PROBLEM ON BALAK
By ROGER DEE
Illustrated by DICK FRANCIS
[Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from the September 1953issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Extensive research did not uncover anyevidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.]
What I'm getting at is that you don't ever have to worry about beingbored stiff in Solar Exploitations field work. It never gets dull—andin some pretty strange places, at that.
Take the S.E.2100's discovery of Balak, which is a little planetcircling 70 Ophiuchi some 20,000 light-years from Earth, for example.You'd never expect to run across the greatest race of surgeons in theGalaxy—structural, neural or what have you—on a little apple likethat, any more than you'd expect a four man complement like ours to behanded the sort of life-and-death problem they put to us.
And, if by some miracle of prophecy you anticipated both, it's a cinchyou'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 hundredyards 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 ofsoil and vegetation and keeping a wary eye out for possible predatorswhen it happened. Gibbons, our ecologist and the scientific mainspringof our crew, was watching a swarm of little twelve-legged bugs that werebusily pollinating a dwarf shrub at the top and collecting payment indrops of white sap that oozed out at the bottom in return. His eyes wereshining behind their spectacles, and he was swearing to himself in apleased monotone.
"Signal the ship and tell the Quack—if you can pry that hypochondriacidiot away from his gargles and germicide sprays—to bring out alive-specimen container," he called to Captain Corelli. "We've stumbledonto something really new here, a conscious symbiosis between entirelydissimilar life-forms! If the rest of the flora and fauna cooperate likethis...."
At the moment, Gibbons' discovery didn't register, because it was justthen that the first Balakian showed himself.
The native looked at first glance something like a wrinkled pinkoctopus, standing three feet high and nearly as broad, and he walked ina skip-a-step swing like a man on crutches because his three short legswere set in a horizontal row. He had four arms to each side, the lowerones meant for grasping and holding and the upper ones for manipulation.He didn't have a head, exactly, but there was a face of sorts up nearthe top of the body that looked like nothing so much as a politelygrinning Oriental's.
He wasn't armed, but I took no chances—I dropped my specimen kit andyanked out the heat-gun that is a part of every S.E. field operative'sgear. Captain Corelli, who was on the point of calling the Quack at theship, took his thumb off the mike button and grabbed for his ownweapon. Gibbons, like a true scientist, stood by with his mouth open,too interested to be scared.
Then the Balakian spoke, and Corelli and I gaped wider than Gibbons. AsI said before, Balak is some 20,000 light-years from Earth, and to ourknowledge we were the first human beings ever to come within a hundredparsecs of the place.
"Please don't shoot, gentlemen," he said to us in Terran. "My name isGaffa, and I assure you that I am quite friendly."
I had to give Gibbons credit for being fast on his mental fe