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 1953issue of Galaxy Science Fiction. Extensive research did not uncover anyevidence 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 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 feet; he hadtaken over before Corelli and I could get our mouths closed, and wastalking to the native as if this sort of thing happened every time wemade planetfall.

  "You speak Terran fluently," Gibbons said. "Or is this some sort oftelepathic contact that creates the illusion of oral communication?"

  The native grinned delightedly. "The contact is oral. We learned yourlanguage from an independent planet-hunter named Haslop, who waswrecked here some years ago."

  In Solar Exploitations you learn to expect the unexpected, but to methis was stretching coincidence clear out of joint. We had the latestzero-interval-transference drive made, and I couldn't believe that anyindependent planet-staker could have beaten us here with outmodedequipment.

  "A Terran?" I asked. "Where is he now?"

  "Coming up," Gaffa said. "With my fellows."

  A couple of dozen other Balakians, looking exactly like him, bore downon us through the dwarf shrubbery, and with them were two lanky Terransdressed in loose shirt-and-drawers ensembles which obviously had beenmade on Balak. Even at a distance the Terrans looked disturbingly alike,and when they got closer I could see that they were identical twins.

  "You don't count so good, chum," I said. "I see _two_ Terrans."

  "Only one," Gaffa corrected, grinning wider. "The other is one of us."

  I didn't believe it, of course. Corelli didn't get it, either; his eyeshad a glazed look, and he was shaking his head like a man with a gnat inhis ear.

  One of the Terrans rushed up to us with tears in his eyes and hisAdam's apple bobbing, so overcome with emotion that I was afraid hemight kiss us.

  "I'm Ira Haslop," he said in a choked voice. "I've been marooned herefor twenty-two eternal years, and I never thought I'd see a Terran faceagain. And now--"

  He stopped, but not for breath. The other skinny Terran had grabbed hisarm and swung him around.

  "What the hell do you think you're doing, you masquerading nightmare?"the second one yelled. "_I'm_ Ira Haslop, and you damn well know it! Ifyou think you're going to pass yourself off as me and go home to Earthin my place...."

  The first Haslop gaped at him for a moment; then he slapped the other'shand off his arm and shook a bony fist in his face.

  "So that's your game! That's why these grinning freaks made you looklike me and threw us together all these years--they've planned all alongto ring in a switch and send you home instead of me! Well, it won'twork!"

  * * * * *

  The second Haslop swung on him then and the two of them went to the matlike a pair of loose-drawered tigers, cursing and gouging. The grinningnatives separated them after a moment and examined them carefully fordamage, chattering away with great satisfaction in their own language.

  Corelli and Gibbons and I stared at each other like three fools. It wasimpossible to think that either of the two men could be anything butwhat he claimed to be, a perfectly normal and thoroughly angry Terran;but when each of them swore that one of them--the other one, ofcourse--was an alien, and the natives backed up the accusation, whatelse could we believe?

  Gaffa, who seemed to be a sort of headman, took over and explained thesituation--which seemed to be an incredibly long-range gag cooked up bythese octopod jokers, without the original Haslop's knowledge, againstthe day when another Terran ship might land on Balak. Their real intent,Gaffa said, was to present us with a problem that could be solved onlyby a species with a real understanding of its own kind. If we couldsolve it, his people stood ready to assist us in any way possible. Ifnot....

  I didn't like the sound of it, so I reached for my heat-gun again. Sodid Captain Corelli and Gibbons, but we were too slow.

  A little stinging bug--another link in the cooperative Balakianecology--bit each of us on the back of the neck and we passed out cold.When we woke up again, we were "guests" of Gaffa and his tribe in a sortof settlement miles from the _S.E.2100_, and there wasn't so much as anail file among us in the way of weapons.

  The natives hadn't bothered to shackle us or lock us up. We foundourselves lying instead in the middle of a
circular court surrounded bymossy mounds that looked like flattened beehives, but which wereactually dwellings where the Balakians lived.

  We learned later that the buildings were constructed by swarms of tinyburrowing brutes like termites, who built them up grain by grainaccording to specifications. I can't begin to explain the principlebehind the harmony existing between all living things on Balak; it justwas, and seemed to operate like a sort of hyper-sympathy or interlockingtelepathy between species. Every creature on the planet performed someservice for some other creature--even the plants, which grew edibleswithout pain-nerves so it wouldn't hurt to be plucked, and which sent upclouds of dust-dry spores once a week to make it rain.

  And the three-legged, eight-armed natives were right at the top of thisscrewy utopia,