Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

And all the Stars a Stage 159

“Great Ghost,” Jorn whispered. “But, couldn’t there have been–2′

“A real such race? Yes, we think so. But there are two more things to be

added. While we were in our aborted landing orbit around that planet, we

were photographing continuously, as a matter of course; and the pictures

show that all the cities over which we passed were in a fairly uniform

stage of ruin, Secondly, we passed over the spot which later turned out to

be the place where our attackers wanted us to land; and after this matter

came up, we examined that site closely.

“It evidently had been a landing field, a large spaceport, at one time in

the distant past. Its completely overgrown now, and you can only see its

bare outlines. You can also see two wrecks. One of them is about three

hundred years old, if we have interpreted the vegetation around it

correctly. It looks rather like the lavelin in general design. The other

one is such a ruin that almost nothing can be told about it, except that

it’s of completely different design. I would like to guess that the more

recent of the two might have been a refugee from the Great Nova, but of

course, that’s just my romantic nature speaking.

“Given this much, however, we can put the story together. The black race

obviously was real, and it was probably just as proud and hostile as was

the ghost of it we encountered-after all, the computer involved had to

build its solidigrapb and its social attitudes from stored data, it

couldn’t invent them. Maybe the race was visited by an interstellar