Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

“Well, maybe he’s undergone a conversion,” said Theremon. Cautiously he added, after a tantalizing pause, “I know for a fact that he and his staff have turned up some data that might just tend to support your belief that Darkness is going to sweep over the world on the nineteenth of Theptar next.”

Folimun allowed himself the smallest sort of carefully controlled display of interest, an almost imperceptible raising of one eyebrow. “How fascinating, if it’s true,” he said calmly.

“You’ll have to see him yourself to find that out.”

“I may just do that,” the Apostle said.

And indeed he did. Exactly what the nature of the meeting between Folimun and Athor was, Theremon never succeeded in finding out, despite all his best efforts. Athor and Folimun were the only ones present, and neither of them said a thing to anyone else about it afterward, so far as Theremon could discover. Beenay, Theremon’s chief link to the Observatory, was able to offer only vague guesses.

“It had something to do with the ancient astronomical records that the Chief believes are in the Apostles’ possession, that’s all I can tell you,” Beenay reported. “Athor suspects that they’ve been handing things down over the centuries, maybe even since before the last eclipse. Some of the passages in the Book of Revelations are in an old forgotten language, you know.”

“Old forgotten gibberish, you mean. Nobody’s ever been able to make any sense out of that stuff.”

“Well, I certainly can’t,” said Beenay. “But it’s the opinion of some quite respectable philologists that those passages may be actual prehistoric texts. What if the Apostles actually have a way of deciphering that language? But they keep it to themselves, thus concealing whatever astronomical data may be recorded in the Book of Revelations. That may be the key Athor’s after.”

Theremon was astonished. “You mean to say that the preeminent astronomer of our time, perhaps of all time, feels the need to consult a pack of hysterical cultists on a scientific issue?”

With a shrug, Beenay said, “All I know is that Athor doesn’t like the Apostles and their teachings any more than you do, but he thought there was something important to gain by meeting with your friend Folimun.”

“No friend of mine! He’s strictly a professional acquaintance.”

Beenay said, “Well, whatever you want to call—”

Theremon cut him off. Real wrath was rising in him now, a little to his own surprise. “And it’s not going to sit very well with me, let me tell you, if it turns out that you people and the Apostles have cut some sort of deal. So far as I’m concerned, the Apostles represent Darkness itself—the blackest, most hateful sort of reactionary ideas. Give them their way and they’ll have us all living medieval lives of fasting and chastity and flagellation again. It’s bad enough we have psychotics like them spewing forth demented delirious prophecies to disturb the tranquillity of everyday life, but if a man of Athor’s prestige is going to dignify those ludicrous creeps by incorporating some of their babble into his own findings, I’m going to be very, very suspicious, my friend, of anything at all that emanates from your Observatory from this point onward.”

Dismay was evident on Beenay’s face.

“If you only knew, Theremon, how scornfully Athor speaks of the Apostles, how little regard he has for anything they’ve ever advocated—”

“Then why is he deigning to speak with them?”

“You’ve talked with Folimun yourself!”

“That’s different. Like it or not, Folimun’s helping to make news these days. It’s my job to find out what’s going on in his mind.”

“Well,” Beenay said hotly, “maybe Athor takes the same view.”

That was the point where they had let the discussion drop. It was beginning to change from a discussion into a quarrel, and neither one of them wanted that. Since Beenay really had no idea what kind of understanding, if any, Athor and Folimun might have worked out with each other, Theremon saw there wasn’t much sense in belaboring him about it.

But, Theremon realized afterward, that conversation with Beenay was exactly when his attitude toward Beenay and Sheerin and the rest of the Observatory people had begun to shift—when he had started to move from sympathetic and curious onlooker to jeering, scornful critic. Even though he himself had been instrumental in bringing it about, the meeting between the Observatory director and the Apostle now seemed to Theremon to be a sellout of the most disastrous kind, a naive capitulation on Athor’s part to the forces of reaction and blind ignorance.

Although he had never really been able to make himself believe the theories of the scientists—despite all the so-called “evidence” they had allowed him to inspect—Theremon had taken a generally neutral position in his column when the first news stories about the impending eclipse began to appear in the Chronicle .

“A startling announcement,” he had called it, “and very frightening—if true. As Athor 77 quite rightly says, any prolonged period of sudden worldwide Darkness would be a calamity such as the world has never known. But from the other side of the world comes a dissenting view this morning. ‘With all due respect to the great Athor 77,’ declares Heranian 1104, Astronomer Royal of the Imperial Observatory of Kanipilitiniuk, ‘there is still no firm evidence that the so-called Kalgash Two satellite exists at all, let alone that it is capable of causing such an eclipse as the Saro group predicts. We must bear in mind that suns—even a small sun such as Dovim—are immensely larger than any wandering space satellite could possibly be, and it strikes us as highly unlikely that such a satellite would be able to enter precisely the position in the heavens necessary to intercept all solar illumination that might reach the surface of our world—’ ”

But then came Mondior 71’s speech of Umilithar thirteenth, in which the High Apostle proudly declared that the world’s greatest man of science had given his support to the word of the Book of Revelations. “The voice of science is now one with the voice of heaven,” Mondior cried. “I urge you now: put no further hope in miracles and dreams. What must come must come. Nothing can save the world from the wrath of the gods, nothing except a willingness to abandon sin, to give up evil, to devote oneself to the path of virtue and righteousness.”

Mondior’s booming pronouncement had pushed Theremon out of his neutrality. In loyalty to Beenay’s friendship he had allowed himself to take the eclipse hypothesis more or less seriously, for a while. But now he began to see it as pure sillyseason stuff—a bunch of earnest, self-deluding scientists, swept away by their own enthusiasm for a lot of circumstantial evidence and reasoning from mere coincidence, willing to kid themselves into a belief in the century’s most nonsensical bit of insanity.

The next day Theremon’s column asked, “Are you wondering how the Apostles of Flame ever managed to gain Athor 77 as a convert? Of all people, the grand old man of astronomy seems about the least likely to line up in support of those robed and hooded purveyors of claptrap and abracadabra. Did some silver-tongued Apostle charm the great scientist out of his wits? Or is it simply the case, as we’ve heard whispered behind the ivy-covered walls of Saro University, that the mandatory faculty retirement age has been pegged a few years too high?”

And that was only the beginning.

Theremon saw what role he had to play now. If people started taking this eclipse thing seriously, there would be mental breakdowns on all sides, even without the coming of general Darkness to start the trouble off.