Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

“Sifer—”

She broke the contact.

And kept it broken, refusing to return any of his calls, until just a few weeks before the fateful day itself.

Early in the month of Theptar, Theremon called once more, and Siferra found herself on the line with him before she knew who it was.

“Don’t hang up,” he said quickly. “Just give me a minute.”

“I’d rather not.”

“Listen, Siferra. You can hate me all you like, but I want you to know this: I’m not cruel and I’m not foolish.”

“Whoever said you were?”

“You did, months ago, the last time we spoke. But it isn’t so. Everything I’ve written in my column about the eclipse has been there because I believe it.”

“Then you are foolish. Or stupid, at any rate. Which may be slightly different, but not any better.”

“I’ve looked at the evidence. I think you people have all been jumping to conclusions.”

She said coldly, “Well, we’ll all know whether that’s so on the nineteenth, won’t we?”

“I wish I could believe you, because you and Beenay and the rest of you are all such fine people, so obviously dedicated and brilliant and all. But I can’t. I’m a skeptic by nature. I have been all my life. I can’t accept any kind of dogma that other people want to sell me. It’s a serious flaw in my character, I suppose—it makes me seem frivolous. Maybe I am frivolous. But at least I’m honest. I simply don’t think there’ll be an eclipse, or madness, or fires.”

“It’s no dogma, Theremon. It’s a hypothesis.”

“That’s playing with words. I’m sorry if what I’ve written has offended you, but I can’t help it, Siferra.”

She was quiet a moment. Something in his voice had oddly moved her. She said at last, “Dogma, hypothesis, whatever it is, it’s going to be tested in a few weeks. I’ll be at the Observatory on the evening of the nineteenth. You come there too, and we’ll see which one of us is right.”

“But hasn’t Beenay told you? Athor’s declared me persona non grata at the Observatory!”

“Has that ever stopped you?”

“He refuses even to talk to me. You know, I have a proposal for him, something that could be of great help to him after the nineteenth when all this tremendous buildup misfires into whopping anticlimax and the world comes yelling for his skin, but Beenay says there’s no chance he’ll talk to me at all, let alone allow me to come in that evening.”

“Come as my guest. My date ,” she said acidly. “Athor’ll be too busy to care. I want you to be in the room when the sky turns black and the fires start. I want to see the look on your face. I want to see if you’re as experienced at apologizing as you are at seduction, Theremon.”

That had been three weeks ago. Fleeing angrily from Theremon now, Siferra rushed to the far side of the room and caught sight of Athor, standing by himself, looking through a set of computer printouts. He was sadly turning the pages over and over and over as though he hoped to find a reprieve for the world buried somewhere in the dense columns. Then he looked up and saw her.

Color came to her face.

“Dr. Athor, I feel I ought to ask your pardon for inviting that man to be here this evening, after all he’s said about us, about you, about—” She shook her head. “I genuinely thought it would be instructive for him to be among us when—when—Well, I was wrong. He’s even more shallow and foolish than I imagined. I should never have told him to come.”

Wanly Athor said, “It scarcely is of any importance now, is it? So long as he keeps out of my way, I hardly care whether he’s here or not. A few more hours and then nothing will make any difference.” He pointed through the window, toward the sky. “So dark! So very dark! And yet not nearly as dark as it will be.—I wonder where Faro and Yimot are. You haven’t seen them, have you? No?—When you came in, Dr. Siferra, you said there’d been a last-minute problem at your office. Not a serious one, I hope.”

“The Thombo tablets have disappeared,” she said.

“Disappeared?”

“They were in the artifact safe, of course. Just before I left to come over here, Dr. Mudrin came to see me. He was on his way to the Sanctuary, but he wanted to check one last thing in his translation, one new notion he’d had. So we opened the safe, and—nothing. Gone, all six of them. We have copies, naturally. But still—the originals, the authentic ancient objects—”

“How can this have happened?” Athor asked.

Bitterly Siferra said, “Isn’t it obvious? The Apostles have stolen them. Probably to use as some kind of holy talismans, after the—the Darkness has come and done its work.”

“Are there any clues?”

“I’m no detective, Dr. Athor. There’s no evidence that would mean anything to me. But it had to be the Apostles. They’ve wanted them ever since they knew I had them. Oh, I wish I’d never said a word to them about them! I wish I’d never mentioned those tablets to anyone!”

Athor took her by the hands. “You mustn’t get so upset, my girl.”

My girl! She glared at him, astonished. No one had called her that in twenty-five years! But she choked back her anger. He was old, after all. And only trying to be kind.

He said, “Let them have them, Siferra. It makes no difference now. Thanks to that man over there, nothing makes any difference, does it?”

She shrugged. “I still hate the thought that some thief in an Apostle’s robe was sniffing around in my office—jimmying my safe—taking things that I had uncovered with my own hands. It’s like a violation of my body, almost. Can you understand that, Dr. Athor? To have been robbed of those tablets—it’s almost like a rape.”

“I know how upset you are,” Athor said, in a tone that indicated he didn’t really understand at all. “Look—look there. How bright Dovim is this evening! And in just a little while how dark everything will be.”

She managed a vague smile and turned away from him.

All about her, people were buzzing to and fro, checking this, discussing that, running to the window, pointing, murmuring. Now and then someone would come rushing in with some new data from the telescope dome. She felt like a complete outsider among these astronomers. And altogether bleak, altogether hopeless. Some of Athor’s fatalism must have rubbed off on me, she thought. He seemed so depressed, so lost. It wasn’t at all like him to be that way.

She wanted to remind him that it wasn’t the world that would end this evening, it was just the present cycle of civilization. They would rebuild. Those who had gone into hiding would come forth and start everything over, as had happened a dozen times before—or twenty, or a hundred—since the beginning of civilization on Kalgash.

But for her to tell Athor that would probably do no more good than for him to have told her not to worry about the loss of the tablets. He had hoped all the world would prepare itself against the catastrophe. And instead only a small fraction had paid any heed to the warning. Just those few who had gone to the university Sanctuary, and whatever other sanctuaries might have been set up elsewhere—

Beenay came over to her. “What’s this I hear from Athor? The tablets are gone?”

“Gone, yes. Stolen. I knew I never should have allowed myself to have any sort of contact with the Apostles.”

Beenay said, “You think they stole them?”

“I’m sure of it,” she said bitterly. “They sent word to me, after the existence of the Thombo tablets first became a matter of public knowledge, that they had information that would be of use to me. Didn’t I tell you? I guess not. What they wanted was a deal similar to the one Athor worked out with that high priest, or whatever he is: Folimun 66. ‘We have maintained a knowledge of the old language,’ Folimun said, ‘the language spoken in the previous Year of Godliness.’ And so they had, apparently—texts of some sort, dictionaries, alphabets of the old script, perhaps a lot more.”