Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

had come over the statistics of crime in the last two generations would

draw very much the same conclusion.

All the same, he could not bring himself to hope that any open conflict

between the sexes-as opposed to the natural, buried, and eternal

conflict-could end by changing society more than slightly. You could of

course change human nature, since in the long r(m that meant nothing more

than changing human behavior; that had been done over and over again, quite

often by design. But the one thing you could not change was human needs. In

any formal war between the sexes, the defections from both sides would in

the end wipe out even the possibility that either side could win, exactly

as an ancient play Jorn had been

And all the Stars a Stage 19

forced to read at school had devoted five acts to insisting.

Damn Jurg Wester; but still, it was a nice notion to daydream about on an

afternoon of incipient thunder. At least it helped Jorn to ignore the fact

that he was hopelessly stumping the beltways: again, the pockets of his SI

suit without enough credits in them to clink against each other.

The beltways were depressingly well populated with men of all ages. Those

who looked to be about Jorn’s age or younger were dressed in a wild variety

of styles. Though the SI suit was predictably in the majority, even that

was often modified enough to accommodate the one mandatory feature of all

the current styles, an outlandishly stuffed and padded codpiece. Where the

men involved had the money for it, the suits were replaced entirely by