Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

that she owed him something. So … I suppose you could say that the egg

was her grandchild.”

jorn choked, nearly upsetting the board.

“You see?” Ailiss saicL “Where would it get me,

180 fames Blish

peddling that kind of information to anybody who asked for it? The first

thing a psychologist learns is to keep her mouth shut around laymen.” She

reached out and picked up a charger, twiddled it judiciously, and moved it

from here to there.

“I can see why … She must have been crazy, poor old woman. You know, I

almost loved her once, old though she was even when we met.”

“Of course, I know,” Ailiss said. ‘And if it comforts you any, she wasn’t

crazy at all. She was being quite normal. I haven’t given you the real

explanation, and I don’t plan to, either … All right, that’s my move; and

now you’re in jeopardy, Director.”

There was a decorous knock at the door of their cabin. It was divinely well

timed, from Jorn’s point of view; though he spent the rest of his life

wondering what he would have said next, nothing satisfactory ever occurred

to him.

The knocker was Monel. He was being very stiff and formal.

“The tapes, Director.”

“Very good,” Jorn said, trying to regroup some of the scraps of his

dignity. “Report.”

“Ies a yellow dwarf star, sir, forty-one hundred light years from our point

of origin; surface temperature about fifty-five hundred degrees. The

computer says ten planets, possibly eleven. No evidence of patterned

electromagnetic activity. The star is third generation and good for about

five thousand million years more at a minimum before it begins to expand.”