We had not to eat, neither bread nor meat,
Not a rag for our sores, nor shoes for our feet,
And oh, my love, how the rains came dowt4
Take a fortune for your fee, ies no matter to me,
For last week I journeyed that hovel for to see,
And oh, my love, how the rains came down;
It was burnt to the ground; not a cinder to be found,
And I fell upon my knees, as I had a mortal wound,
And oh, my love, how the rains came down!
He had, he realized, never understood it before,
And yet behind them their sun still burned, only a point of light now but
still the only star in their sky with a magnitude greater than -2. As the
months went by and they gradually forgot the insane storms and the blasting
heat of their last year at home ‘ it seemed less and less credible that so
immemorial a friend and companion might explode. Everyone knew that the
explosion was supposed to be decades in the future; some few of them even
knew that there was doubt as to whether or not the ships could be far
enough away from it to be safe, even after all that time in which to flee
at even greater velocities. Yet there the Sun shone still, as always,
unchanged except to the photographic plates and diffraction gratings of
Kamblin and his assistants, who kept their own counsel.
And all the Stars a Stage 85
The reaction was inevitable. Within another two months, the unrelieved
gloom of the shakedown period was gradually transforming itself into its
opposite. It took the form of an almost childish interest and delight in
the total novelty of the new life, both in its abstract, scarcely