Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

“They’ll burn whatever they can get. They’ve got to have light. They’ve got to burn something, and wood won’t be handy, not on city streets. So they’ll burn whatever is nearest. A pile of newspapers? Why not? The Saro City Chronicle will give a little brightness for a while. What about the newsstands that the papers on sale are stacked up in? Burn them too! Burn clothing. Burn books. Burn roof-shingles. Burn anything. The people will have their light—and every center of habitation goes up in flames! There are your fires, Mr. Newspaperman. There is the end of the world you used to live in.”

“ If the eclipse comes,” said Theremon, an undertone of stubbornness in his voice.

“If, yes,” said Sheerin. “I’m no astronomer. And no Apostle, either. But my money’s on the eclipse.”

He looked straight at Theremon. Eyes held each other as though the whole matter were a personal affair of respective will powers, and then Theremon broke away, wordlessly. His breathing was harsh and ragged. He put his hands to his forehead and pressed hard.

Then came a sudden hubbub from the adjoining room.

Beenay said, “I think I heard Yimot’s voice. He and Faro must have showed up, finally. Let’s go in and see what kept them.”

“Might as well!” muttered Theremon. He drew a long breath and seemed to shake himself. The tension was broken—for the moment.

The main room was in an uproar. Everyone clustered around Faro and Yimot, who were trying to parry a burst of eager questions while they removed their outer garments.

Athor bustles through the crowd and faced the newcomers angrily. “Do you realize that it’s practically E-hour? Where have you two been?”

Faro 24 seated himself and rubbed his hands. His round, fleshy cheeks were red with the outdoor chill. He was smirking strangely. And he seemed curiously calm, almost as if he had been drugged.

“I’ve never seen him like that before,” Beenay whispered to Sheerin. “He’s always been very obsequious, very much the humble junior astronomer deferring to the great people around him. Even to me. But now—”

“Shh. Listen,” Sheerin said.

Faro said, “Yimot and I have just finished carrying through a little crazy experiment of our own. We’ve been trying to see if we couldn’t construct an arrangement by which we could simulate the appearance of Darkness and Stars so as to get an advance notion as to how it looked.”

There was a confused murmur from the listeners.

“Stars?” Theremon said. “You know what Stars are? How did you find out?”

Smirking again, Faro said, “By reading the Book of Revelations. It seems pretty clear that Stars are something very bright, like suns but smaller, that appear in the sky when Kalgash enters the Cave of Darkness.”

“Absurd!” someone said.

“Impossible!”

“The Book of Revelations! That’s where they did their research! Can you imagine—”

“Quiet,” Athor said. There was a sudden look of interest in his eyes, a touch of his old vigor. “Go on, Faro. What was this ‘arrangement’ of yours? How did you go about it?”

“Well,” said Faro, “the idea came to Yimot and me a couple of months ago, and we’ve been working it out in our spare time. Yimot knew of a low one-story house down in the city with a domed roof—some kind of warehouse, I think. Anyway, we bought it—”

“With what?” interrupted Athor peremptorily. “Where did you get the money?”

“Our bank accounts,” grunted the lanky, pipestem-limbed Yimot 70. “It cost us two thousand credits.” Then, defensively, “Well, what of it? Tomorrow two thousand credits will be two thousand pieces of paper and nothing else.”

“Sure,” Faro said. “So we bought the place and rigged it up with black velvet from top to bottom so as to get as perfect a Darkness as possible. Then we punched tiny holes in the ceiling and through the roof and covered them with little metal caps, all of which could be shoved aside simultaneously at the close of a switch. At least, we didn’t do that part ourselves; we got a carpenter and an electrician and some others—money didn’t count. The point was that we could get the light to shine through those holes in the roof, so that we could get a Starlike effect.”

“What we imagined a Starlike effect would be,” Yimot amended.

Not a breath was drawn during the pause that followed. Athor said stiffly:

“You had no right to make a private—”

Faro seemed abashed. “I know, sir—but, frankly, Yimot and I thought the experiment was a little dangerous. If the effect really worked, we half expected to go mad—from what Dr. Sheerin says about all this, we thought that would be rather likely. We felt that we alone should take the risk. Of course, if we found that we could retain our sanity, it occurred to us that we might be able to develop immunity to the real thing, and then expose the rest of you to what we had experienced. But things didn’t work out at all—”

“Why? What happened?”

It was Yimot who answered. “We shut ourselves in and allowed our eyes to get accustomed to the dark. It’s an extremely creepy feeling because the total Darkness makes you feel as if the walls and ceiling are crashing in on you. But we got over that and pulled the switch. The caps fell away and the roof glittered all over with little dots of light.”

“And?”

“And—nothing. That was the wacky part of it. So far as we understood the Book of Revelations, we were experiencing the effect of seeing Stars against a background of Darkness. But nothing happened. It was just a roof with holes in it, and bright points of light coming through, and that’s just what it looked like. We tried it over and over again—that’s what kept us so late—but there just wasn’t any effect at all.”

There was a shocked silence. All eyes turned to Sheerin, who stood motionless, mouth open.

Theremon was the first to speak. “You know what this does to the whole theory you’ve built up, Sheerin, don’t you?” He was grinning with relief.

But Sheerin raised his hand. “Not so fast, Theremon. Just let me think this through. These so-called ‘Stars’ that the boys constructed—the total time of their exposure to Darkness—” He fell silent. Everyone watched him. And then he snapped his fingers, and when he lifted his head there was neither surprise nor uncertainty in his eyes. “Of course—”

He never finished. Thilanda, who had been up in the Observatory dome exposing photographic plates of the sky at tensecond intervals as the time of eclipse drew near, came rushing in, waving her arms in wild circles that would have been worthy of Yimot at his most excited.

“Dr. Athor! Dr. Athor!”

Athor turned. “What is it?”

“We just found—he came walking right into the dome—you won’t believe this, Dr. Athor—”

“Slow down, child. What happened? Who came walking in?”

There were the sounds of a scuffle in the hall, and a sharp clang. Beenay, starting to his feet, rushed out the door and came to a sudden halt, crying, “What the deuce!”

Davnit and Hikkinan, who should have been up in the dome with Thilanda, were out there. The two astronomers were struggling with a third figure, a lithe, athletic-looking man in his late thirties, with strange curling red hair, a thin sharpfeatured face, icy blue eyes. They dragged him into the room and stood holding him with his arms gripped tightly behind his back.

The stranger wore the dark robe of the Apostles of Flame.

“Folimun 66!” Athor cried.

And in the same breath, from Theremon: “Folimun! What in the name of Darkness are you doing here?”

Quietly, in a cold, commanding tone, the Apostle said, “It’s not in the name of Darkness that I’ve come to you this evening but in the name of light.”