Chapter 9: Dancing with the Star Charts

There was a hearty breakfast in the captain's mess, a bit of glamorous conceit that had been added to the Pai Lung when she became the Hawking and the ship became a commercial venture. It was Ted, Victor, Wendy, Ike, DeeDee and Rob, along with Alexandra Nascimento and Owen Gardner. Victor and Ted seemed a touch too cheerful, and blamed it on their military backgrounds.

"We learn to be of good cheer and to eat well, of our meal and of life before we go off to battle." Victor said, raising his glass of tea in salute.

"The modern soldier can't quite say 'We who are about to die salute you.' Too many movies, both the cheesy ones and the good have made those words seem too cheap." Ted added. "But that is the attitude. We're able to find joy in our commitment to our duty and our oath and ignore the possibilities that the situation might suggest."

"It doesn't matter that the moment isn't a literal sword over our necks." Victor added with a laugh. "A moment of mind-boggling impossibility will do as well, eh?"

Victor and Owen Gardner were going on the trip. Alexandra Nascimento had risen to second in command after taking Rob's place on the bridge, and would assume command for the duration of the trip. She had three experienced officers to rely on in Victor's absence, and Rob expected she wouldn't need them. Alexandra always was one of those 'eye of the eagle' types, and now that she had learned to master her natural inclinations in a healthier way, the position suited her. Ike and DeeDee would come as well. The rear cargo space had been emptied out and some collapsible emergency folding seats had been added. Of course the Q-Space Engines were just past the bulkhead to the aft of those new seats, but Rob wasn't going to mention it until they had made their first trip.

Everyone ate their meal and left, heading to their quarters to get ready, a last minute chance for everyone to 'freshen up', empty a nervous bladder or calm a queasy bowel, and then meet in the shuttle bay. The Cherenkov, with her new blister, took up most of the bay. There was an awkward bit of ladder and scaffolding to negotiate to get to her entry hatch. A small design flaw, in a cobbled together craft.

Ted took the pilot's seat in the forward command cabin. Rob took the second seat, and would be the one with access to the QSE, as Ted had begun calling it. Victor took the third seat, but he was just along for the ride today. Wendy was in the middle cabin at the sensor and communications center that had last been used for tracking the Q-One and her now sacrificed sister. Ike, DeeDee and Owen Gardner took the new seats in the converted cargo bay behind her.

The Hawking's tractor beams eased the Cherenkov out of the shuttle bay, and once she was free of the shields, they fired up her own G2 drive and move a quick million miles away from the Hawking. Wendy had standard Q-tap communications with the Hawking established, and was in active contact with Ty Glover and Fred Wassermann. She also had the Cherenkov's Beacon up and actively locked in by the Hawking. Everyone was wearing full Caldwell suits with space harnesses that had added EV utility modifications. If the ship couldn't make it back, they weren't likely to make a difference, but they wore them all the same.

"Systems Check." Rob called over the Cherenkov's circuit.

"G2 drive is green." Ted called. Rob heard him in stereo, as his words came through the tap at the same time as he said them beside him.

"Comm suite green. Tracking suite green. Beacon green and active." Wendy said through the comm.

"Bringing the Q-Space Engine online." Rob said, watching the displays flicker as he did. He watched them settle into stable readings.

"Bringing the QSE from standby to full ready." He said. "Power is holding steady."

They sat there for a moment, collectively feeling the hum of the ship whispering through their bones.

"Ready when you are sweetheart." Rob said to Wendy on a personal channel. He looked back through the open hatchway behind him, spotting her figure in the distance.

"Hawking, this is the Cherenkov. All systems are at full ready and we are prepared to engage the drive." He said, switching to the Hawking's channel.

"Roger that Cherenkov, this is the Hawking, we have you locked and are standing by." Came one of the bridge officer's voices. Alexandra's voice followed.

"Good luck and God speed, Cherenkov."

"All hands, prepare for Q-Space activation." Rob called. "Comm, what is our Beacon, and our phase?"

"We are locked on Alpha Centauri A, and our phase offset is zero." Wendy replied.

Rob nodded to himself and reached down, tilted the safety cover up and caressed the button for a second, and then pushed it.

Nothing happened. Rob felt nothing at all. He looked at the displays. The power readings were showing a completed cycle, and the Engine showed as having engaged.

"Status?" He called.

"Beacon lock is still active, and I have a reading that says its 5 AU away, dead behind us." Wendy called.

