Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

“Why not? The invitation was serious, wasn’t it?”

“Of course. But you were so savage in your mockery, in all those columns you wrote about us—so cruel—”

“ ‘Irresponsible’ is the word you used,” Theremon said.

She reddened. “That too. I didn’t imagine you’d be able to look Athor in the eye after all those horrid things you said about him.”

“I’ll do more than look him in the eye, if it turns out that his dire predictions were on the mark. I’ll go down on both knees before him and humbly beg his pardon.”

“And if his predictions turn out not to have been on the mark?”

“Then he’ll need me.” Theremon said. “You all will. This is the right place for me to be, this evening.”

Siferra gave the newspaperman a startled glance. He was always saying the unexpected thing. She hadn’t managed to figure him out yet. She disliked him, of course—that went without saying. Everything about him—his profession, his manner of speaking, the flashy clothes he usually wore—struck her as tawdry and commonplace. His entire persona was a symbol, to her, of the crude, crass, dreary, ordinary, repellent world beyond the university walls that she had always detested.

And yet, and yet, and yet—

There were aspects of this Theremon that had managed to win her grudging admiration, despite everything. He was tough, for one thing, absolutely unswervable in his pursuit of whatever he might be after. She could appreciate that. He was straightforward, even blunt: quite a contrast to the slippery, manipulative, power-chasing academic types who swarmed all around her on the campus. He was intelligent, too, no question about that, even though he had chosen to devote his particular brand of sinewy, probing intelligence to a trivial, meaningless field like newspaper journalism. And she respected his robust physical vigor: he was tall and sturdy-looking and in obvious good health. Siferra had never had much esteem for weaklings. She had taken good care not to be one herself.

In truth she realized—improbable as it was, uncomfortable as it made her feel—that in some way she was attracted to him. An attraction of opposites? she thought. Yes, yes, that was an accurate way of putting it. But not entirely. Beneath the surface dissimilarities, Siferra knew, she had more in common with Theremon than she was willing to admit.

She looked uneasily toward the window. “Getting dark out there,” she said. “Darker than I’ve ever seen it before.”

“Frightened?” Theremon asked.

“Of the Darkness? No, not really. But I’m frightened of what’s going to come after it. You should be too.”

“What’s going to come after it,” he said, “is Onos-rise, and I suppose some of the other suns will be shining too, and everything’s going to be as it was before.”

“You sound very confident of that.”

Theremon laughed. “Onos has risen every morning of my life. Why shouldn’t I be confident it’ll rise tomorrow?”

Siferra shook her head. He was beginning to annoy her again with his pigheadedness. Hard to believe that she had been telling herself only moments before that she found him attractive.

She said coolly, “Onos will rise tomorrow. And will look down on such a scene of devastation as a person of your limited imagination is evidently incapable of anticipating.”

“Everything on fire, you mean? And everyone walking around drooling and gibbering while the city burns?”

“The archaeological evidence indicates—”

“Fires, yes. Repeated holocausts. But only in one small site, thousands of miles from here and thousands of years ago.” Theremon’s eyes flashed with sudden vitality. “And where’s your archaeological evidence for outbreaks of mass insanity? Are you extrapolating from all those fires? How can you be sure that those weren’t purely ritual fires, lit by perfectly sane men and women in the hope that they would bring back the suns and banish the Darkness? Fire which got out of hand each time and caused widespread damage, sure, but which were in no way related to any mental impairment on the part of the population?”

She gazed at him levelly. “There’s archaeological evidence of that too. The widespread mental impairment, I mean.”

“There is?”

“The tablet texts. Which only this morning we just finished keying in against the philological data provided by the Apostles of Flame—”

Theremon guffawed. “The Apostles of Flame! Wonderful! So you’re an Apostle too! What a shame, Siferra. A woman with a figure like yours, and from now on you’ll have to muffle yourself up in one of those terrible shapeless bulky robes of theirs—”

“Oh!” she cried, stifling a red burst of anger and loathing. “You don’t know how to do anything but mock, do you? You’re so convinced of your own righteousness that even when you’re staring right at the truth all you can do is make some pitiful joke! Oh—you—you impossible man—”

She swung around and headed swiftly across the room.

“Siferra—Siferra, wait—”

She ignored him. Her heart was pounding in rage. She saw now that it had been a terrible mistake to invite someone like Theremon to be here on the evening of the eclipse. A mistake, in fact, ever to have had anything to do with him.

It was Beenay’s fault, she thought. Everything was Beenay’s fault.

It was Beenay, after all, who had introduced her to Theremon, one day at the Faculty Club many months before. Apparently the newspaperman and the young astronomer had known each other a long time and Theremon regularly consulted Beenay on scientific matters that were making news.

What was making news just then was the prediction of Mondior 71 that the world would end on Theptar nineteenth—which at that time was something close to a year in the future. Of course nobody at the university held Mondior and his Apostles in any sort of regard, but it was just about at the same moment that Beenay had come up with his observations of the apparent irregularities in Kalgash’s orbit, and Siferra had reported her findings of fires at two-thousand-year intervals at the Hill of Thombo. Both of which discoveries, of course, had the dismaying quality of reinforcing the plausibility of the Apostles’ beliefs.

Theremon had seemed to know all about Siferra’s work at Thombo. When the newspaperman entered the Faculty Club—Siferra and Beenay were already there, though not by any prearranged appointment—Beenay merely had to say, “Theremon, this is my friend Dr. Siferra of the Archaeology Department.” And Theremon replied instantly, “Oh, yes. The burned villages piled up on that ancient hill.”

Siferra smiled coolly. “You’ve heard of that, have you?”

Beenay said quickly, “I told him. I know I promised not to say a word about it to him, but after you revealed everything to Athor and Sheerin and the rest, I figured that it wouldn’t matter any more if I let him know—so long as I swore him to secrecy—I mean, Siferra, I trust this man, I really do, and I was absolutely confident that—”

“It’s all right, Beenay,” Siferra said, making an effort not to seem as annoyed as in fact she was. “You really shouldn’t have said anything. But I forgive you.”

Theremon said, “No harm’s been done. Beenay swore me to a terrible oath that I wouldn’t print anything about it. But it’s fascinating. Absolutely fascinating! How old is the one at the bottom, would you say? Fifty thousand years, is it?”

“More like fourteen or sixteen,” Siferra said. “Which is quite immensely old enough, when you consider that Beklimot—you know of Beklimot, don’t you?—is only about twenty centuries old, and we used to think that was the earliest settlement on Kalgash.—You aren’t planning to write a story about my discoveries, are you?”