Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

seen. Since where one act of magic has occurred, anything is possible, add

to this halt and sighting sufficient magnification to see events on the

home planet; then they might be able to watch the crowning of Gol of

Dobrai, a small, uninteresting and short-lived nation distinguished only by

Gol himself. He had been the first king in recorded history.

And yet a backward look with the comparatively minor magic of the Ertak

Effect showed what at first glance seemed to be a different segment of the

skies altogether. The enormous glare of the initial explosion

141

142 James Blish

had died away in slightly less than a year, leaving be

hind a sprawling, growing cloud like a glowing cancer

which seemed slowly but inexorably to be reaching

after them. The interferometer showed that it was in

fact expanding at the rate of 0.31 angular seconds per

year; and since not even the Ertak Effect could pro

duce absolute simultaneity between ship time and the

time of an object three thousand light years away,

what they were seeing on the screens was the after

matb of the ex ‘ Plosion as it had appeared between five

and six years after the event-and since that day was

in fact closer to fifteen years in the past, the malignant

nebula was now actually far larger than the screens

could show it to be.

The central mass of the nebula, which could not be seen, but only

photographed by infra-red light, was a smooth sphere. It was surrounded by

an irregular, interwoven complex of filaments and jets of glowing hydrogen,

brilliantly visualized through a crimson filter. The total effect was