Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

“Everyone but you.”

“I wanted to wait for you.”

He took her hand. “How did you know I’d come?”

“You said you would. As soon as you were finished photographing the eclipse. You always keep your promises, Beenay.”

“Yes,” Beenay said, in a remote tone of voice. He had not yet recovered from the shock of finding the Sanctuary empty. It had been his hope to rest here, to heal his bruised body, to complete the job of restoring his Stars-shattered mind. What were they supposed to do now, set up housekeeping here by themselves, just the two of them in this echoing concrete vault? Or try to get to Amgando all alone? The decision to vacate the Sanctuary made a sort of crazy sense, Beenay supposed—assuming it made any sense at all for everyone to collect at Amgando, it was probably better to make the journey now, while the countryside was in such a high degree of disorder, than to wait until new political entities, whether Apostles or private regional buccaneers, clamped down on all travel between districts. But he had wanted to find his friends here—to sink down into a community of familiar people until he had recovered from the shock of the past few days. Dully he said, “Do you have any real idea of what’s going on out there, Raissta?”

“We got reports by communicator, until the communicator channels broke down. Apparently the city was almost completely destroyed by fire, and the university was badly damaged also—that’s all true, isn’t it?”

Beenay nodded. “So far as I know, it is. I escaped from the Observatory just as a mob came smashing in. Athor was killed, I’m pretty sure. All the equipment was wrecked—all our observations of the eclipse were ruined—”

“Oh, Beenay, I’m so sorry.”

“I managed to get out the back way. The moment I was outside, the Stars hit me like a ton of bricks. Two tons. You can’t imagine what it was like, Raissta. I’m glad you can’t imagine it. I was out of my mind for a couple of days, roaming around in the woods. There’s no law left. It’s everybody for himself. I may have killed someone in a fight. People’s household animals are running wild—the Stars must have made them crazy too—and they’re terrifying.”

“Beenay, Beenay—”

“All the houses are burned. This morning I came through that fancy neighborhood on the hill just south of the forest—Onos Point, is that what it’s called?—and it was unbelievable, the destruction. Not a living soul to be seen. Wrecked cars, bodies in the streets, the houses in ruins—my God, Raissta, what a night of madness! And the madness is still going on!”

“You sound all right,” she said. “Shaken, but not—”

“Crazy? But I was. From the moment I first came out under the Stars until I woke up today. Then things finally began to knit back together in my head. But I think it’s much worse for most other people. The ones who hadn’t the slightest degree of emotional preparation, the ones who simply looked up and— bam!—the suns were gone, the Stars were shining. As your Uncle Sheerin said, there’ll be a whole range of responses, from short-term disorientation to total and permanent insanity.”

Quietly Raissta said, “Sheerin was with you at the Observatory during the eclipse, wasn’t he?”

“Yes.”

“And afterward?”

“I don’t know. I was busy overseeing the photographing of the eclipse. I don’t have any idea what became of him. He didn’t seem to be in sight when the mob broke in.”

With a faint smile Raissta said, “Perhaps he slipped away in the confusion. Uncle is like that—very quick on his feet, sometimes, when there’s trouble. I’d hate to have had anything bad happen to him.”

“Raissta, something bad has happened to the whole world. Athor may have had the right idea: better just to let it sweep over you and carry you away. That way you don’t have to contend with worldwide insanity and chaos.”

“You mustn’t say that, Beenay.”

“No. No, I mustn’t.” He came up behind her and lightly stroked her shoulders. Bent forward, softly nuzzled behind her ear.—“Raissta, what are we going to do?”

“I think I can guess,” she said.

Despite everything, he laughed. “I mean afterward .”

“Let’s worry about that afterward,” she told him.

Theremon had never been much of an outdoorsman. He thought of himself as a city boy through and through. Grass, trees, fresh air, the open sky—he didn’t actually mind them, but they held no particular appeal for him. For years his life had shuttled along a fixed urban-based triangular orbit, rigidly following a familiar path bounded at one corner by his little apartment, at another by the Chronicle office, by the Six Suns Club at the third.

Now, suddenly, he was a forest-dweller.

The strange thing was that he almost liked it.

What the citizens of Saro City called “the forest” was actually a fair-sized woodsy tract that began just southeast of the city itself and stretched for a dozen miles or so along the south bank of the Seppitan River. There once had been a great deal more of it, a vast wilderness sweeping on a great diagonal across the midsection of the province almost to the sea, but most of it had gone to agriculture, much of the remainder had been cut up into suburban residential districts, and the university had taken a goodly nip some fifty years back for what was then its new campus. Unwilling to have itself engulfed by urban development, the university had then agitated to have what was left set aside as a park preserve. And since the rule in Saro City for many years had been that whatever the university wanted the university usually got, the last strip of the old wilderness was left alone.

That was where Theremon found himself living now.

The first two days had been very bad. His mind was still half fogged by the effects of seeing the Stars, and he was unable to form any clear plan. The main thing was just to stay alive.

The city was on fire—smoke was everywhere, the air was scorching hot, from certain vantage points you could even see the leaping flames dancing along the rooftops—so obviously it wasn’t a good idea to try to go back there. In the aftermath of the eclipse, once the chaos within his mind had begun to clear a little, he had simply continued downhill from the campus until he found himself entering the forest.

Many others plainly had done the same thing. Some of them looked like university people, others were probably remnants of the mob that had come out to storm the Observatory on the night of the eclipse, and the rest, Theremon guessed, were suburbanites driven from their homes when the fires began to break out.

Everyone he saw appeared to be at least as unsettled mentally as he was. Most seemed very much worse off—some of them completely unhinged, totally unable to cope.

They had not formed any sort of coherent bands. Mainly they were solitaries, moving on mysterious private tracks through the woods, or else groups of two or three; the biggest aggregation Theremon saw was eight people, who from their appearance and dress seemed all to be members of one family.

It was horrifying to encounter the truly crazy ones: the vacant eyes, the drooling lips, the slack jaws, the smeared clothing. They plodded through the forest glades like the walking dead, talking to themselves, singing, occasionally dropping to their hands and knees to dig up clumps of sod and munch on them. They were everywhere. The place was like one vast insane asylum, Theremon thought. Probably the whole world was.

Those of this sort, the ones who had been most affected by the coming of the Stars, were generally harmless, at least to others. They were too badly deranged to have any interest in being violent, and their bodily coordination was so seriously disrupted that effective violence was impossible for them, anyway.