Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

desk, just to the left and directly in front of Dr. Chase-Huebner, the

orange light went on.

It bad never been on before. It would never go on again. It meant, very

simply, that Dr. Cbase-Huebner -and Director Ertak?-had already waited too

long, and that even the Haggard would now never be finished.

The Sun, baleful though it had become, was still decades away from its last

agony; but the cataclysm was upon them, all the same.

5

The truck was covered and there was hardly anything to be seen from it. Jorn

and fourteen other crew members of the Javelin clung to the hard benches and

craned their necks around each other, trying to peer out the back over the

tailgate; but at first the administration building blocked off the view, and

then the driver was careening across Salt Flats at a pace which made

visibility less important than just hanging on. It was maddening.

All the same, a general distant roar of human and machine sound, massive

and ugly, came rolling clearly over the snarling of the truck’s own engine.

If the sputtering of gas guns was a part of that clamor, it could not be

distinguished, at this distance, from the boundary fences; but there were

louder explosions too -explosive bullets, grenades, even an occasional

mortar.

It was hard to believe that any sort of a mob could have gathered outside

that fence, in the middle of one of the most forbidding deserts in this

entire hemisphere of the world; but that was what the orange

72

And all the Stars a Stage 73

light had been triggered to foretell. And the fact that the mob was already