Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

Theremon was experienced enough in worldly things to understand that no amount of smooth talk was persuasive enough to break through barriers that were so determinedly maintained. He had long ago decided that no worthwhile woman could ever be seduced; you could present the possibility to them, but you had to leave it ultimately to them to do the seducing for you, and if they weren’t so minded, there was very little you could do to change their outlook. And with Siferra, things had been sliding in the wrong direction for him all year long. She had turned on him ferociously—and with some justification, he thought ruefully—once he began his misguided campaign of mockery against Athor and the Observatory group.

Somehow right at the end he had felt that she was weakening, that she was becoming interested in him despite herself. Why else had she invited him to the Observatory, against Athor’s heated orders, on the evening of the eclipse? For a short time that evening there actually had seemed to be real contact blossoming between them.

But then had come the Darkness, the Stars, the mob, the chaos. After that everything had plunged into confusion. But if he could find her somehow, now—

We’d work well together, he thought. We’d be a tremendous team—hard-nosed, competent, survival-oriented. Whatever kind of civilization is going to evolve, we’d find a good place for ourselves in it.

And if there had been a little psychological barrier between them before, he was certain it would seem unimportant to her now. It was a brand-new world, and new attitudes were necessary if you were going to survive.

But how could he find Siferra? No communications circuits were open, so far as he knew. She was just one of millions of people at large in the area. The forest alone probably had a population of many thousands now; and he had no real reason for assuming that she was in the forest. She could be fifty miles from here by this time. She could be dead. Looking for her was a hopeless task: it was worse than trying to find the proverbial needle in a haystack. This haystack was several counties wide, and the needle might well be getting farther away every hour. Only by the wildest sort of coincidence could he ever locate Siferra, or, for that matter, anyone else he knew.

The more Theremon thought about his chances of finding her, though, the less impossible the task seemed. And after a while it began to seem quite possible indeed.

Perhaps his steadily rising optimism was a by-product of his new secluded life. He had nothing to do but spend hours each day sitting by the brook, watching the minnows go by—and thinking. And as he endlessly reevaluated things, finding Siferra went from seeming impossible to merely unlikely, and from unlikely to difficult, and from difficult to challenging, and from challenging to feasible, and from feasible to readily achievable.

All he had to do, he told himself, was get back out into the forest and recruit a little help from those who were reasonably functional. Tell them who he was trying to find, and what she looked like. Spread the word around. Employ some of his journalistic skills. And make use of his status as a local celebrity. “I’m Theremon 762,” he would say. “You know, from the Chronicle. Help me and I’ll make it worth your while. You want your name in the paper? You want me to make you famous? I can do it. Never mind that the paper isn’t being published just now. Sooner or later it’ll be back, and I’ll be right there with it, and you’ll see yourself smack in the middle of the front page. You can count on that. Just help me find this woman that I’m looking for, and—”

“Theremon?”

A familiar voice, high-pitched, cheerful. He stopped short, squinted into the brightness of the midday sunlight cutting through the trees, peered this way and that to locate the speaker.

He had been walking for two hours, looking for people who would be glad to get out there and spread the word on behalf of the famous Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle. But so far he had found only six people altogether. Two of them had taken to their heels the moment they saw him. A third sat where he was, singing softly to his bare toes. Another, crouching in the fork of a tree, methodically rubbed two kitchen knives together with maniacal zeal. The remaining two had simply stared at him when he told them what he wanted; one did not seem to understand at all, and the other burst into gales of wild laughter. Not much hope of help from any of them.

And now it appeared that someone had found him.

“Theremon? Over here. Over here, Theremon. Here I am. Don’t you see me, man? Over here!”

Theremon glanced to his left, into a clump of bushes with huge prickly parasol-shaped leaves. At first he saw nothing unusual. Then the leaves swayed and parted, and a plump, roundish man stepped out into view.

“Sheerin?” he said, amazed.

“Well, at least you’re not so far gone that you’ve forgotten my name.”

The psychologist had lost some weight, and he was incongruously dressed in overalls and a torn pullover. A hatchet with a chipped blade was dangling casually from his left hand. That was perhaps the most incongruous thing of all, Sheerin carrying a hatchet. It wouldn’t have been very much stranger to see him walking around with a second head or an extra pair of arms.

Sheerin said, “How are you, Theremon? Great gods, you’re all rags and tatters, and it hasn’t even been a week! But I suppose I’m not much better.” He looked down at himself. “Have you ever seen me this skinny? A diet of leaves and berries really slims you down, doesn’t it?”

“You’ve got a way to go before I’d call you skinny,” Theremon said. “But you do look trim. How did you find me?”

“By not looking for you. It’s the only way, when everything’s become completely random. I’ve been to the Sanctuary, but no one was there. Now I’m on my way south to Amgando Park. I was just ambling along the path that cuts across the middle of the forest, and there you were.” The psychologist came bounding forward, holding out his hand. “By all the gods, Theremon, it’s a joy to see a friendly face again!—You are friendly, aren’t you? You’re not homicidal?”

“I don’t think I am.”

“There are more crazies per square yard in here than I’ve ever seen in my life, and I’ve seen plenty of crazies, let me tell you.” Sheerin shook his head and sighed. “Gods! I never dreamed it would be this bad. Even with all my professional experience. I thought it would be bad, yes, very bad, but not this bad.”

“You predicted universal madness,” Theremon reminded him. “I was there. I heard you say it. You predicted the complete breakdown of civilization.”

“It’s one thing to predict it. It’s something else again to be right in the middle of it. It’s a very humbling thing, Theremon, for an academic like me to find his abstract theories turning into concrete reality. I was so glib, so blithely unconcerned. ‘Tomorrow there won’t be a city standing unharmed in all Kal-gash,’ I said, and it was all just so many words to me, really, just a philosophical exercise, completely abstract. ‘The end of the world you used to live in.’ Yes. Yes.” Sheerin shivered. “And it all happened, just like I said. But I suppose I didn’t really believe my own dire predictions, until everything came crashing down around me.”

“The Stars,” Theremon said. “You never really took the Stars into account. They were the thing that did the real damage. Maybe we could have withstood the Darkness, most of us, just felt a little shaken up, a little bit upset. But the Stars—the Stars—”

“How bad was it for you?”