Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

with a blunt nafl.’

Jorn grinned in spite of himself. Jurg undoubtedly had hit the target

pretty close to dead center: that item had had all the ring of a lure of

some kind of

16 fames Blish

space travel experiment, which was already no more than a nearly-standard

way for a young man in despair to commit suicide … especially since the

money involved, even if you did survive, was invariably less than the

residence-conclave dole.

And yet, and yet … perhaps only because he bad been observed writing the

address down, perhaps only because he a little bit disliked Jurg’s habitual

air of knowing all the answers in advance, he felt himself turning

stubborn.

“Maybe so,” he said slowly. “But I’ve heard a lot of those ads. She said,

‘Survivors may become famousI can’t remember ever having heard that hook

before, except when I was a little boy. It certainly doesn’t sound like the

lunar colony project, just to begin with.”

“No,” Jurg agreed, “there’s too many people settled on that rock-ball

already. It’s just the usual guineapiggery-a satellite, or maybe an

interplanetary probe: tell us what you can see, old man, until we can’t

hear you any more, and then s-t-r-e-t-c-h that last can of

cream-of-fungus-mycelium soup. Besides, why do you want to be famous,

anyhow?”

“I don’t, exactly,” Jorn said, irritated. ‘But if it meant what it said …

well, fame is negotiable, if you handle it right.-

How do you do that? By marrying the next World Director?”

. No. For that I’d have to be lovable, too-all the video shows tell you