Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

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