"Ted?" Rob said

"On it!" He answered, pulling the yoke to the side to spin us around.

Slowly the distant little yellow ball, so similar and yet so different, came to be centered in our screen. Rob tapped a circuit to the Hawking.

"Hawking, this is the Cherenkov. We have Alpha Centauri A in our screens."

They hung around for the same two hours that the Q-One and Q-two probes had for their first trips, and while they waited, put the Cherenkov's sensor array to work, trying to get a little more information on the three planets the probes had seen. All they got were some signs that the second planet, the one in the theoretical 'life zone', had an atmosphere, and that there was at least trace oxygen in it.

At the end of their two hour stay, Rob avoided any sense of drama and just pushed the button. Once again there was no sensation at all.

"Welcome home Cherenkov." Came Alexandra's voice. "Welcome home."

The debriefing aboard the Hawking was interesting, to say the least. The entire medical staff gave them a going over like they had just spent a month in the desert without food or water. They were told to expect an MRI, CAT scan and a full work up when they got back to Infinity Station. They nodded their heads and kept on grinning.

"The first and most amazing thing I noticed was that there was no perception of a transition, at all. None. We did not know we had succeeded until we looked at the data displays." Rob began.

"Everything about that transition must be beyond our physical ability to experience." Wendy said. "We literally can't feel it.

"The second thing I noticed was that no time appeared to pass for us." Rob said. "Did the same 3 or 4 second period that we observed with the probes occur? Did you have a loss of contact?"

"Yes, exactly the same amount of time passed." Fred Wassermann said. "And Ty found something interesting." Fred said, turning to Tyrese Glover and raising an eyebrow.

"I do not claim this means anything, but our standard tracking chronometer only displays 4 decimal places, and all transition periods measured out to 3.1416 seconds. However, it is internally designed to measure up to 12 decimal places, so I pulled the measurements up in the diagnostic display instead of the tracking display. The time measures out to 3.141592653589 seconds."

"Wow." someone said into the silence. "Transition time is pi?"

On the way back to Earth, Rob tapped Tom Standaahl and got him into a holo call with Coretta and Saalih.

"We've had a good test in the Cherenkov, and we're ready to refit the Hawking and our two transports." He began. "But we gained some experience that I want to pass along. I've got some data for you. Here." Rob said, piping the data through to their Q-taps.

"I see what you wound up doing with the Cherenkov. Is that going to be permanent?" Tom asked.

"No, and that's what this call is about really. We did that to avoid loosing our easy access to the Engine. The damned things are just too complicated to risk tight quarters, and that's what we would have had to do to shoehorn one into the Cherenkov's drive bay."

"So you want to go modular it appears?" Tom said, looking at the data Rob had sent.

"Yes. I'm picturing every one of these engines being built into a vehicle pretty much like the two we already built, but I still don't want these four to have to go through the poking and prodding that surface to orbit certification would require."

"So we modify the exteriors with all these mounting surfaces. Should we pull the internal flight controls and just leave the control and remote interfaces?"

"No, I think the fact that every Q-Space Engine is a self-contained ship, with its own reactor and controls is a good idea, and it adds very little to the overall cost. You might want to remove all the hard seats though and replace them with the fold up and drop down seating used in emergency vehicles."

They hashed things out for over two hours, but when they were done, they had a pretty good design. They also knew exactly what they had to do to the Hawking to get her ready for her new engines.

Victor was not amused.

"What do you mean we are pulling the existing G2 drive? We just finished getting refitted with her!"

With several months to go before the first of the new engines would be ready, they had plenty of time to get everyone used to the idea, and plenty of time to reserve some time in the Infinity Station dry dock.

Given the Hawking's size, they weren't going to have to alter her external appearance at all. There was more than enough room in the rear drive bay for one of the new engines, but it did mean modifying the layout of the surrounding area pretty drastically. The crew did all the internal work they could while waiting for their slot, stripping interior walls and bracings until they had the existing drive isolated in a framework of supports and control feeds. They had the cuts they were going to need to make marked and ready to go. The time in the dry dock was going to seem like an Indy 500 pit stop.

A week after Rob's call to Erie Precision, Saalih called to let him know they'd be getting the first two engines at the same time. The crew took that knowledge and ran with it, prepping the Beagle in the Hawking's shuttle bay.

