Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

She walked through the parking lot, ignoring the frenzy going on all about her, and emerged on the far side, where a paved road led along a level ridge on the flank of Observatory Mount. From some still-functioning region of her mind came the information that this was the road from the Observatory to the main part of the university campus. Up ahead, Siferra could see some of the taller buildings of the university now.

Flames were dancing on the roofs of some of them. The bell tower was burning, and the theater, and the Hall of Student Records.

You ought to save the tablets , said a voice within her mind that she recognized as her own.

Tablets? What tablets?

The Thombo tablets.

Oh. Yes, of course. She was an archaeologist, wasn’t she? Yes. Yes. And what archaeologists did was dig for ancient things. She had been digging in a place far away. Sagimot? Beklikan? Something like that. And had found tablets, prehistoric texts. Ancient things, archaeological things. Very important things. In a place called Thombo.

How am I doing? she asked herself.

And the answer came: You’re doing fine.

She smiled. She was feeling better moment by moment. It was the pink light of dawn on the horizon that was healing her, she thought. The morning was coming: the sun, Onos, entering the sky. As Onos rose, the Stars became less bright, less terrifying. They were fading fast. Already those in the east were dimmed by Onos’s gathering strength. Even at the opposite end of the sky, where Darkness still reigned and the Stars thronged like minnows in a pool, some of the intensity was starting to go from their formidable gleam. She could look at the sky for several moments at a stretch now without feeling her head begin to throb painfully. And she was feeling less confused. She remembered clearly now where she lived, and where she worked, and what she had been doing the evening before.

At the Observatory—with her friends, the astronomers, who had predicted the eclipse—

The eclipse—

That was what she had been doing, she realized. Waiting for the eclipse. For the Darkness. For the Stars.

Yes. For the Flames, Siferra thought. And there they were. Everything had happened right on schedule. The world was burning, as it had burned so many times before—set ablaze not by the hand of the gods, nor by the power of the Stars, but by ordinary men and women, Star-crazed, cast into a desperate panic that urged them to restore the normal light of day by any means they could find.

Despite the chaos all around her, though, she remained calm. Her injured mind, numbed, all but stupefied, was unable to respond fully to the cataclysm that Darkness had brought. She walked on and on, down the road, into the main quadrangle of the campus, past scenes of horrifying devastation and destruction, and felt no shock, no regret for what had been lost, no fear of the difficult times that must lie ahead. Not enough of her mind was restored yet for such feelings. She was a pure observer, tranquil, detached. The blazing building over there, she knew, was the new university library that she had helped to plan. But the sight of it stirred no emotion in her. She could just as well have been walking through some two-thousand-year-old site whose doom was a cut-and-dried matter of historical record. It would never have occurred to her to weep for a two-thousand-year-old ruin. It did not occur to her to weep now, as the university went up in flames all around her.

She was in the middle of the campus now, retracing familiar paths. Some of the buildings were on fire, some were not. Like a sleepwalker she turned left past the Administration building, right at the Gymnasium, left again at Mathematics, and zigzagged past Geology and Anthropology to her own headquarters, the Hall of Archaeology. The front door stood open. She went in.

The building seemed almost untouched. Some of the display cases in the lobby were smashed, but not by looters, since all the artifacts appeared still to be there. The elevator door had been wrenched off its hinges. The bulletin board next to the stairs was on the floor. Otherwise everything apparently was intact. She heard no sounds. The place was empty.

Her office was on the second floor. On the way up the stairs she came upon the body of an old man lying face upward at the first-floor landing. “I think I know you,” Siferra said. “What’s your name?” He didn’t answer. “Are you dead? Tell me: yes or no.” His eyes were open, but there was no light in them. Siferra pressed her finger against his cheek. “Mudrin, that’s your name. Or was. Well, you were very old anyway.” She shrugged and continued upward.

The door to her office was unlocked. There was a man inside.

He looked familiar too; but this one was alive, crouching against the file cabinets in a peculiar huddled way. He was a burly, deep-chested man with powerful forearms and broad, heavy cheekbones. His face was bright with sweat and his eyes had a feverish gleam.

“Siferra? You here?”

“I came to get the tablets,” she told him. “The tablets are very important. They have to be protected.”

He rose from his crouch and took a couple of uncertain steps toward her. “The tablets? The tablets are gone, Siferra! The Apostles stole them, remember?”

“Gone?”

“Gone, yes. Like your mind. You’re out of your mind, aren’t you? Your face is blank. There’s nobody home behind your eyes. I can see that. You don’t even know who I am.”

“You are Balik,” she said, the name coming unbidden to her lips.

“So you do remember.”

“Balik. Yes. And Mudrin is on the stairs. Mudrin is dead, do you know that?”

Balik shrugged. “I suppose. We’ll all be dead in a little while. The whole world’s gone crazy out there. But why am I bothering to tell you that? You’re crazy too.” His lips trembled. His hands shook. An odd little giggle burst from him, and he clenched his jaws as though to suppress it. “I’ve been here all through the Darkness. I was working late, and when the lights started to fail—my God,” he said, “the Stars, the Stars. I had just one quick look at them. And then I got under the desk and stayed there through the whole thing.” He went to the window. “But Onos is coming up now. The worst must be over.—Is everything on fire out there, Siferra?”

“I came for the tablets,” she said again.

“They’re gone.” He spelled the word out for her. “Do you understand me? Gone. Not here. Stolen.”

“Then I will take the charts that we made,” she said. “I must protect knowledge.”

“Absolutely crazy, aren’t you? Where were you, the Observatory? Got a good view of the Stars, did you?” He giggled again and started to cut diagonally across the room, moving closer to her. Siferra’s face twisted with disgust. She could smell the odor of his sweat now, sharp and harsh and disagreeable. He smelled as if he hadn’t bathed in a week. He looked as if he hadn’t slept in a month. “Come here,” he said, as she backed away from him. “I won’t hurt you.”

“I want the charts, Balik.”

“Sure. I’ll give you the charts. And the photographs and everything. But first I’m going to give you something else. Come here, Siferra.”

He reached for her and pulled her toward him. She felt his hands on her breasts and the roughness of his cheek against her face. The smell of him was unbearable. Fury rose in her. How dare he touch her like this? Brusquely she pushed him away.

“Hey, don’t do that, Siferra! Come on. Be nice. For all we know, there’s just the two of us in the world. You and me, we’ll live in the forest and hunt little animals and gather nuts and berries. Hunters and gatherers, yes, and later on we’ll invent agriculture.” He laughed. His eyes looked yellow in the strange light. His skin seemed yellow too. Again he reached for her, hungrily, one cupped hand seizing one of her breasts, the other sliding down her back toward the base of her spine. He put his face down against the side of her throat and nuzzled her noisily like some kind of animal. His hips were heaving and thrusting against her in a revolting way. At the same time he began to force her backward toward the corner of the room.