Produced by Robert Cicconetti, Mary Meehan and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net 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 bottom in return. His eyes were shining behind their spectacles, and he was swearing to himself in a pleased monotone. "Signal the ship and tell the Quack--if you can pry that hypochondriac idiot away from his gargles and germicide sprays--to bring out a live-specimen container," he called to Captain Corelli. "We've stumbled onto something really new here, a conscious symbiosis between entirely dissimilar life-forms! If the rest of the flora and fauna cooperate like this...." At the moment, Gibbons' discovery didn't register, because it was just then that the first Balakian showed himself.