Kirk looked up from the padd in his hands. "Spock." He glanced at the time on the screen before him. "Damn. Sorry."
"If you are too busy for our game of chess..."
"No, I'm... Well, I am, but..."
Spock looked at the untidy heap of data cassettes on the captain's bed. "Reports?"
"No. The Annual Enterprise Short Story Competition." Kirk picked up one of the cassettes, read the label and dropped it again. "Spock, on Vulcan, you must have a set of clearly defined criteria for judging a short story. Some easy way of giving it a grade." He turned 'make it happen -- for me' eyes on his first officer.
Spock found it difficult to resist Jim's frequent demands that he should do the impossible. So difficult, that the impossible usually turned out to be possible after all. However, this time...
"On Vulcan, we have no short stories. Indeed, we have no fiction at all. Therefore, we have not developed any set of standardised criteria for judging such artefacts."
Jim's face fell.
"However, it cannot be difficult," Spock found himself saying. "There were clearly defined rules for the competition. You can eliminate those stories which do not exactly qualify for inclusion in the judging process."
Kirk looked a little doubtful. "That seems a little philistine..."
"But it will make your task easier."
"Okay," Kirk agreed, and swept a subset of cassettes to one side, revealing that he had already considered this strategy, even if he hadn't implemented it.
Spock nodded approvingly. "Then there is grammar and spelling."
Another, smaller batch of cassettes joined the rejects.
"Illogicalities of plot, inconsistent characterisation, plagiarism..."
Now, Kirk had to sort through, but he quickly identified the culprits and added them to the growing pile of non-contenders.
Spock turned to the remaining twelve cassettes. He looked briefly at the ceiling. "While I am no expert on fiction, Captain, I have read accounts of some of the Federation's most noted literary 'prizes'. I believe at this stage, you should express a clear preference for the work of your close personal friends, or lovers, or if you are so unattractive a personality that you have neither, then you should allow yourself to be biased by the latest literary fashion."
"My god, Spock. You do have a sense of humour."
Spock raised the obligatory eyebrow. "Is the suggestion helpful?"
"I suppose it could be, but all the entries are anonymous, and I don't have a clue what the lastest literary fashion is. I like Dickens..."
"Yes. I believe you have told me that."
"Sorry. But anyway, it doesn't help. So what next?"
The Vulcan considered. "You will no doubt find this suggestion questionable, coming from a Vulcan, but might I suggest that you now rank the stories according to how much you enjoyed them?"
Kirk threw his hands in the air. "How do I know? I'm too intimidated by this judging process to know if I enjoyed them or not. Some of them I definitely didn't..."
Spock gestured at the cassettes, and Kirk sorted them into enjoyable, or at least tolerable, sheep, and those which, entertainment-wise, were certified goats. As he did it, he experienced an uneasy, guilty suspicion that some of Earth's greatest literature would also be goats, if he was in charge of choosing. Still, it did bring the pile of candidates to a manageable four. They'd almost reached the point where he could declare a tie and go play chess with his first officer.
Spock picked up each of the four in turn, and examined them. Kirk wasn't sure if the Vulcan's speed-reading ability was such that, in the time available, he had read them in their entirety, or if he was simply checking the Flesch-Kincaid readability score. The review over, Spock held out a single tape.
Kirk took it, then handed it back. "No."
"I realise that your decision is final, and that you will not feel it necessary to publicly justify it, but I am interested..."
"Content," Kirk told him succinctly.
"Content?"
"*Adult* content."
"Is that explicitly excluded by the rules?"
"Spock, it just isn't polite to submit a story in which the writer is plainly fantasising about having sex with the judge. This is not open for discussion."
The eyebrow twitched. "You have accessed this file thirty nine times in the last twenty four hours. The closest runner up..."
"I had difficulty believing someone actually had the... the nerve to submit it."
Spock moved on to the next tape. "This file has been accessed four times, the other two only once. Is the 'content' acceptable?"
"Yeah..." Kirk agreed, bored now that they'd arrived at the logical, and acceptable, winner. "Spock, can you find out who submitted that one?" He gestured at the last reject. "From the file headers, or other information on the padd?"
"The rules..."
"I've chosen a winner now. It's grammatical, spelled correctly, has a beginning, a middle and an end, and even made me smile once or twice. Now tell me who wrote this one."
Spock paused with his fingers over the query keys on the padd. "I... should apologise, Captain. I did not realise that in submitting this story, I was being impolite."
Kirk stared at him. "You..."
"I wrote it."
Kirk drew a wary breath. "You know, I thought there was something... beginnerish, about it."
"I had not attempted to write fiction before. Perhaps with practice, and more acceptable 'content'..."
"Yes, I think if I were to help you with style, and technique, and perhaps some of the practical details..."
"I am sure such tutoring would be most helpful, Captain. And most rewarding, for both of us..."
***
The winner was published in the 'Enterprise Gazette', where it was widely ignored. An early reject, M'Benga's 'Cowslips for Christine', was described later in the Times Literary Supplement as 'the most assured and imaginative revisiting of Joyce to emerge in centuries.' Captain James Tiberius Kirk, when challenged from time to time over this error of judgement, would say only, 'I don't remember that it got anyone killed.'
Despite the fact that it hadn't won the competition, 'Ensign Smith meets The Captain' was always Jim Kirk's favourite story. (And Spock never owned up to the fact that Chekov wrote it.)
***
The End