Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

the entire jobopenings announcement. This was nonsensical, since nobody but

an unmarried male would be desperate enough to hope to locate a job through

these television announcements in the first place, and the sets in the

residence conclave rooms did not include telefax equipment; it was of course

true that the set in the recreation hall had a telefax: attachment, but no

bachelor in his right mind could hope to compete with two hundred others for

that single sheet of blurrily printed brown paper, which even when new

looked as though it had been rescued almost too late from a fire, and still

have any time left over for tracking down the very few jobs it announced. If

you had hoped to have a hearing at all, you had to hop, the moment you got

the word. You couldn’t afford to waste time hanging around the orifice of a

community telefax, until it should choose-as it did only once an hour-to

protrude the long sickly brown tongue of its transcript.

All this was difficult enough to blame upon a star that had exploded three

hundred years ago; but in view of the persistent triviality of the news,

and the high unlikelihood that the job-opportunities commercial could offer

anything whatsoever worth pounding the beltways to get, Jorn managed. In a

world in which hardly anything satisfied him, it was easy enough to wonder

how today might have differed from itself if history could somehow have

been re-arranged; and the exploding star was a natural beginning to such a

daydream, since before that event nothing, really, could be said to have