Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

Jom did not care, and neither, he suspected, did anyone else. He had his

family to think about. It now included a twelve-year-old daughter named

Kasi, conceived after the most protracted and solemn discussion with Ailiss

had resulted in an agreement to have no children, and he devoted almost all

his free time to her, with a sort of gloomy delight. He no longer thought

about his duties, nor did Ailiss; they got them over with, and that was

that.

In this, it was evident, they were typical. With the actual extinction of

the home world, nobody on board the Javelin really believed any more that

there was any place in the universe that was a real and tangible world for

them, except the Javelin-unless it was Ertak himself; but it was impossible

to know what be thought, and becoming increasingly harder to care. A

promising sighting by the computer of the Quarrel, one of the few remaining

ships of the armada within range, so completely failed to disturb this

pervasive, self-centered apathy that there was hardly any detectable

disappointment when it turned out to be a false alarm. The sk~ itself a

prison is, some anonymous hand had quoted in a slantwise scrawl across one

144 fames Blish

otherwise blank page of the Grand Log; and whatever Ertak might have thought

of the entry, he let it stand.

Or perhaps he never saw it; for between the day when it had apparently been

written in, and the expected date of his next somnambulist’s tour of the

bridge, the Javelin’s own computer once again made the control barrel clang