Accidental Abduction From Earth

Tom decides to take some time off from his demanding Ph.D. program to clarify his life goals. He enjoys the natural world, so he moves to a remote, off-grid cabin in the Northern California coastal woods. The last thing that he expects is that he will be accidentally abducted by the bungling crew of an interstellar spaceship raiding Earth for saleable artifacts and animals.

Tom's adventure begins in his backyard when his dog wakes him up in the pre-dawn dark to alert him that some varmint is getting into his chickens. Instead of a raccoon that wants chicken for breakfast, he finds a big toothy creature resembling a tyrannosaur in the dim light and looks like it would like to have him for breakfast. With only a flashlight and a small shotgun, Tom outwits and disables the monster. As the sun comes up, Tom sits against a tree to think about how he will convince anyone to come and investigate something as unlikely as a dinosaur in his back yard, but he falls asleep.

Tom wakes up on the spaceship, disoriented and confused. He finds himself in a radically different culture populated with strange aliens and intelligent robots, and there are no humans to help him adapt. Tom doesn't even have his dog to keep him company because the shipowners will sell it as an exotic pet. It turns out that the dinosaur in Tom's backyard was also an exotic animal collected from another planet, but it is intelligent and escaped when the spaceship stopped near Tom's property.

The shipowners don't care about Tom's plight and don't want him running loose, so they send their security department to capture him, and they play rough, but he is smart and not afraid to get physical when necessary, and he evades them.

Tom makes friends with some of the ship's unusual residents, including the dinosaur-like predator that he had defeated in his backyard. The ship's artificial intelligence and the general manager are sympathetic and help Tom to hide from the security department, and h