Willie came over and studied the card with Tom. "Could have bacteria we didn't get from this height, but it sure as hell hasn't got anything else."
Pudge held up the pictures; they showed close-ups of a tangled mass of plants. "All ferns," he said. "Doesn't seem to be anything else."
"Why would a planet have ferns and nothing else, not even the beginning of animal life?" Tom wondered aloud.
"I once read an account of finding the tiny seeds of Earth's plants millions of miles out in space," Willie said. "Seems the winds blow them right off the planet and they're so light they just keep going." He looked at the pictures, then at Tom. "Suppose some of them drifted here?"
"That's as good a guess as anything else," Tom said. "Maybe the master minds at home can figure it out."
"Only seven or eight Earth-type planets in all these years of star mapping and I had to find one with nothing but ferns on it," Bart said in disgust to the screen. "Oh, well, maybe it'll do as a colony. No alien life to worry about, anyway. We'll call it Bart McDonald Planet."
"Hey," Tom spoke up, "Willie found the planet. He should get to name it."
Bart was curt. "I'm the captain of this ship; new planets are named after the captain that discovers them."
"Nuts," Tom muttered. "We all had a hand in this. It ought to be named after all of us."
"How about calling it the ship's name," Willie put in quietly.