The two transports were not big enough to add a Q-Space engine to without visible external modifications, so they tore apart her entire rear end and rebuilt it from scratch. The drive assembly would slide into the transport like a bullet into the chamber, and the rear of the Beagle would have a flared bulge that did resemble those on an old fashioned revolver's magazine.

There was an internal struggle in Rob's mind about making the Q-Space engine public and revealing this new ability to travel to the stars. He hadn't held anything back in the past when his weirdly wired brain fired off something new. Other than to be able to surprise a few people. This time though He felt like they needed to have some sort of handle on the new technology and become familiar with the process and the underlying reality. As long as the folks at Erie Precision were willing to keep their lips sealed, they had time. Time to adjust, time to think and time to explore.

Things were kept kind of mum back on Sandy Isle too. Rob and Wendy's parents were happily adjusting to the island life, and had begun to take sailing lessons. They were shopping for a sailboat and Dave McKesson had volunteered to help. Sailing was something of a family obsession with the McKesson family, it seemed.

Dave was there with his wife Ginny during one of the couple's trips down, and the two of them seemed to sense they were up to something special. Rob could see a shine in their eyes when Wendy or he talked about getting back to the Hawking.

Rob hadn't really met Doctor McKesson before, except for briefly at Andy and Cor's wedding, and it was still amazing to him that someone so young and beautiful could be old enough to be Andy and Serenity McKesson's mom. He thought Wendy felt a little outdone in the beauty department with her around, but he did spend some serious time every night making her forget her concerns.

They invited the Hawking's crew down for some time on the beach as well, and by the time everyone had rotated through for at least a week of swimming, soaking up some sun and being winded and dined by the elder Youngs and Fellowes, the entire crew was feeling fully recharged and ready to go. Rob almost regretted not being there during Alexandra's week. He understood she considered the beach as clothing optional, and had absolutely no problems being seen au natural.

Wendy slugged him in the shoulder twice, both times they heard the story from someone on the ship.

"That's for imagining her naked." She said.

The practical minds of the geeks in the lab had decided that an interstellar drive that worked in so unnoticeable a fashion was not a good thing. They tied the engine's firing circuits to the ships artificial gravity, and set the gravity field to flicker just above the level of perception. It probably wouldn't wake up anyone who was sleeping, or interrupt someone's concentration, but everyone who was awake would feel a momentary flutter in the pit of their stomachs when they made a jump.

That wasn't the only surprise. Someone had decided that if they were going to be interstellar adventurers, they needed something distinctive to wear. Everyone was pretty comfortable wearing synthetic mesh shirts and shorts under their Caldwell suits, and the suits were mandatory attire during duty hours. To be honest, they were so comfortable most of the crew forgot they were wearing them until it was time for a bath or a little romance.

They all got a little 'zap' from a portable update module, and now their Caldwell suits sported a triple circle logo over the left breast that symbolized the three stars of the Alpha Centauri System. Rob really liked the looks of it, and decided he would have to use it officially for whatever business venture he wound up in when interstellar travel became a public reality.

Saalih and Coretta came back to the Hawking to supervise the installation of the new Engines. The hardest part was shredding the shipping crates off them. The system of mounts and rails worked perfectly, and the engines slid into their new homes smoothly. The biggest difference between the two installs was the manner in which they tied the existing fusion reactors into their power grids. The Hawking had a much larger reactor for her original drive, and routing that power to the new drive assembly did take a little reconfiguration of the power couplings.

Ted Henley, who had originally been hired as a glorified chauffeur after all, stayed at home this time. He parked Isaac at Infinity Station and took the Viking to their lab on the moon. The Viking may be waiting for her new engine, but she had all the beacon and tracking gear she needed to become their home base's tracking station.

Even with the extra trickiness of the power tie-ins, they were done in two days. The next two engines wouldn't roll out of Erie Precision's shop for another month. Saalih volunteered to go back in the Viking with Ted and stay at Erie until the engines were done. By then it would be close to time to begin work on the new freighter at the McKesson yard, and he could shift over there to act as liaison on that build.

One concern that came up was the power drain. Standard fusion reactors were considered to be good for a hundred years when powering a grav field generator, even a G2 Drive version. Examination of the power consumption from Q-One told them that those same engines would only last fifty years at the rate one of the Q-Space engines was drawing power. They would have to keep an eye on that until they were very sure of the rate, but the Hawking wasn't going to drain a reactor with a few jumps.

