Produced by Greg Weeks and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net Transcriber's Note: This e-text was produced from Analog Science Fact & Fiction, May, 1961. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed. JOIN OUR GANG? By STERLING E. LANIER _They didn't exactly hold a gun at anybody's head; all they offered was help. Of course, they did sort of encourage people to ask for help...._ Illustrated by Douglas Commander William Powers, subleader of Survey Group Sirian Combine--1027798 and hence first officer of its ship, the _Benefactor_, stared coldly out of his cabin port. The _Benefactor_ was resting on the bedrock of Island Twenty-seven of the world called Mureess by its natives. Like all the other such names, it meant "the world," just as the natives' name for themselves, Falsethsa, meant "the people," or "us," or "the only race." To Commander Powers, fifty years old, with eleven of them in Survey work, the world was Planet Two of a star called something unpronounceable in the nebula of something else equally pointless. He had not bothered to learn the native name of Island Twenty-seven, because his ship had mapped one thousand three hundred and eighty-six islands, all small, and either rocky or swampy or both. Island Twenty-seven, to him, had only one importance, and that was its being the site of the largest city on the planet. Around the island's seven square miles, a maze of docks, buildings, sheds, breakwaters, and artificial inlets made a maze stretching a mile out to sea in every direction. The gray sea, now covered with fog patches, rolled on the horizon under low-lying cloud. Numerous craft, some small, some large, moved busily about on the water, which in its components was identical with that of Terra, far distant in the Sirius Sector. Crude but workable atomic motors powered most of them, and there was a high proportion of submarines. Powers thought of Earth's oceans for a moment, but then dismissed the thought. Biological technical data were no specialty he needed. Terra might be suitable for the action formulating in his mind, but a thousand suns of Sirian Combine might prove more useful. The biologists of Grand Base would determine, assisted by data his ship provided, in their monster computers, what was called for. Powers had been trained for different purposes.