It had all begun, Jorn Birn thought dispiritedly, with the exploding star.
The thought did not cheer him much. It is a hard thing to have to blame
one’s troubles upon an event which took place three hundred years ago,
particularly when one’s troubles are present, immediate, and full of
nagging little details which seem to have nothing to do with history at
all-let alone with so remote a subject as astronomy.
Take for example the present instance. Given, to begin with, a young
bachelor sitting alone in his government-allotted room in an all-male
“residence concIave”-the government’s totally transparent euphemism for a
barracks or dormitory, combining only the grimmer features of each. Given,
secondly, the morning television newscast, with its usual quota of stories
which seemed to differ from day to day but actually were always the same:
the swearing-in of the first World Legislature to be composed entirely of
women delegates; the failure (again) to meet the year’s food production
quota, despite the most intensive, back-
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breaking exploitations of hydroponics, undersea farming, cloud culture,
desert irrigation, deep-tank mass cell culture and half a dozen other
techniques the names of which conveyed absolutely nothing to Jorn; the
successful landing of a robot-probe expedition on the tiny, sunbaked, and
intransigently useless planet nearest the Sun, whose name fled out of Jorn’s
head as slipperily as it had skidded in on the oil of the newscaster’s
voice, the verdict in a sensation trial involving a minor government