Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

anything at all about the job. He was sent back to the ranked folding

chairs to wait while his cards were processed, with an enormous roar which

made all talk in the room impossible except at a driving shout, by a

computer which seemed to be not so much analyzing the cards as chopping

them completely into more vari-colored little checks. After more than an

hour, during which the heat reduced Jorn’s SI suit to an assemblage of

clinging dishrags and the folding chair became increasingly impossible to

sit on comfortably regardless of how he tried to accommodate himself to it,

one of the young women took a red card out of the stack in the computer’s

return basket, stared at it with astonished disapproval, and came to the

rail to call Jorn’s name. Simple though it was, she had no difficulty in

mispronouncing it; obviously, she had had practice.

He was directed off the floor into a room not much

And all the Stars a Stage 23

bigger than a closet, but which at least seemed to be air-conditioned. Here

a middle-aged woman doctor asked him another hundred questions, these of

such astonishing intimacy that he did not himself know the answers to nearly

half of them. This, for some reason, seemed to satisfy her profoundly; he

was told to step into the next room and take off all his clothes. Since the

heat in the waiting room had long since converted the suit into a clammy,

slowly disintegrating shroud, he was a little reluctant to do so, out of the

conviction that he would never get it on again in one piece. Nevertheless he