Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

chairs, like fugitives from a funeral. Here the applicants sat waiting

their turns to stand at one of the writing banquettes along the wall and

fill out a limp, gray legal-length questionnaire which offered not a single

clue to what the victim was applying for.

Those who got past the first screening at the desk by the gate, as jorn

eventually did, were transferred to an interviewer; and if the interviewer

was satisfied -though “satisfied” was hardly the word, for the young women

who did the work somehow managed to look as sour upon finding someone they

could pass

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22 James Blish

as they did when (far more usually) they sent the applicant ignominiously

out-the legal-length form was promptly reduced to a series of punches in

three stiff colored cards. The floor around the interviewing desks was

drifted over by the little red, yellow and blue checks which had snowed down

from the busily snipping punches; they were also all over the tops of the

desks and even on the seats of the chairs. They clung to the hair, settled

into the creases of the SI suits, became airborne at whim and floated up the

nose, and every so often, immediately following an explosive sneeze, went

flying in all directions toward the ceiling like chaff through a silo. When

this happened, the young woman interviewing the hapless sneezer usually

changed her expression from routine disapproval to implacable grimness and

sent him packing, dropping his cards into the waste-can.

Jorn somehow managed to pass this test, though still without learning