Birthright

planet.”

Bowman was right. They did learn something, two days later. The Pioneers had sent off their last dozen probes with very little hope of any results, but one of them remained functional long enough to report the presence of life on or beneath the surface. “That's crazy!” said Bowman. “What in hell could possibly be living down there?'’ “We're not going to know until we can get our hands on some more probes,” said Nelson. “We've got to find some way to make contact with them,” said Bowman. “They're the only way we're ever going to beat this dizzy world. You know all that bitching I did about the Master Computer a few days ago?”

Nelson nodded.

“Forget it,” said Bowman. “This time I think we're going to need it.” Nelson offered no objection, and a few hours later their ship's computer was tied in. It fed the Master Computer every piece of data available about the planet and waited far the gigantic machine to hypothesize the makeup of the inhabitants. Its conclusion was less than comforting. “According to the Big Brain,” said Bowman, checking the readout, “the little bastards feed on energy. Which figures, I suppose; I don't know what the hell else they could feed on. But it also means that they're not going to bend over backwards to help us siphon it away from the planet.” He paused. “As long as we're still tied in, and in hock for half the contract, we might as well see what it says about landing our miners on the surface.”

It saidno about as emphatically as a computer can say anything. There was still time for one more question, so Bowman decided to see if the Master Computer could come up with any alternative to forfeiting the contract. It could.

“Well, I'll be damned!” said Bowman as he looked at the readout. “What does it say?” asked Nelson.

“It says, in effect, that since we can't bring Mohammed to the mountain, our alternative is to bring the mountain to Mohammed.”

“Translated from the Biblical, what does that mean?” “It means that instead of trying to land men on Bowman 29, we can funnel off the energy into a force field and send it across the galaxy.”

“Do you know anything about force fields?” asked Nelson. “No,” said Bowman. “Do you?”