R45et6yd4 called up the status report and watched the symbols dance on the screen before him. Suddenly he punched the controls, freezing the picture, and looked it over more carefully. Then his chair squeaked in protest as he turned around slowly and heavily.

Being a spaceship engineer one often cannot find enough free time as it is, but, hearing the squeak, almost everyone in the lab discovered they had urgent business elsewhere and the rest found themselves unexpectedly, but completely, involved with their current projects.

R45et6yd4 faced his workers and leaned back a bit, waiting. They kept working on their project, but if one watched them hard enough, it was apparent their “work” was nothing more than fiddling with various gadgets each had on his table. R45et6yd4 kept waiting and watched the fiddling grow more and more nervous by the second.

Finally one of the technicians couldn’t take it any longer and looked up. R45et6yd4 looked at him coldly and held up the status report printout.

“Who authorized this?” He demanded.

The technician swallowed. Everyone on the ship knew R45et6yd4’s temper. The man had the shortest fuse anyone in the empire ever saw. He could snap at the emperor himself. The only thing still keeping him alive was his ingenuity in the physics department and specifically engineering. His works have been the last push the empire needed to enter the next phase in science. But alive didn’t have to mean happy and so he was always sent on the most far off missions that kept him busy and out of the emperor’s sight.

The technician decided playing dumb was the safest bet at the moment, especially considering he really didn’t know what this whole thing was about.

“Authorized what, sir?” He asked.

R45et6yd4 threw him the printouts.

“The cloaking drop, the descent below cloud level, being on the sunlit side of the planet… Are you deliberately trying to make us visible to the local population, god-dammit? “ He snapped.

The technician swallowed again, this time with a greater difficulty, and went over the report. His fellow workers huddled at a corner and cast sympathizing glances at him. None of them, however, thought of offering their help, with their survival instinct pulling all the brakes it could.

The technician kept looking at the report, but his movements have once again grown into a nervous ruffle, as he thought of a way to redirect the anger from himself. With a corner of his eye he noticed one of R45et6yd4’s eyes starting to twitch and realized he was running out of time. Then it hit him.

“Umm,” he started cautiously. “Well, these changes are too major for someone in our section to be able to authorize them. Save from you, naturally. Err, what does the history log says about it?”

R45et6yd4 narrowed his eyes and, for a brief second, the technician thought he would explode. Then R45et6yd4 swung his chair about and punched on some more controls. The technician, watching over R45et6yd4’s shoulder, watched the screens flash rapidly until, finally, the history log lighted up. He then gasped and, seeing R45et6yd4’s fists starting to clench, moved slowly to the side, clearing as much space as he could between himself and anything that could be broken on, say, someone’s head.

R45et6yd4 brought one of his fist down, which sent the screen flashing with various messages, claiming the request could not be completed, stood up abruptly, sending his chair sliding clear across half the lab, and stormed out, kicking everything in his way, be it a chair, a table or some poor guy’s feet.

T34y8 sat in his chair and watched the main viewing screen show the sights he’d seen at least twice each day for the last few years. He felt the faint hint of boredom creeping up on him. Soon he’d have to start looking for the artificial entertaining the ship could offer him.

He heard a loud bang on the elevator door and turned to watch it open and R45et6yd4 storm out of it. The head engineer seemed upset.

“Are you out of your mind?” He demanded. “Dropping our cloaking, dropping bellow the cloud level? Do you wish to see us shot straight out of the air?”

T34y8 raised an eyebrow calmly. R45et6yd4 faced him eye-to-eye, no more than a few inches apart. It wasn’t much of a pretty sight: the head engineer’s face was red, his breath heavy (and rather smelly) and his left eye was twitching rapidly.

T34y8 leaned back and waved a hand in front of him. It didn’t help much with the smell, but it did force some more space between them.

“What are you talking about?” He asked.

“One of you latest orders.” R45et6yd4 breathed out. “The one leaving us clearly visible to the planet’s population.”

T34y8 sighed and, motioning the head engineer to take a seat, touched a few buttons on his personal control panel, which brought up a holographic screen in front of him. He touched another button and the view changed, scrolled several lines over the screen, highlighted one of them and brought it into full view. The captain smiled.

“Oh, that one. I decided we could save a bit on the ‘hiding’ energy. It’s wasted for no good reason really.”

R45et6yd4 drew in a quick breath and jumped up from his seat. The captain threw up his hand, stopping him, and motioned him to return to his seat. This was the main reason R45et6yd4 was assigned to T34y8’s ship: the captain had a nearly inexhaustible amount of patience and his calmness was virtually unbreakable. These two qualities made him probably the only man in the whole fleet, not to say the empire, who was capable of working in close contact with R45et6yd4 without ending up in the nearest psychiatric facility.

“No good reason?” Raged R45et6yd4. “Not to mention the fact it leaves us wide open, and almost inviting, for an attack, I recall the research department saying something about watching the inhabitants without their knowledge of it.”

“Calm down.” T34y8 replied. “First of all, from what we’ve gathered about this planet, the civilization clearly has no weapons that could harm us to the slightest of degrees. Second, they really can’t detect us to any acceptable degree of certainty. And they tend not to trust their own senses.”

“From what we’ve gathered… We may not have gathered all there is to gather. There are ways to conceal this kind of information, you know? Also, tend doesn’t cut it. Some of them do believe what they see, and if you gather up enough of those, they’re bound to enlighten the rest of them sooner or later. Besides, save energy? Our energy sources are but limitless. Your ‘saving’ will not have the slightest of impacts on our energy reserves. So I suggest you stop this nonsense immediately and cancel that stupid order of yours.”

Something flashed on T34y8’s control panel. He glanced at the light and touched several buttons. The highlighted item darkened and disappeared.

“Very well,“ he said. “You can resume the hiding position at your will.”

R45et6yd4 nodded, somewhat puzzled by the sudden change of moods, stood up and left the bridge.

T34y8 smiled to himself and touched the flashing button. The screen in front of him came to life and presented him the face of one of the planet’s inhabitants. The translating device emitted the following:

“And on a different topic, another UFO sighting has been reported today. Jim Rednik, the eyewitness, says the object dove from the clouds, hovered in midair for a while and then moves slowly across the sky to the west. Government officials claim the local radars recorded only one appearance that day and that was of a commercial airplane en-route from Washington to LA. Our field reporter, Jenny Bland, who happened to be at the area, interviewed Jim and here is her story:”