Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

like what all the others found to say. The entries became steadily shorter,

the attendance at the transceiver more and more perfuncm tory; often, now,

what was written down in the Log was not the full text of the message, and

sometimes the message was not entered at all.

“Birn, just what are you doing now?” Ailiss’ voice snapped down from the

RIF bridge. “Trying to figure out what thirty per cent of three is, again?”

“I was thinking,” Jorn said slowly.

‘Well, do it on sack time. I need those fleet angular momentum corrections

now.~

“They’ve been on your clipboard for the last twenty minutes.”

“Um. Oh. High time. Well, find something else to do. Something productive.”

Jorn suppressed a retort and bent to faking a job. She had caught him

during one of those brief periods –once rare, but they were becoming

commoner now -when be was ahead of schedule; but he was not going to let

the matter turn into another session of snapping and snarling over nothing

if he could help it. He had bad more than enough of those already.

Ailiss O’Kung was in fact tolerating the strains of the new society rather

more poorly, on the whole, than Jorn would have expected. Jorn found the

reaction thoroughly unpleasant. Perhaps the only compensation to be derived

from it from his point of view -and it was mainly a gain only for his

curiosity, though it did slightly increase his respect for Ailiss at a time

when he had lost almost all other traces of itwas that through these

quarrels he managed to learn something about her background. She had never