Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

Research Tower, Central City.

“Excuse me,” he said. “I think I’m going for a walk”

It was high summer at its worst outside. The massive blue-white supergiant

sun, an undulating variable with more than a hundred different overlapping

perfods, was at one of its thousands of possible peaks of three or more

cycles. It turned the air into an invisible cauldron, which might at any

moment boil up into a storm, very possibly one too violent for Weather Con.

18 lames Blish

trol to cope with-there had been an increasing number of those in the last

few years.

Nevertheless, Jorn elected to take the beltways. He was lucky enough to be

in Central City to begin with; but also, be had bought three books this

month, which had nearly wiped out his carfare budget.

The sensed threshold of violence in the weather forced his thoughts

reluctantly back to Jurg Wester, and the vague rumors of revolution which

Jurg had been attempting to float. Jorn had heard them before, and not

always from Jurg; they came drifting through the residence conclaves as

ominously and unpredictably as thunderheads. It was a minor cross to Jorn

that he was still unable to take much stock in them.

He had, to be sure, every reason to believe that the vast sexual

proletariat of the bachelors was bored and desperate enough to welcome

almost any imaginable kind of trouble. It was not hard to suspect, too,

that the husbands and concubines were just as unreconciled to the role of

belonging to the inferior sex. Anyone seriously examining the change which