There is always a brief 'ants scurrying' period of time before any mission. They had experienced it every time and this was no exception, but finally, the scurrying was over, the crew were at their stations and it was time to leave Infinity Station and head for space. The Hawking was, as far as anyone on Earth knew, heading for the Oort cloud, but what they really intended to do was test the 5AU limit they'd observed at the incoming end, and see if it applied to the departure end as well. They would hit the button at about 2AU, just before they got to the Asteroid belt, and if the first one didn't work, again just before they got to Jupiter at 5.1AU.

An hour after leaving Infinity Station the Hawking passed beyond Mars orbit, and thirty minutes after that, with the backscatter of the asteroids providing some cover, Rob pushed the button. His stomach fluttered and the star field in front of him changed immediately.

"Okay! No 5AU limit on outgoing jumps!" He said into the crowded bridge.

"Definitely still holding at 5AU for incoming." Owen Gardner said from the navigation station.

"Wendy, can you tap Ted back on the Moon and let him know all is well and that we'll give him more details when we've parked the ship somewhere for the night?"

Two hours after arrival, they were orbiting the second planet of Alpha Centauri A, and looked down on a world with water and life and what looked like breathable atmosphere, though they would have to wait until a more complete analysis had been done.

"We've got three island continents." Peter London called out.

"Axial tilt appears to be much less than Earth, only 12 or 13 degrees." Carol Kingman announced.

"Surface temperature at the main equatorial continent is currently reading 34 degrees Celsius." Alexandra said.

They had a lot of eyes focused on the scenery below. Everyone with access to an external sensor array was looking for something.

"We'll come back, but lets get the rest of the big picture stuff out of the way." Rob said to Victor.

"Of course. Time to cruise around the neighborhood, before we decide where to park for the night, eh?"

Rob smiled and nodded back.

"All hands, we are breaking orbit on a course for planet one." Victor said over the ship circuit. He paused for the reaction he knew was happening all over the ship. "We will be back. To your stations!"

The innermost of the three planets was not that much to look at. Somewhere between Mercury and Mars in size, with no atmosphere, and tidally locked on Alpha Centauri A. The Hawking spent only enough time in orbit to get the particulars of axial tilt and a gross reading of her composition. The live reads suggested the possibility that she was rich in heavy metals and carbon, but it would take some in-depth analysis by the experts to tell them more.

Rob went over to Owen's navigation station and the two of them ran through the procedure of getting a beacon lock. This time the target was going to be Alpha Centauri B. The two stars' distance from each other varied between 11 and 35 AU, approximately. Currently the two were about 23 AU apart. This was little more than three light hours away, and at G2 drive speeds they could actually make that trip in a half a day. They didn't have to settle for G2 speeds though. Once the lock was set, and Owen nodded his confirmation at how exactly they had just done what they did, Rob looked at Victor.

"All hands are at their stations." Victor reported.

"Very well, you may proceed Captain." Rob said.

"Navigator, activate the interstellar drive on my mark." Victor said, followed by a short pause. "Mark."

My stomach fluttered, and once again, the stars had changed.

"We have a lock on Alpha Centauri B, and our distance is 4.8 AU." Myron Kirby, the assistant astrogator called.

"A sensor sweep indicated two planets and an asteroid belt." Owen called in turn. "The asteroid belt is behind us about 20 light minutes. Planet one is in the HZ."

"Captain, make for the second planet at speed." Rob said.

"Navigator, give me a course." Victor called.

"Locked in sir." Myron called back a moment later.

"Helm, put us under way at full drive."

The second planet was again somewhere between Mercury and Mars in size, but this one had a hydrocarbon rich atmosphere similar to what had been seen on Saturn's moon Titan. There was a moon as well, though it was small and misshapen, half again as big as Phobos. This planet had an extreme 83 degree axial tilt, and they saw signs of atmospheric movement just in the brief hour they were in orbit around her.

"Break orbit for planet one." Rob called out once they'd captured the vitals.

Victor repeated his exchange with the navigator and the helmsman, and they were on their way. The distance between the two orbits, planet one and two was only 1.5 AU, but planet one was currently at their nine o'clock in relation to the star itself, so the trip in took almost as long as it had to reach planet two from the jump threshold.

The crew of the Hawking were not disappointed when they got there. Not in the least. If the second planet of Alpha Centauri A had seemed a revelation, then this planet was a miracle! Air and water and life was not enough. Fred Wassermann called it perfectly over the ship circuit.

