying really hard to be happy and nearly all of them use body coverings.”
He peered closely at his screen. “We don’t seem to be able to get a precise fix on how many wars are going on down there, but there are a lot of them.”
He looked up. “I’m afraid it just goes on and on like this sir. Completely useless really, I can’t see that we can use any of it. I mean, there’s just nothing substantial enough to provide a proper picture.”
The Captain shook his head and blew out a long breath.
The Officer shrugged and said “Like I said sir… scrappy.”
“Damn! OK. My quarters, now.” The Captain vacated his chair and waved the Second Officer over.
In the Captain’s room they sat looking at the printout.
“Have to do what we did for Rigor 39… fudge it. We have no choice. There’ll be a hell of a stink if we don’t tick all the boxes.” He dropped his head into his hands and said “I’ve got one of my really bad migraines coming on.” He looked up with bloodshot eyes and said “Let’s just give it a B11 rating and move on.”
The First Officer stood up, saluted and said “Yes Captain.”
He left the room, closing the door very gently behind him.