Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

began to shrink. Within five hundred seconds it had fallen back to its

“normal” size; within another five hundred, it was half as big as anyone

had ever seen it before.

All the heavy metal lines, and those of titanium, vanadium, chromium and

manganese, too, vanished instantly from the spectrum. That ribbon could not

show the sudden outpouring of gamma rays; instead, there glowed forth the

malignant blue and indigo lines of helium, so glaringly that the rest of

the spectrum seemed to dim and shrink almost to invisibility.

The Sun collapsed.

For a full second it was not there at all. All that was left was a

heartbreaking after-image upon the retina.

The screen turned white. Then, it turned black. It was burned out. In

something less than a hundred seconds, the Sun was shining again …

shining more

140 James Blish

brilliantly than all of the hundreds of millions of other stars in the

galaxy put together.

In the glare of this colossal torch they fled outward, disinherited.

jorn and Ailiss were married the next day. Somehow, there seemed to be

nothing else to do.

I i

11

Disinherited they were, as finally and completely as it was possible for a

people to be, short of complete extinction. Yet the ultimate irony of their

situation lay in this: that after nearly fifty years of traveling, they were

now three thousand light years away from home.

Were they now by some flat of magic to stop in their tracks and look back,

what they would see would be their Sun as it had always been-although not

a sun any one of them nor even any of their grandparents ever could have