The Project Gutenberg EBook of Problem on Balak, by Roger D. Aycock

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Title: Problem on Balak

Author: Roger D. Aycock

Release Date: October 4, 2010 [EBook #33839]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK PROBLEM ON BALAK ***

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PROBLEM ON BALAK

By ROGER DEE

Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS

[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from the September 1953
issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Extensive research did not uncover any
evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]

[Sidenote: _Sometimes you can solve your problem by running out on it!_]

What I'm getting at is that you don't ever have to worry about being
bored stiff in Solar Exploitations field work. It never gets dull--and
in some pretty strange places, at that.

Take the _S.E.2100's_ discovery of Balak, which is a little planet
circling 70 Ophiuchi some 20,000 light-years from Earth, for example.
You'd never expect to run across the greatest race of surgeons in the
Galaxy--structural, neural or what have you--on a little apple like
that, any more than you'd expect a four man complement like ours to be
handed the sort of life-and-death problem they put to us.

And, if by some miracle of prophecy you anticipated both, it's a cinch
you'd never expect that problem to be solved in the way ours was.

* * * * *

Captain Corelli and Gibbons and I couldn't have gone more than a hundred
yards from the _S.E.2100_ before we met our first Balakian native. Or,
to be more accurate, before he met us.

Corelli and I were filling our little sterilized bottles with samples of
soil and vegetation and keeping a wary eye out for possible predators
when it happened. Gibbons, our ecologist and the scientific mainspring
of our crew, was watching a swarm of little twelve-legged bugs that were
busily pollinating a dwarf shrub at the top and collecting payment in
drops of white sap that oozed out at the botto