Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

protect ourselves; nor will we be able to do so after the other four ships

have landed here, if we let them. I will have a full written report ready

for you all by day after tomorrow; if you are not convinced now, I am fully

persuaded that you will be after you have read it.”

No one left the ship for the next two days, and the caves and halls of the

lavelin were hushed with a silent fury of reading. On the morning of the

third day, Ertak’s voice came tiredly and heavily over the public address

system.

“To all hands: Prepare to embark.”

Easier said than done; relaxation of vigilance and felling of trees had

spread the encampment wider and wider, and there were the damaged sensor

lenses to replace too, with a squad to keep the molluscs off the ship

henceforth. At Jorn’s suggestion, the perimeter of the camp was drawn in to

about half the distance over which the would-be colonists had been working,

and the intervening space between perimeter and jungle became a sort of

tunnel of charged wire, like

130 James Blish

a loosely wound armature about fifty feet in diameter. The effect was to

scramble the local magnetic field so that very few of the insects could

“fly” at all inside the encampment. In fact-though this hadn’t been

foreseen-there were soon thousands of them trapped inside the tunnel. The

electrified boma consumed a lot of energy, but they bad energy to spare.

What was more important, hardly anyone was hurt thereafter, and nobody was

killed.

The planet bad one last unpleasant surprise for them, however. On the last