Blish,James – And all the Stars a Stage

arriving all the time) and a very few elderly people of both sexes, but

that most of the population clustered around middle-age or youngerso

closely, in fact, that the average age was a good six years under the

median. Life expectancy had stabilized back home, many decades before the

present debacle had even been suspected, at around a century

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98 James Blish

for males and between 115 and 120 years for females; and though the hazards

of interstellar travel, both known and unknown, could be expected to cut

those figures somewhat, there was a general awareness that this kind of

communal, cooped-up, low-reward living, with all its sensory deprivations,

disorientations, boredoms, frustrations, offenses to the aesthetic sense,

and inescapable personal frictions might go on for many decades to come.

Indeed, in view of the lack of success of the entire armada thus far, it

might constitute all that was left of life, perhaps for generations to come,

perhaps-wbo could tell?-forever.

But they had bad the firmest of reminders that even this was better than

death: the fate of the Kestrel.

It had been assumed throughout the rest of the armada that that problem bad

settled itself. It bad not-, it remained exactly what it bad been before;

but the urgency had gone out of it. The packed masses aboard the Kestrel

had come to the only terms possible with the intolerable kind of life their

damaged ship forced them to lead. The Kestrel was still with the expanding

sphere of ships, a sort of stabilized slum without hope of relief or