Publisher's Synopsis
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.
