Problem on Balak

It is a novel book. 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.