"We have dinosaurs!"

Rob looked at the images in the view screen and shook his head. 'The religious fanatics back on Earth who seem to oppose me at every turn because I keep inventing things that they see as contradicting the Bible might well be happier with him in the future.' He thought to himself. 'Alpha Centauri is surely God's gift to the people of Earth.'

Rob expressed similar sentiments over lunch with most of the lab rats, and found himself defending his position. While most everyone agreed to some degree, there were a few holdouts, mostly on the principle of science and faith being mutually exclusive.

"Most of us who delve into the depths of the way the universe works are people of faith, but we are also professional skeptics." Rob said with some passion. "I cannot look at Alpha Centauri and imagine God as not existing. Why else would the Sun's near twin and its close cousin be so tantalizingly close, and why else would we find such bounteous life once we got there?"

Three hours after their discovery, the dinosaurs were less of a mystery, but still amazing. Smooth skinned, long necked and thick legged, they looked like every man's memory of a cartoon dinosaur from the classic Flintstones TV cartoon. Even down to the pastel purple skin.

It appeared that most living things on this planet had a bit of a purplish cast to them. This wasn't a trick of the atmosphere, or something, the sky here seemed as blue as Earth's, though perhaps a shade paler. The purple tinge was from some compound, organic or otherwise that must be ever-present in the cells of living things.

The desire the crew had expressed a few short hours ago to park for the night around Alpha Centauri A's pseduo-earth was quickly switched to a desire to remain where they were. Nobody on the bridge was opposed to the new plan, and the only caution was to remind the crew that they needed to get a sufficient amount of sleep.

The Hawking was not so crowded that there was a need to maintain a complete schedule of watches for all the crew. The bridge crew maintained a standard naval watch schedule, as did the reactor crew. This was mostly a holdover from the naval days as well. The reactors were not finicky creatures.

This meant that there was a regular night and day schedule on board, and even when they didn't park for the night, the phrase was used to describe the time in the ships day that passed for the hours between dinner and breakfast the following day. Even Infinity Station and Aristarchus base were on a rotation, given that the people back home were potentially from any given time zone.

Despite the warnings, there were a lot of grumpy lab rats at breakfast the next morning. Brian Conroy described it best.

"There was a 24 hour Dinotopia marathon on the Reality channel last night."

Zoo Shimizu and Carol Kingman seemed the least affected, so they won the surprise offer.

"Zoo, Carol, you guys want to go for a ride with Wendy and I this morning?" Rob asked.

"Sure!" Zoo answered immediately. "Where we going?"

After a moment's hesitation and a glance at Zoo, Carol nodded in agreement.

"Love to." She said.

"Great, after you get a chance to get your teeth brushed and your faces washed, I figured we'd heat up the Beagle and test out its new engine with a quick trip to Proxima Centauri."

Carol got the honors of pushing the button this time, and the jump limit for Proxima turned out to be only 3 AU. The big surprise at Proxima was the single orbit planetary system Ike immediately dubbed 'Triplanetary'. Yes, he was showing his 'Doc' Smith space opera geek-iness, but he wasn't the first of the crew to do that, and what else would you call your first planetary system with three planets all orbiting each other?

The three planets were almost identical in size, each close to half again the mass of Earth, and all three had atmospheres, though once again they weren't looking at anything breathable. Wendy named them Clotho, Lachesis and Atropos, after the three fates from Greek mythology. Clotho had a soupy, corrosive atmosphere, full of sulfur compounds and a variety of metallic poisons. Lachesis had an atmosphere similar to Venus, mostly carbon dioxide and nitrogen. Atropos came the closest to being hospitable, it was mostly oxygen and nitrogen, but contained far too much else, and was much thicker than Earth's atmosphere at the surface. Proxima being a flare star meant that life wouldn't have been likely to survive even if it had formed, so they did only a cursory search.

Some older NASA research from the beginning of the century had pinpointed a large, rocky planet as existing here, but this was not quite meeting the predictions. Back in the 1990's, data from the Hubble space telescope suggested that their might be a large planet or brown dwarf orbiting Proxima Centauri, but no confirming data was found. This perhaps explained the problems in pinning things down.

They spent the morning moving the Beagle through the relatively close orbits, taking atmospheric samples, getting better readings on the orbits and inclinations of the three bodies in relation to each other and to Proxima. These were the kinds of orbits you couldn't really calculate based on short term study though. Someone was going to be back here to do more follow up, that was certain. All the good probe hardware was back on the Hawking anyway.

