James Blish And all the Stars a Stage

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"What's next?" Monel said. He seemed, to Jorn's secret and malicious pleasure,
to be a little dazed.
"We've got a Yellow Warning," be said. "Pull the tapes and look them over.
That's your job, isn't it? When you've got a digest of what's on them, report
to me in my cabin-no later than tomorrow noon."
"The tapes? Oh, of course. Yes, all right."
"No, it's not all right. Try again."
The youngster looked up, startled, into his fatherin-law's eyes. Then his
expression turned slightly sullen.
"Yes, Director."
Unfortunately, Kasi chose this moment to giggle. That was not going to improve
matters. All the same,
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178 James Blish
Jorn enjoyed it. His small streak of sadism was one of his few remaining
pleasures.
"Ailiss, let's go." Heads high, the Director and his consort walked
arthritically out of the control barrel.
"Now, Director," Ailiss said sardonically over the Castles board, "tell me
what you make of that affair, or I won~t make another move, double jeopardy or
no double jeopardy."
"I'd make more of it if I knew more about synthetic biochemistry," Jorn said
reluctantly. "I never saw a familiar that size before and I didn't know it was
possible. But Ertak was old and he never married, so I suppose be had the
sheer time for it-though he must have pampered her beyond belief, enough to
make him quite sick now and then."
"I knew that much," Ailiss said. "It was his own special vice. There are a few
other cases in the literature, though none of them are this extreme.
His mother tried to--.!'
"His mother?"
'Yes. Dr. Chase-Huebner. He was a reject of the Chase line. That's how he got
her into The Project; she felt guilty at having made Jon Huebner such a
favorite, and a partner in her cancer research and so on, and having dumped
her earlier son. When Ertak got to be an eminent scientist in his own right,
he had a club he could use, and he did."
Jorn stared at his wife with new eyes. "And you knew this all the time?"
"Well, ever since she tried to persuade him to give up the familiar before
take-off. She couldn't make him; she was afraid to try. Otherwise, you'd have
had to give up Tabath, and the same for all the other bachelors."
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And all the Stars a Stage 179
"Great Ghost. Hmm. How many of them are there aboard ship now, do you think?"
"None, I'm almost sure," Ailiss said. "Everyone sur~ viving from the first
generation is married; and of course, we couldn~t make new familiars for the
male children, we diddt have the laboratory to reproduce them." The wrinkles
at the comers of her eyes suddenly deepened sharply. "Though from what I saw
back up there, she'd solved that problem. Quite an achievement, when you look
at it dispassionately."
'Yes. An egg. Thafs what I took that apple-thing to be, too. But only on
intuition." He stared down at the still-incomplete game on the Castles board.
"And you were asking me what I thought of all thisl You might as well go on.
Why did she do it?"
"Do what?"
"Dodt dodge, Ailiss, this is your field. Why did she help her son's familiar
to make the egg?"
"If I told you that you would go out of your own mind."
"There seem to be a good many things that you dodt tell," he said stiffly.
"There are some things I dont tell until I'm asked," she said, "and some I
dodt tell even then. You want an explanation? It depends on who died first.
Well never know that now, and we might never have been able to figure it out;
obviously the familiar was living off the corpses' body fluids, which was a
new departure in itself. But if he died first, then she knew the familiar
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would die soon after unless she could get it to reproduce; strong though it
was, it needed some new emotional attachment. And she still felt that she owed
him something. So ... I suppose you could say that the egg was her
grandchild."
jorn choked, nearly upsetting the board.
"You see?" Ailiss saicL "Where would it get me,
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180 fames Blish peddling that kind of information to anybody who asked for it?
The first thing a psychologist learns is to keep her mouth shut around
laymen." She reached out and picked up a charger, twiddled it judiciously, and
moved it from here to there.
"I can see why ... She must have been crazy, poor old woman. You know, I
almost loved her once, old though she was even when we met."
"Of course, I know," Ailiss said. 'And if it comforts you any, she wasn't
crazy at all. She was being quite normal. I haven't given you the real
explanation, and I don't plan to, either ... All right, that's my move; and
now you're in jeopardy, Director."
There was a decorous knock at the door of their cabin. It was divinely well
timed, from Jorn's point of view; though he spent the rest of his life
wondering what he would have said next, nothing satisfactory ever occurred to
him.
The knocker was Monel. He was being very stiff and formal.
"The tapes, Director."
"Very good," Jorn said, trying to regroup some of the scraps of his dignity.
"Report."
"Ies a yellow dwarf star, sir, forty-one hundred light years from our point of
origin; surface temperature about fifty-five hundred degrees. The computer
says ten planets, possibly eleven. No evidence of patterned electromagnetic
activity. The star is third generation and good for about five thousand
million years more at a minimum before it begins to expand."
"Hmm. Pretty cold star. Anything else?"
"Very little as yet, sir," the boy said stiffly. "Except that the star is a
double."
"A double? With planets?"
"Yes, Director. There's a small white dwarf located
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And all the Stars a Stage 181
about half a light year below the south pole of the yellow sun, and their
masses are such that at that distance they have to be in orbit around each
other. les almost a duplicate of the doublet system we passed at extreme range
just a few weeks ago. But the larger star here has planets; we can even see
the biggest one from here, just barely."
"I see. Very good. Dismissed."
'Mank you, sir. Uhm ... Director?"
"What is it?"
'Do you have any further orders, sir?"
Jorn frowned. He did not; that was his trouble. It was, of course, remotely
possible that the lonely and decrepit Javelin had finally found herself a
stop, but it was not very likely-sureIy not in a system as outr6 as this one.
One more Yellow Warning like this and he would be convinced for good and all
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that the computer, like the one the black men had devised and entrusted their
fate to, was deranged; none of its choices, now that he came to think of it,
had ever been very close to the model it was supposed to have been set to scan
for.
And did they really want a stop? Now, after all this time? They were in no
shape to fight for a planet, not only with hostile natives, but even with
blind nature. It would be so much easier simply to glide onward forever. [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]

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