Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

It was a heavy blow.

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In this jorn was both right and wrong; for he did not know that they were

not done biting that bullet yet. It was over, as far as he was concerned,

when the defeat had been recorded in the Grand Log, in terms as unemotional

as possible, for the benefit of the few ships that were left who could still

take part in that communal rite.

Staring into the plotting tank only five years later, he saw with hypnotic

gloom how few their numbers had become: only nine, counting the Javelin, of

that original thirty-one.

Watching the tank had become one of his main hobbies these days, especially

since Kasi bad become a teen-ager, and become abruptly both incompreben-

sible and-he could hardly bear to admit it-a little hateful. He had set the

tank up originally on the pretext that it would be an aid to navigation;

there was nobody to say him nay, especially since time, power and materials

for it had been plentiful, but it bad in fact never been of much use. More

recently, he bad

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156 James Blish

begun to entertain the faint hope that it might offer some clue to the

disappearances.

That was about all there was to see in the tank: lights winking out, faster

and faster-much more rapidly, in fact, than even tottering old Kamblin~s

original extrapolation had predicted. It seemed to jorn that the positions

and rates of the disappearances might yet reveal some pattern, and thus

re-infuse at least a faint shade of meaning into the scraps and ghosts of

the armada. But the few arcs and chords of the original sphere that were