It took three hours to get back to the Hawking, constrained by Alpha Centauri B's jump limits and a desire to give the outer asteroid belt a quick looking over. The sensors were giving off very strong mass readings from most of the larger asteroids, and spectral data was suspicious as well. The Beagle moved in and found a small cluster of asteroidal bodies orbiting around a larger piece, and the four explorers began a little poking and prodding.

This was when they discovered a great weakness.

There was nothing that could be considered a weapon on the Beagle, and the Hawking was the same. Rob wanted to grab an asteroid and blast it with something to get a better spectographic analysis, but there was nothing that could be used for that purpose. There were some hand-help tools used for planetary analysis on board, but nothing that could be used from inside the ship. It would have to be added to the list of things to talk about at the next meeting. In the meantime a tractor beam flicked out and grabbed the asteroid, and the Beagle fetched it back to Dinotopia.

Once Rob was back on the Hawking, he had to decide what to do next. The study of the saurians, or dinoids, or whatever they wound up calling them was interesting, but the examination of the potentially habitable planet back at Alpha Centauri A promised a larger payoff in the long term if it proved to be capable of supporting human life. They had seen plant life, trees and grass, or their local equivalents. But the presence of animal life was a presumption at the moment.

Another meeting was held over breakfast in the Captain's mess. Victor and Alexandra represented the bridge crew, Ike and Nat Simmons represented the lab rats, Chesty Price was there representing the service crew and Rob was there as the owner, with Wendy of course, who introduced herself facetiously as 'Mrs. Owner'.

"That the crew is completely fascinated with Dinotopia is certain." Victor said. "Is it wise to spend so much time on this place?"

"People are reporting fascinating amounts of information on behavior. There are family groupings, packs, perhaps even what could be called tribes, and each of these groupings means social behavior, mating, a million things." Nat said.

"And this behavior is among a dozen dominant species at least, not just one!" Ike added.

"But do we have anyone in the crew who is specialized in an area that gives them particular reason to be studying the life on this planet rather than the other one?" Chesty Price asked.

"No." Rob said. "That is the key point here. We are mostly physicists or students of the other hard sciences. If we are going to be conducting what amounts to amateur investigations, is this the investigation we should be doing?"

"Personally?" Ike said. "I'd think we should be giving Islandia a thorough going over, because it seems like a planet with potential for colonization, and that kind of potential should represent a primary focus of our exploration."

"I agree that looking for potential colonies is a very good use of our skills and resources." Alex said. "But we have no official mandate on this trip except for what Rob wanted to do. Rob brought us here, what does he want to do?"

That got everyone focused on Rob, and he stared back at them.

"I would be happy to be off in the Cherenkov, trying to gain a better understanding of the Q-space environment, of the nature of these stellar beacons that allow us to find our way from star to star. I wonder if a beacon can be made to give up some secrets of its star before the jump. I wonder if the jump limit can be defeated in any way. The stellar systems, the planets, the life, that is amazing and wonderful, but for the geek in me it is just a hobby, something to do during my off hours when I'm not working on these other things."

"If we are going to become the committee who decides where to go and what to do, lets recognize the facts behind Alex's statement first, eh?" Chesty Price said. "When Rob wants to go somewhere or do something, we do. He's the owner. Absent a desire from Rob, we make the decisions as a committee."

"As long as it is understood that the committee will not interfere with the Captain's responsibilities to the ship and crew." Victor added. "When a situation calls for a Captain's decision, it will get made by me, or Alexandra, or the officer of the watch."

"Of course." Rob said. Everyone else nodded. "Remember though that we are building a commercial freight hauler back on Earth. When the time comes, anyone who wants a bit of a more mundane lifestyle will be getting first choice for a birth on the new ship."

"So Rob, are we absent a desire of the owner?" Alexandra asked.

"No. This time I'm involved, I guess. I believe we need to get back to Islandia and begin some serious studying there." Rob said. "Nice name by the way Ike. Did you come up with it?"

"No, DeeDee did, from the title of an old book. She said it was a cult classic from her college days, but the title was perfect, and she said it was a Utopian novel, which seemed even more perfect. I guess I've been calling it that in my head since then."

