Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

Of all the rigors he was forced to undergo, one of the most difficult to

bear up under was the fact that his section leader was Ailiss O’Kung.

Obviously she had been through it all before, perhaps several times, and

regarded the gasps and struggles of the recruits with easy contempt; though

she allowed no one to fail through unfamiliarity or exhaustion, her

definition of these two categories only barely distinguished them from

stupidity and gold-bricking, with both of which she was utterly merciless.

And yet, oddly, she lost fewer recruits than any other section leader.

Though he tried to tell himself that the impression was nonsense, jorn was

nevertheless convinced that Ailiss went out of her way to assign him the

roughest, the dirtiest or the dullest details of every assignment. Since it

was impossible to discover a reason for this, he was forced to invent one,

this being the instantaneous dislike she seemed to have taken to him when

they had first met in room a-10-prime.

In response, he swore in private, gritted his teeth and bore down harder.

Simple male pride was not going to allow him to admit that a girl was any

better at all this than he was (the simple fact that she was better

notwithstanding; she might be better at it now, but he’d show her). Somehow

it quite failed to occur to him that approximately the same thought might

be being cherished in the heads of every male in the

And all the Stars a Stage 45

section, and that Ailiss’ attitude was expressly designed to provoke nothing

else. As for the women in the section, they were mostly a hardy,