Clogging The Interface

--Captain, there's gunk all over the controls!

--Who's been clogging the interface? There's no way to navigate with all this muck in the circuits.

(Diminished visibility, screens clouded by toxic fog)

--We'll have to attempt a crash landing. Jiffy, alert the shock absorbers!

(In small cells under the star-bridge squads of shock absorbers were raised from space sleep, little hippo monkey men with rubber elephant-stump spring feet)

--Release the ecto jets!

(Phlegmatic green beams whirred out in spirulous emanations, clearing a descent zone through the murk, readying the path of the shock absorbers...)

--What do you think could be down there, Jiffy?

--I don't know Sir, the readings indicate snotty swamp lands, usual dwelling place of...

--No, don't tell me, Jiffy. I know what you're thinking.

Our channels were furred like filaments yet to be descaled. Ferruginous deposits had hindered our interstellar progress and we'd attempted an emergency descent. It became apparent on landing, on familiarising ourselves (messy and tired as we were) with the new place, that resistance, impediments to progress (such as the clogging of our interfaces), are sometimes in the end necessary for our advancement. Without these points of reference, without the grip offered by apparent malfunction, we would slip off into space unchecked, light years from any intervention, from any thing to notice. Nothingness, that seemed to us, Basic Astro-men, to consist in the lack of an up and a down, of any sense of here and there --a lack found painfully in the depths of space. Out of this silently acknowledged fear our equipment, designed to ensure the smooth progress of the craft through uninterrupted space, was occasionally sabotaged by paranoiac crew members. It was thus we found ourselves, broken yet ecstatic, plunging towards some known unknown, more reassuring by far than the unknown unknown of deep, dead space.