Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

was allowed to take part in almost none of it. In the first six months of

his training, he was somewhere else almost all of the time; he knew only

that he had travelled at least half a million miles in that periodat least,

because he had spent three weeks of it on the Moon.

He was equally sure, on less evidence, that he must have- travelled at

least that far again going round and around in giant centrifuges; in riding

rocket sleds down horizon-to-horizon lines of railroad track; and most

mysteriously, in sitting patiently or doing exercises in isolation chambers

firmly fixed to the earth, while his weight varied steadily and smoothly

from nothing at all to close to nine times normal. He also covered

considerable ground crawling flat on his belly dragging a carbine behind

him, as though interstellar travel were going to be a sort of infantry

operation; conversely, he learned to read terrain from the air in

innumerable glider drops over every imaginable kind of landscape.

During none of this-gruelling, outr6 and bodeful though most of it was-did

he hear any suggestion

44 fames Blish

that he be deprived of Tabatb; and in time the possibility, though it was

actually still as great as ever, receded from the forefront of his attention

and went underground. If the familiar herself found the training alarming,

she gave no sign; or, more accurately, she seemed to find the world she

lived in almost continuousIy alarming, precisely as usual, but dismissible

as long as she could continue to ride through it on jorn’s arm.