Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

And all the Stars a Stage 137

Ical accident-the odds grew longer and longer. There was nothing to write in

the Grand Log; and the next day, nothing again. One by one, too, the ships

of the armada were passing out of earshot, even to the straining,

hypersensitive nerve-ends of the Ertak Effect. The expanding, misshapen

globe of ships now encompassed an unthinkably enormous volume of space,

without filling that volume in the least; and the favelin and her four

sister ships who had stopped or slowed down for the system of the blue-white

sun were the farthest behind of all, and still losing ground every day. The

armada was no longer an entity, but only a loose system of far-flung

outposts. Before very much longer it would cease to be even that, leaving

behind only a number of single cells, each alone and silent in the voiceless

night.

There were other silences, already, which were not so easily accounted for.

Several ships had stopped transmitting while still well inside the

theoretical reception area of the Ertak Effect. Sometimes they had simply

failed to respond to calls after a short silence~ then and thereafter;

sometimes the broadcast was broken off in the middle of an apparently

routine message; and twice the end was a garbled message, or a fragmentary

one, obviously intended to be final, but impossible to interpret. In only

three of these vanishments was there enough information available to con-

struct a sensible hypothesis of what had happened to the ships, and in

those three it appeared to have been a major accident of some kind-one of