Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

bacteria, or all the other insidious parasites-turnor cells included-that

you assigned to me. I’ve been thinking about all these things, as you asked

me to do. Now rm ready to report:

“The familiars will have to be left behind.”

“Justify,” the Director said. “Pound for pound—!’

‘~-~ a nonsense way of approaching the question. Those are not the

parameters that we need to fill. Better an ounce of canned fish than a

pound of familiar-they’re mostly water, and they’re inedible~ useless, even

unable to adapt: dead weight.”

“A woman would naturally say so.”

“Perhaps. But as I say, that isn’t even the argument.”

“No? T~en what is?”

“Contamination,” the woman said quietly.

“Now youre talking nonsense. Familiars contaminate nothing.”

“Nothing here, at home. But who knows what will contaminate a virgin world?

Do you know how huge a role epidemics have played in the history of man-

kind? The books tell us the name of the man who discovered a given

continent, but they don’t tell us the name of the man in his crew who

picked up that continent’s epidemic disease and brought it back home with

him-back to whole populations that had no immunity to it at all. And who

among us is going to take the responsibility of infecting a whole new

planet with the mycobacterium, the spirochete, the plague virus, the white

death-or the familiar, that unknown, unclassifiable thing we have made

our-

68 lames Blish

selves? We can’t swear as yet that the creature is harmless even to usl

“You don’t answer. Well, then, I shall have to answer for you. I say: