Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

The air was very still. No planes were aloft, there was no sound of ground traffic, a weird silence resounded from every direction.

Suddenly Beenay knew where he was, and everything fell into place.

The university was visible off to his left, a handsome cluster of brick buildings, many of them now streaked with black smoke-stains and some seeming to be altogether destroyed. Beyond, on its high promontory, was the Observatory. Beenay glanced at it quickly and looked away, glad that at this distance he was unable to make out its condition very clearly.

Far away to his right was Saro City, gleaming in the bright sunlight. To his eyes it seemed almost untouched. But he knew that if he had a pair of field glasses he would surely see shattered windows, fallen buildings, still-glowing embers, rising wisps of smoke, all the scars of the conflagration that had broken out at Nightfall.

Straight below him, between the city and the campus, was the forest in which he had been wandering during the time of his delirium. The Sanctuary would be just on the far side of that; he might well have passed within a few hundred yards of its entrance a day or so ago, all unknowing.

The thought of crossing that forest again did not appeal to him. Surely it was still full of madmen, cutthroats, irate escaped pets, all manner of troublesome things. But from his vantage point on the hilltop he could see the road that cut across the forest, and the pattern of streets that led to the road. Stick to paved routes, he told himself, and you’ll be all right.

And so he was. Onos was still in the sky when he completed the traversal of the forest highway and turned onto the small rural road that he knew led to the Sanctuary. Afternoon shadows had barely begun to lengthen when he came to the outer gate. Once past that, Beenay knew, he had to go down a long unpaved road that would take him to the second gate, and thence around a couple of outbuildings to the sunken entrance to the Sanctuary itself.

The outer gate, a high metal-mesh screen, was standing open when he reached it. That was an unexpected and ominous sight. Had the mob come roaring in here too?

But there was no sign of mob destruction. Everything was as it should be, except that the gate was open. He went on in, puzzled, and made his way down the unpaved road.

The inner gate, at least, was closed.

“I am Beenay 25,” he said to it, and gave his university identification-code number. Moments passed, and lengthened into minutes, and nothing happened. The green scanner eye overhead seemed to be working—he saw its lens sliding from side to side—but perhaps the computers that operated it had lost their power, or had been smashed altogether. He waited. He waited some more. “I am Beenay 25,” he said again, finally, and gave his number a second time. “I am authorized to enter here.” Then he remembered that mere name and number were not enough: there was a password to say, also.

But what was it? Panic churned his soul. He couldn’t remember. He couldn’t remember. How absurd, finally to have found his way here and then be stranded at the outer gate by his own stupidity!

The password—the password—

Something to do with the catastrophe, that was it. “Eclipse?” No, not that. He wracked his aching brain. “Kalgash Two?” Didn’t seem right. “Dovim?” “Onos?” “Stars?”

That was closer.

Then it came to him.

“ Nightfall ,” he said triumphantly.

Still nothing happened, at least not for a long while.

But then, what seemed like a thousand years later, the gate opened to admit him.

He zigzagged past the outbuildings and confronted the oval metal door of the Sanctuary itself, set at a forty-five-degree angle into the ground. Another green eye studied him here. Did he have to identify himself all over? Evidently he did. “I am Beenay 25,” he said, preparing for another long wait.

But the gate began immediately to roll back. He stared down into the Sanctuary’s concrete-floored vestibule.

Raissta 717 was waiting for him there, scarcely ten yards away.

“Beenay!” she cried, and came rushing toward him. “Oh, Beenay, Beenay—”

Since they had first become contract-mates, two years earlier, they had never been apart longer than eighteen hours. Now they had been separated for days. He pulled her slim form up against him and held her tight, and it was a long while before he would release her.

Then he realized they were still standing in the open gateway of the Sanctuary.

“Shouldn’t we go in and lock the gate behind us?” he asked. “What if I’ve been followed? I don’t think I was, but—”

“It doesn’t matter. There’s no one else here.”

“What?”

“They all went yesterday,” she said. “As soon as Onos came up. They wanted me to come too, but I said I was going to wait for you, and I did.”

He gaped at her, uncomprehendingly.

He saw now how weary and haggard she looked, how drawn and thin. Her once-lustrous hair was hanging in unkempt strings and her face was pale, unadorned. Her eyes were reddened and puffy. She seemed to have aged five or ten years.

“Raissta, how long has it been since the eclipse?”

“This is the third day.”

“Three days. That was more or less what I figured.” His voice echoed strangely. He glanced past her, into the deserted Sanctuary. The bare underground chamber stretched on and on, lit by a track of overhead bulbs. He saw no one as far as his eye could reach. He hadn’t expected this, not at all. The plan had been for everyone to stay hidden down here until it was safe to emerge. In wonder he said, “Where have they gone?”

“Amgando,” Raissta said.

“Amgando National Park? But that’s hundreds of miles from here! Were they crazy, coming out of hiding on only the second day and going marching off to some place halfway across the country? Do you have any idea what’s going on out there, Raissta?”

Amgando Park was a nature preserve, far to the south, a place where wild animals roamed, where the native plants of the province were jealously protected. Beenay had been there once, when a boy, with his father. It was almost pure wilderness, with a few hiking trails cut into it.

She said, “They thought it would be safer to go there.”

“ Safer? ”

“Word came that everyone who was still sane, everybody who wanted to take part in the rebuilding of society, should rendezvous at Amgando. Apparently people are converging on it from all over, thousands of them. From other universities, mostly. And some government people.”

“Fine. A whole horde of professors and politicians trampling around in the park. With everything else ruined, why not ruin the last bit of unspoiled territory we have, too?”

“That isn’t important, Beenay. The important thing is that Amgando Park is in the hands of sane people, it’s an enclave of civilization in the general madness. And they knew about us, they were asking us to come join them. We took a vote, and it was two to one to go.”

“Two to one,” said Beenay darkly. “Even though you people didn’t see the Stars, you managed to go nuts anyway! Imagine leaving the Sanctuary to take a three-hundred-mile stroll—or is it five hundred?—through the utter chaos that’s going on. Why not wait a month, or six months, or whatever? You had enough food and water to hold out here for a year.”

“We said the same thing,” Raissta replied. “But what they told us, the Amgando people, was that the time to come was now. If we waited another few weeks, the roving bands of crazed men out there would coalesce into organized armies under local warlords, and we’d have to deal with them when we came out. And if we waited any longer than a few weeks, the Apostles of Flame would probably have established a repressive new government, with its own police force and army, and we’d be intercepted the moment we stepped outside the Sanctuary. It’s now or never, the Amgando people said. Better to have to contend with scattered half-insane free-lance bandits than with organized armies. So we decided to go.”