Grant concentrated hard as he stared at the computer screen, which showed a huge mass of brown filaments stretching across space in the direction he was heading, until suddenly the truth dawned: Flight Officer Jessica was combing her hair again.

It was a bright and starry night - night always, and always starry, here in the stellar nursery of the nebula - doubly bright and doubly starry to the fascinated eyes of Dr Hugh McComber, as he adjusted his self-patented personalised gravity-and-atmosphere-aura belt and turned his opticometrically enhanced spectacles in the direction of that which he had journeyed light-years at vast, commercially-subsidised expense to see: the emerging corona of a new astronomical entity tentatively titled by his generous sponsors 'Novus Walmartus'.

In the Gamma Sector, a stinking brown mass suddenly appeared , and it didn't take long until a black cloud of what looked like whirling insects hung over it, unperturbed by the triumphant howling of a lone cyber dog next to it.

Qwetrghtdcvznoyyllt, a Fgtyhjuidsctxxzian from Hjkuyghtghtdd looked across to where his Significant Other, suspended from the ceiling by a mesh of silk webbing, was resting half emerged from her fourth-instar moult and sighed; he just knew Phfffdxxxicotyl was going to demand, as soon as he'd gained the energy to speak, that the whole pod be redecorated to match the colour scheme of this latest skin.

It dawned too late on Picard that, although he had performed the Galacto-masonic handshake with the Qz'Fbarin president with faultless protocol, he may not have selected the correct appendage.