"We'll have to see how our naming schemes work out." Rob said. "With Islandia, Dinotopia and Triplanetary as examples, we'll want to make sure we're not being to Quixotic. It may mean naming by committee, and you can guess how dull the names might become then."

"Wendy's names for the three individual Proxima planets are good though, speaking of perfect." Nat said.

"Rob wants Islandia, then that's what he gets." Victor said.

Rob's desires expressed and the breakfast finished, all hands were advised of the Hawking's imminent return to Alpha Centauri A, and in fact the jump was made shortly after the announcement.

Some of the sampling and analysis that had already been done was re-done. Sea water and soil samples were taken and Carol Kingman headed up a team from the medical section that began looking for microorganisms, bacteria, and other potential sources of problems. They broke out the lab rats and began testing.

Peter London was the first to complain about being called a lab rat. The breaking out of the cages of actual lab rats by Carol Kingman's crew prompted it. After the waters had been stirred for several days, he even stood up in the galley during dinner one evening and made his empassioned statement.

"The scientific and technical members of the crew have been getting called lab rats for some time now, and I propose this stop. We have real lab rats aboard, and we are not them! We are Geeks! Geeks in space, and deserve to be recognized as what we are!"

There was a lot of snickering, but amazingly enough, the term lab rat did get retired.

With everyone wearing Caldwell suits, there was no real reason to stay off planet while the medical team did their testing. Some care was taken to get everything aboard the Beagle and configured for planet-side duty, but a system of bio-filters and decontamination procedures had been designed into the airlocks of the Hawking and its transports for the Mars expedition, and they were still pretty much state of the art.

Life on Islandia existed in every niche where you would expect it to be, and the 'analogs' — a fun word the exobiologist used to describe organisms that performed a function similar to something else. The analogs that filled those niches were achingly familiar and yet so different.

In the northern island continent's central great lake there lived an analog to the Pike that ran nine feet long and several hundred pounds. Like the Pike back on Earth, Islandia's Blue Pike, as it was being called, had lots and lots of sharp teeth. There was nothing in the way of fishing gear aboard, so those insane enthusiasts dying to try fishing for one with a hand held rod and reel were going to have to wait for a return trip. Most of the more reasonable people, having seen pictures of one considered this desire to be a tad suicidal.

The southern island continent featured a great savanna, and on these warm and sunny fields ran a great pack of antelope-like creatures given the name, Youngbok, over Rob's protests. The creatures did indeed resemble the African Springbok in its markings. The biggest difference was the single spiraled horn, like the mythical unicorn. These beautiful creatures moved in herds of thousands, and were preyed upon by a large creature that quickly became known as the Lion-Bear. Shaggy all over, and a dark brown in coloring was what lent it the bearlike appearance, but it was definitely built to run the savanna, and like the lions of Earth, hunted in extended family groups dominated by a female.

Mickey Brooks, Traci Stevens and 'Zoo' Shimizu were scouting the edges of the equatorial island continent's great central forest. They were mostly interested in the nature of the trees. The leaves on these trees were not quite evergreen needles, and not quite the flat leaves of the deciduous trees of Earth. The closest they came to describing them was 'semi-cedar'. The leaves were broad and rounded, but were composed of flat stiff, waxy segments that overlapped each other. The bark was mostly smooth, but where the limbs broke away from the trunk, they were surrounded by stiff spikes of crusted bark and dried sap.

They had the honor of stumbling across the first Bumble Tiger, and Mickey bore the brunt of the encounter. His Caldwell suit proved its worth then, as the creature snarled and clawed at Mickey after it had knocked him down. Try as it might, it couldn't penetrate the suit's gravitic shields, and with the encouragement of a few whacks on its back from Traci and Mickey, fled after its brief attempt at mayhem.

In retrospect, it was a beautiful feline analog with broad, bright yellow and black stripes that were the reason it got stuck with the impromptu name of Bumble Tiger. Fred Wassermann immediately suggested the forest be designated Tiger Woods, but that got vetoed very quickly and very officially. Once the laughter died down that is. On or off the ship, Fred's sense of humor had gained some notoriety.

The encounter with the Bumble tiger reinforced a weakness that had already been spotted once. The Hawking and its crew were defenseless and weaponless, outside of a few side arms that had come aboard with some of the service crew.

"We finally picked up some fallen branches and started whacking it with them." Traci said during the debriefing.

The decision was quick and nobody argued. It was time to head home, and the next trip would include some of the tools explorers in dangerous places needed.