Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

against it. The lavelin was ordered to be modified in as many small ways as

possible, but she was not to be rebuilt, nor was she to be nibbled at

drastically enough to risk weakening her present structure. This made

sense, but jorn was not prepared for the corollary decision: that all the

lavelin~s sister ships were to be built to the same design and with only

such minor modifications as the lavelin herself could safely withstand.

This decision too was eminently reasonable, but not to a man to whom five

years seemed like a long time.

And as with the ships, so with the world. This decision was not Ertak’s to

make, but since the principles

62 James Blish

were the same, so was the outcome. The whole world was not converted

overnight, or at any other time, to the production of intersellar ships, as

jorn had fuzzily imagined the World Consort to have implied. Doom or no

doom, the fact remained that the original favelin at completion would have

cost half a billion credits, plus four years in construction time. Her

sister ships would cost slightly less than that, but not much-mass

production is an almost meaningless term for a structure like a bridge or a

skyscraper or a ship, the savings involved running narrowly between two and

four per cent per structure.

jorn had of course supposed that mere financial cost-and in that word

“mere” there resounded hollowly a huge hole in his education-would go by

the board in so ultimate an emergency. Like all the poor, money to him was

an abstraction, a frivolity, a curse; as a graduate engineer he knew all