Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

“Wait a minute,” Sheerin said. “That’s pretty glib of you, saying life wouldn’t have developed there. How do you know? What’s so fundamentally impossible about life evolving in a place that has Darkness half the time?”

“I told you, Sheerin, life is fundamentally dependent upon light. And therefore in a world where—”

“Life here is fundamentally dependent on light. But what does that have to do with a planet that—”

“It stands to reason, Sheerin!”

“It stands to circular reason!” Sheerin retorted. “You define life as such-and-such a kind of phenomenon that occurs on Kalgash, and then you try to claim that on a world that’s totally unlike Kalgash life would be—”

Theremon burst suddenly into harsh gusts of laughter.

Sheerin and Beenay looked at him indignantly.

“What’s so funny?” Beenay demanded.

“You are. The two of you. An astronomer and a psychologist having a furious argument about biology. This must be the celebrated interdisciplinary dialogue that I’ve heard so much about, the great intellectual ferment for which this university is famous.” The newspaperman stood up. He was growing restless anyway, and Beenay’s long disquisition on abstract matters was making him even edgier. “Excuse me, will you? I need to stretch my legs.”

“Totality’s almost here,” Beenay pointed out. “You may not want to be off by yourself when that happens.”

“Just a little stroll, and then I’ll be back,” said Theremon.

Before he had taken five steps, Beenay and Sheerin had resumed their argument. Theremon smiled. It was a way of easing the tension, he told himself. Everybody was under tremendous pressure. After all, each tick of the clock was bringing the world closer to full Darkness—closer to—

To the Stars?

To madness?

To the Time of the Heavenly Flames?

Theremon shrugged. He had gone through a hundred gyrations of mood in the past few hours, but now he felt oddly calm, almost fatalistic. He had always believed that he was the master of his own destiny, that he was able to shape the course of his life: that was how he had succeeded in getting himself into places where other newspapermen hadn’t remotely had a chance. But now everything was beyond his control, and he knew it. Come Darkness, come Stars, come Flame, it would all happen without a by-your-leave from him. No sense consuming himself in jittery anticipation, then. Just relax, sit back, wait, watch it all happen.

And then, he told himself—then make sure that you survive whatever turmoil follows.

“Going up to the dome?” a voice asked.

He blinked in the half-darkness. It was the chubby little graduate-student astronomer—Faro, was that his name?

“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Theremon said, though in truth he had had no particular destination in mind.

“So am I. Come on: I’ll take you there.”

A spiral metal staircase wound upward into the high-vaulted top story of the huge building. Faro went chugging up the stairs in a thudding short-legged gait, and Theremon loped along behind him. He had been in the Observatory dome once before, years ago, when Beenay wanted to show him something. But he remembered very little about the place.

Faro pulled back a heavy sliding door, and they went in.

“Come for a close look at the Stars?” Siferra asked.

The tall archaeologist was standing just inside the doorway, watching the astronomers at their work. Theremon reddened. Siferra wasn’t what he wanted to run into just now. Too late he recalled that this was where Beenay had said she had gone. Despite the ambiguous smile she had seemed to cast his way at the moment of the eclipse’s beginning, he still feared the sting of her scorn for him, her anger over what she saw as his betrayal of the Observatory group.

But she showed no sign now of hard feelings. Perhaps, now that the world was plunging headlong into the Cave of Darkness, she felt that anything that had happened before the eclipse was irrelevant, that the coming catastrophe canceled out all errors, all quarrels, all sins.

“Quite a place!” Theremon said.

“Isn’t it amazing? Not that I really know much of what’s going on here. They’ve got the big solarscope trained on Dovim—it’s really a camera more than it is a spyglass, they told me; you can’t just squint through it and see the heavens—and then these smaller telescopes are focused deeper out, watching for some sign that the Stars are appearing—”

“Have they spotted them yet?”

“Not so far as anyone’s told me,” Siferra said.

Theremon nodded. He looked around. This was the heart of the Observatory, the room where the actual scanning of the skies took place. It was the darkest room he had ever been in—not truly dark, of course; there were bronze sconces arrayed in a double row around the curving wall, but the glow that came from the lamps they held was faint and perfunctory. In the dimness he saw a great metal tube going upward and disappearing through an open panel in the roof of the building. He was able to glimpse the sky through the panel also. It had a terrifying dense purple hue now. The diminishing orb of Dovim was still visible, but the little sun seemed to have retreated to an enormous distance.

“How strange it all looks,” he murmured. “The sky has a texture I’ve never seen before. It’s thick—it’s like some sort of blanket, almost.”

“A blanket that will smother us all.”

“Frightened?” he asked.

“Of course. Aren’t you?”

“Yes and no,” Theremon said. “I mean, I’m not trying to sound particularly heroic, believe me. But I’m not nearly as edgy as I was an hour or two ago. Numb, more than anything.”

“I think I know what you mean.”

“Athor says there’s already been some rioting in the city.”

“It’s only the beginning,” Siferra replied. “Theremon, I can’t get those ashes out of my mind. The ashes of the Hill of Thombo. Those big blocks of stone, the foundations of the cyclopean city—and ashes everywhere at their base.”

“With older ashes below, down and down and down.”

“Yes,” she said.

He realized that she had moved a little closer to him. He realized also that the animosity she had felt toward him over the past few months seemed to be completely gone, and—could it be?—she appeared to be responding to some ghost of the attraction that he had once had for her. He knew the symptoms. He was much too experienced a man not to know them.

Fine, Theremon thought. The world is coming to an end, and now, suddenly, Siferra is finally willing to put aside her Ice Queen costume.

A weird, gawky figure, immensely tall, came slithering by them in a clumsy jerky way. He offered them a giggly greeting.

“No sign of the Stars yet,” he said. It was Yimot, the other young graduate student. “Maybe we won’t get to see them at all. It’ll all turn out to be a fizzle, like the experiment Faro and I rigged up in that dark building.”

“Plenty of Dovim’s still visible,” Theremon pointed out. “We’re nowhere near total Darkness.”

“You sound almost eager for it,” said Siferra.

He turned to her. “I’d like to get the waiting over with.”

“Hey!” someone yelled. “My computer’s down!”

“The lights—!” came another voice.

“What’s happening?” Siferra asked.

“Power failure,” Theremon said. “Just as Sheerin predicted. The generating station must be in trouble. The first wave of madmen, running amok in the city.”

Indeed the dim lights in the sconces appeared to be on the verge of going out. First they grew very much brighter, as if a quick final surge of power had gone rushing through them; then they dimmed; then they brightened again, but not as much as a moment before; and then they dropped to just a fraction of their normal light output. Theremon felt Siferra’s hand gripping his forearm tightly.