Gilligan's Island; In Space

I had an incredibly vivid dream this morning. I was crewing a broken down space ship with five passengers. We were out on a tour, when the hyperspace weather started getting rough. If not for the courage of the fearless AI and my speedy repairs to the hull and engine leaks, the Space Minnow would have been lost.

            I had found us a world; not very spherical, in fact sort of chunky and holed like Swiss cheese (perhaps it was really a moon.) I discovered a thick atmosphere in some of the deeper canyons and valleys. All of them were full of insects and plants, with no signs of land animals any larger than a cat. Almost all of the scans indicated that we would be able to eat the fruit and animals or fish. I secured the ship for a crash landing in one of the more fruitful valleys.

            The captain of the ship was the ship's AI. We unloaded our castaways near an old abandoned survey station. I got the base beacon working. I suggested we use this as a temporary home until we could summon help. I then explained that I was taking the ship back to orbit and to please leave the beacon on, I wouldn’t be able to find the base again without it.

            Before I could head back to repair the ship, I heard the group already discussing building more shelters so they could have their own quarters. I seriously hoped we wouldn't be stranded here that long. The Space Minnow and I limped back up into a stable orbit and deployed the subspace distress beacon. I loaded all of the ships emergency food supplies into a shuttle/helicopter type vehicle and dropped back down to the planet, landing far away from the group in hopes of keeping the shuttle’s cargo hidden until we really needed it. Because the Space Minnow had an engine leak, we knew there was only limited power, not enough to jump anywhere safe. We needed to be rescued if we were going to get out of here; unless I could actually find and refine fusible materials on this small light world.

            Even during the dream I was calling this "Gilligan's Island, In Space." The passengers didn't seem to get the reference. I remember thinking that a good thing, because I was the obvious choice for Gilligan.

There were other dream images, but the dark red-brown lava rock looking surfaces covered with small lakes and forests and huge soaring arcs of pumice stone making each bubble of life an almost separate environment was the most vivid. The planet was so lumpy that a couple of those arcs of stone reached almost up out of the thin atmosphere.

The Space Minnow had a display screen that showed the wacky magnetic field that surrounded the planet. We were able to set the ships orbit to take advantage of that to keep the beacon and computer core charged up even if the engines completely failed. From space it looked like we were living on the universe’s largest air garden.

The plants on this world were quite varied and non-earthlike. I knew that the data from the survey mission was going to be invaluable; the survey had catalogued nearly half a million different plants and animals, almost all of them edible, or at least harmless. Except for the thinness of the air, the little pockets on this world were miniature garden paradises isolated from each other by hundreds of miles of pockmarked and holed pumice stone. (I had flown over it on my way back from orbit and seen that it had its own harsh ecology, not one I wanted to try any time soon.)

 

Ad astra per technica,

FF