Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

with Yellow Warning One.

It was a shock to find something very like the old excitement singing

wirily in the air of the Javelin again, like sympathetic vibrations in the

taut strings of some invisible harp. There was no doubt that, this time,

the excitement was moderately and heavily overlaid with caution; the

barriers against a new disappointment were almost visibly going up in the

minds and hearts of everyone; but it was still a real excitement, and jorn

was surprised to find how ready he was to welcome it. When Ertak came

loping out of his hermetic quarters to pull the tapes from the computer,

his eyes glowing like corpse-fires in the dark, gaunt hollows of his face,

it was as though everyone in the control barrel bad an instant previously

been organic marionettes, now abruptly drawn together and set to dancing by

the hands of their accustomed master.

“These tapes are a mystery,” Ertak summarized tersely, a day later.

“They’re completely ambiguous. Dr. Kamblin and I are in agreement that the

sun involved is somewhat less promising than the bluewhite star we last hit

was, and there don’t seem to be any evident astronomical reasons for the

computeA having sounded the alarm at all. All it seems to have to offer is

a long series of gnomic equations in probability, which in turn seem to

depend on several rhythmic functions it says the system involved ex.

hibits-but neither Dr. Kamblin nor I can find any

And all the Stars a Stage 145

way to tie them to the observations we have made.”In fact, there’s more to it