Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

Sheerin said, “Have you been having trouble breathing, Beenay?”

“A little.” He sniffled. “A cold, I guess.”

“A touch of claustrophobia, more likely.”

“You think?”

“I’m pretty sure. Anything else feel strange?”

“Well,” Beenay said, “I get the impression that my eyes are going back on me. Things seem to blur, and—well, nothing is as clear as it ought to be. And I’m cold, too.”

“Oh, that’s no illusion. It’s cold, all right,” Theremon said, grimacing. “My toes feel as if I’ve been shipping them cross country in a refrigeration car.”

“What we need right now,” Sheerin said intensely, “is to distract ourselves from the effects we’re feeling. Keep our minds busy, that’s the thing. I was telling you a moment ago, Theremon, why Faro’s experiments with the holes in the roof came to nothing.”

“You were just beginning,” Theremon replied, playing along. He huddled down, encircling a knee with both arms and nuzzling his chin against it. What I ought to do, he thought, is excuse myself and go upstairs to find Siferra, now that the time before totality is running out. But he found himself curiously passive, unwilling to move. Or, he wondered, am I just afraid to face her?

Sheerin said, “What I was about to propose was that they were misled by taking the Book of Revelations literally. There probably wasn’t any sense in attaching any physical significance to the concept of Stars. It might be, you know, that in the presence of total and sustained Darkness the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light. This illusion of light might be all that the Stars really are.”

“In other words,” Theremon said, starting to get caught up in it now, “you mean the Stars are the results of the madness and not one of the causes? Then what good will the photographs that the astronomers are taking this evening be?”

“To prove that the Stars are an illusion, maybe. Or to prove the opposite, for all I know. Then again—”

Beenay had drawn his chair closer, and there was an expression of sudden enthusiasm on his face. “As long as you’re on the subject of Stars—” he began. “I’ve been thinking about them myself, and I’ve come up with a really interesting notion. Of course, it’s just a wild speculation, and I’m not trying to put it forth in any serious way. But it’s worth thinking about. Do you want to hear it?”

“Why not?” Sheerin said, leaning back.

Beenay looked a little reluctant. He smiled shyly and said, “Well then, supposing there were other suns in the universe.”

Theremon repressed a laugh. “You said this was really wild, but I didn’t imagine—”

“No, it isn’t as crazy as that. I don’t mean other suns right close at hand that we somehow mysteriously aren’t able to see. I’m talking about suns that are so far away that their light isn’t bright enough for us to make them out. If they were nearby, they’d be as bright as Onos, maybe, or Tano and Sitha. But as it is, the light they give off seems to us like nothing more than a little point of illumination, and it’s drowned out by the constant glare from our six suns.”

Sheerin said, “But what about the Law of Universal Gravitation? Aren’t you overlooking that? If these other suns are there, wouldn’t they be disturbing our world’s orbit the way Kalgash Two does, and why, then, haven’t you observed it?”

“Good point,” said Beenay. “But these suns, let’s say, are really far off—maybe as much as four light-years away, or even more.”

“How many years is a light-year?” Theremon asked.

“Not how many. How far. A light-year is a measure of distance—the distance light travels in a year. Which is an immense number of miles, because light is so fast. We’ve measured it at something like 185,000 miles per second, and my suspicion is that that isn’t a really precise figure, that if we had better instruments we’d find out that the speed of light is even a little faster than that. But even figuring at 185,000 miles per second, we can calculate that Onos is about ten light- minutes from here, and Tano and Sitha about eleven times as far as that, and so on. So a sun that’s a few light- years away, why, that would be really distant. We’d never be able to detect any perturbations they might be causing in Kalgash’s orbit, because they’d be so minor. All right: let’s say that there are a lot of suns out there, everywhere around us in the heavens, at a distance of four to eight light-years—say, a dozen or two such suns, maybe.”

Theremon whistled. “What an idea for a great Weekend Supplement piece! Two dozen suns in a universe eight light-years across! Gods! That would shrink our universe into insignificance! Imagine it—Kalgash and its suns just a little trivial suburb of the real universe, and here we’ve been thinking that we’re the whole thing, just us and our six suns, all alone in the cosmos!”

“It’s only a wild notion,” said Beenay with a grin, “but you see where I’m heading, I hope. During eclipse, these dozen suns would suddenly become visible, because for a little while there’d be no real sunlight to drown them out. Since they’re so far off, they’d appear small, like so many little marbles. But there you’d have it: the Stars. The suddenly emerging points of light that the Apostles have been promising us.”

“The Apostles talk of ‘countless numbers’ of Stars,” Sheerin said. “That doesn’t seem like a dozen or two to me. More like a few million, wouldn’t you think?”

“Poetic exaggeration,” said Beenay. “There just isn’t room enough in the universe for a million suns—not even if they were jammed right up against each other so that they touched.”

“Besides,” Theremon offered, “once we get up to a dozen or two, can we really grasp distinctions of numbers? Two dozen Stars would seem like a ‘countless’ number, I bet—especially if there happens to be an eclipse going on and everybody is wacky already from staring at Darkness. You know, there are tribes in the backwoods that have only three numbers in their language—‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘many,’ We’re a little more sophisticated than that, maybe. So for us one to two dozen are comprehensible, and then it just feels like ‘countless’ to us.” He shivered with excitement. “A dozen suns, suddenly! Imagine it!”

Beenay said, “There’s more. Another cute little notion. Have you ever thought what a simple problem gravitation would be if only you had a sufficiently simple system? Supposing you had a universe in which there was a planet with only one sun. The planet would travel in a perfect ellipse and the exact nature of the gravitational force would be so evident it could be accepted as an axiom. Astronomers on such a world would start off with gravity probably before they even invent the telescope. Naked-eye observation would be enough to let them figure things out.”

Sheerin looked doubtful. “But would such a system be dynamically stable?” he asked.

“Sure! They call it the ‘one-and-one’ case. It’s been worked out mathematically, but it’s the philosophical implications that interest me.”

“It’s nice to think about,” admitted Sheerin, “as a pretty abstraction—like a perfect gas or absolute zero.”

“Of course,” continued Beenay, “there’s the catch that life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn’t get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total Darkness half of each day. That was the planet you once asked me to imagine, remember, Sheerin? Where the native inhabitants would be fully adapted to alternating daylight and night? But I’ve been thinking about that. There wouldn’t be any native inhabitants. You couldn’t expect life—which is fundamentally dependent upon light—to develop under such extreme conditions of light-deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that. But to continue—just speaking hypothetically, the ‘one-and-one’ system would—”