Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

indeed any other than himself had been allowed to penetrate this far. It

had become wholly a private hial, in which he

J

26 fames Blish

moved entirely alone through a strange universe where a new dragon lurked in

every cave, unarmored, disweaponed and without even a familiar to share his

defiance.

After the physical he was given a break for lunch. It was a better meal

than he had been able to buy for himself at any time in his life, but his

appreciation of it was somewhat dimmed by the company he was forced to eat

it in-three specialists of some kind, one of them male and decidedly

subordinate to the other two, who probed insistently for his opinions and

his stores of information on a wide variety of subjects. So many of these

questions were astronomical that they could not help but revive his

Jurg-nurtured suspicions of space research; but others-those dealing with

crop genetics, for instance, or the education of children-seemed wholly

unrelated either to the astronomical questions or to each other.

The entire aften-,.;on was given over to a battery of pencil-and-paper

tests, all sufficiently difficult to prevent his finishing them in the

allotted time … all, that is, but one, wherein he discovered immediately

that the questions were stacked in order of increasing difficulty, so that

by tackling the last question first, he was able to speed up steadily and

cross the wire with the answer to question number one just as the bell

rang.

These consumed five hours, and he took them all nearly birthday-naked. He