Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

Suddenly Siferra remembered the club that she had picked up somewhere during the night in the Observatory building. She was still holding it, loosely dangling in her hand. Swiftly she brought it upward and rammed the top of it against the point of Balik’s chin, hard. His head snapped up and back, his teeth clattered together.

He let go of her and lurched a few steps backward. His eyes were wide with surprise and pain. His lip was split where he had bitten into it, and blood was pouring down on one side.

“Hey, you bitch! What did you want to hit me for?”

“You touched me.”

“Damn right I touched you! And about time, too.” He rubbed his jaw. “Listen, Siferra, put that stick down and stop looking at me that way. I’m your friend. Your ally. The world has turned into a jungle now, and there’s just the two of us. We need each other. It isn’t safe trying to go it alone now. You can’t afford to risk it.”

Again he came toward her, hands upraised, seeking her.

She hit him again.

This time she brought the club around and smashed it against the side of his cheek, connecting with bone. There was an audible sharp sound of impact, and Balik jerked to one side under the force of it. With his head turned halfway away from her, he looked at her in utter astonishment and staggered back. But he was still standing. She hit him a third time, above his ear, swinging the club with all her strength in a long arc. As he fell, Siferra clubbed him once more, in the same place, and felt everything give beneath the blow. His eyes closed and he made a strange soft sound, like an inflated balloon releasing its air, and sank down in the corner against the wall, with his head going one way and his shoulders the other.

“Don’t ever touch me like that again,” Siferra said, prodding him with the tip of the club. Balik didn’t reply. He didn’t move, either.

Balik ceased to concern her.

Now for the tablets, she thought, feeling wonderfully calm.

No. The tablets were gone, Balik had said. Stolen. And she remembered now: they really were. They had disappeared just before the eclipse. All right, the charts then. All those fine drawings they had made of the Hill of Thombo. The stone walls, the ashes at the foundation lines. Those ancient fires, just like the fire that was ravaging Saro City at this very moment.

Where were they?

Oh. Here. In the chart cabinet, where they belonged.

She reached in, grabbed a sheaf of the parchment-like papers, rolled them, tucked them under her arm. Now she remembered the fallen man, and glanced at him. But Balik still hadn’t moved. He didn’t look as though he was going to, either.

Out the office door, down the stairs. Mudrin remained where he had been before, sprawled out motionless and stiff on the landing. Siferra ran around him and continued to the ground floor.

Outside, the morning was well along. Onos was climbing steadily and the Stars were pale now against its brightness. The air seemed fresher and cleaner, though the odor of smoke was thick on the breeze. Down by the Mathematics building she saw a band of men smashing windows. They caught sight of her a moment later and shouted to her, raucous, incoherent words. A couple of them began to run toward her.

Her breast ached where Balik had squeezed it. She didn’t want any more hands touching her now. Turning, Siferra darted behind the Archaeology building, pushed her way through the bushes on the far side of the pathway in back, ran diagonally across a lawn, and found herself in front of a blocky gray building that she recognized as Botany. There was a small botanical garden behind it, and an experimental arboretum on the hillside beyond that, at the edge of the forest that encircled the campus.

Looking back, Siferra thought she saw the men still pursuing her, though she couldn’t be sure. She sprinted past the Botany building and easily leaped the low fence around the botanical garden.

A man riding a mowing machine waved at her. He wore the olive-drab uniform of the university gardeners; and he was methodically mowing the bushes, cutting a wide swath of destruction back and forth across the center of the garden. He was chuckling to himself as he worked.

Siferra went around him. From there it was a short run into the arboretum. Were they still following her? She didn’t want to take the time to glance behind her. Just run, run, run, that was the best idea. Her long, powerful legs carried her easily between the rows of neatly planted trees. She moved in steady strides. It felt good, running like this. Running. Running.

Then she came to a rougher zone of the arboretum, all brambles and thorns, everything tightly interwoven. Unhesitatingly Siferra plunged into it, knowing no one would go after her there. The branches clawed at her face, ripped at her clothing. As she pushed her way through one dense patch she lost her grip on the roll of charts, and emerged on the far side without them.

Let them go, she thought. They don’t mean anything any more anyway.

But now she had to rest. Panting, gasping with exhaustion, she vaulted across a little stream at the border of the arboretum and dropped down on a patch of cool green moss. No one had followed her. She was alone.

She looked up, through the tops of the trees. The golden light of Onos flooded the sky. The Stars could no longer be seen. The night was over at last, and the nightmare too.

No, she thought. The nightmare is just beginning.

Waves of shock and nausea rolled through her. The strange numbness that had afflicted her mind all through the night was beginning to lift. After hours of mental dissociation, she was starting to comprehend the patterns of things again, to put one event and another and another together and understand their meaning. She thought of the campus in ruins, and the flames rising above the distant city. The wandering madmen everywhere, the chaos, the devastation.

Balik. The ugly grin on his face as he tried to paw her. And the look of amazement on it when she had hit him.

I’ve killed a man today , Siferra thought in astonishment and dismay. Me. How could I ever have done a thing like that?

She began to tremble. The horrifying memory seared her mind: the sound the club had made when she hit him, the way Balik had staggered backward, the other blows, the blood, the twisted angle of his head. The man with whom she had worked for a year and a half, patiently digging out the ruins at Beklimot, falling like a slaughtered beast under her deadly bludgeoning. And her utter calmness as she stood over him afterward—her satisfaction at having prevented him from annoying her any more. That was perhaps the ghastliest part of it all.

Then Siferra told herself that what she had killed hadn’t been Balik, but only a madman inside Balik’s body, wild-eyed and drooling as he clawed and fondled her. Nor had she really been Siferra when she wielded that club, but a ghost-Siferra, a dream-Siferra, sleepwalking through the horrors of the dawn.

Now, though, sanity was returning. Now the full impact of the night’s events was coming home to her. Not just Balik’s death—she would not let herself feel guilt for that—but the death of an entire civilization.

She heard voices in the distance, back in the direction of the campus. Thick, bestial voices, the voices of those whose minds had been destroyed by the Stars and would never again be whole. She searched for her club. Had she lost that too, in her frenzied flight through the arboretum? No. No, here it was. Siferra grasped it and rose to her feet.

The forest seemed to beckon to her. She turned and fled into its cool dark groves.

And went on running as long as her strength held out.

What else was there to do but go on running? Running. Running.