Isaac Asimov - Nightfall (novel)

Perhaps Beenay and Athor were wrong and the astronomical cataclysm wouldn’t happen at all.

No, the cataclysm will definitely happen.

Darkness, despite his own disturbing experiences with it at the Tunnel of Mystery two years before, would turn out not to be such a troublesome thing after all, if indeed it did come.

Wrong. Darkness will cause universal madness.

The madness would be only temporary, a brief period of disorientation.

The madness will be permanent, in most people.

The world would be disrupted for a few hours and then go back to normal.

The world will be destroyed in the chaos following the eclipse.

Back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down. Twin Sheerins, locked in endless debate.

But now he had hit the bottom of the cycle and he seemed to be staying there, unmoving and miserable. His resilience and optimism had evaporated in the glare of what he had seen during his wanderings these past few days. It would be decades, possibly even a century or more, before things returned to normal. The mental trauma had scored too deep a scar, the destruction that had already occurred to the fabric of society was too widespread. The world he had loved had been vanquished by Darkness and smashed beyond repair. That was his professional opinion and he could see no reason to doubt it.

This was the third day, now, since Sheerin had parted from Theremon in the forest and gone marching off, in his usual jaunty fashion, toward Amgando. That jauntiness was hard to recapture now. He had managed to get out of the forest in one piece—there had been a couple of bad moments, times when he had had to wave his hatchet around and look menacing and lethal, a total bluff on his part, but it had worked—and for the last day or so he had been moving in a plodding way through the once-pleasant southern suburbs.

Everything was burned out around here. Entire neighborhoods had been destroyed and abandoned. Many of the buildings were still smoldering.

The main highway running to the southern provinces, Sheerin had believed, began just a few miles below the park—a couple of minutes’ drive, if you were driving. But he wasn’t driving. He had had to make the horrendous climb up out of the forest to the imposing hill that was Onos Heights practically on hands and knees, clawing his way through the underbrush. It took him half a day just to ascend those few hundred yards.

Once he was on top, Sheerin saw that the hill was more like a plateau—but it stretched on endlessly before him, and though he walked and walked and walked he did not come to the highway.

Was he going the right way?

Yes. Yes, from time to time he saw a road sign at a street corner that told him he was indeed heading toward the Great Southern Highway. How far was it, though? The signs didn’t say. Every ten or twelve blocks there was another sign, that was all. He kept going. He had no choice.

But reaching the highway was only the first step in getting to Amgando. He would still be in Saro City, essentially, at that point. Then what? Keep on walking? What else? He could hardly hitch a ride with someone. No vehicles seemed to be running anywhere. The public fuel stations must have gone dry days ago, those that had not been burned. How long was it likely to take him, at this pace, to get down to Amgando on foot? Weeks? Months? No—it would take him forever. He’d be dead of starvation long before he came anywhere near the place.

Even so, he had to go on. Without a sense of purpose, he was finished right now, and he knew it.

Something like a week had passed since the eclipse, maybe more. He was beginning to lose track of time. He neither ate regularly nor slept regularly any more, and Sheerin had always been a man of the most punctual habits. Suns came and went in the sky, now, the light brightened or dimmed, the air grew warmer or grew cooler, and time passed: but without the progression of breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleep, Sheerin had no idea of how it was passing. He knew only that he was rapidly running out of strength.

He hadn’t eaten properly since the coming of the Nightfall. From that dark moment onward, it had been scraps and shards for him, nothing more—a bit of fruit from some tree when he could find it, any unripe seeds that didn’t look as though they’d be poisonous, blades of grass, anything. It wasn’t making him sick, somehow, but it wasn’t sustaining him very well, either. The nutritional content must have been close to zero. His clothes, worn and tattered, hung from him like a shroud. He didn’t dare look underneath them. He imagined that his skin must lie now in loose folds over his jutting bones. His throat was dry all the time, his tongue seemed swollen, there was a frightful pounding behind his eyes. And that dull, numb, hollow sensation in his gut, all the time.

Well, he told himself in his more cheerful moments, there must have been some reason why he had devoted himself so assiduously for so many years to building up such an opulent layer of fat, and now he was learning what that reason was.

But his cheerful moments were fewer and farther between every day. Hunger was preying on his spirits. And he realized that he couldn’t hold out much longer like this. His body was big; it was accustomed to regular feedings, and robust ones; he could live only so long on his accumulated backlog of Sheerin, and then he would be too weak to pull himself onward. Before long it would seem simpler just to curl up behind some bush and rest … and rest … and rest.…

He had to find food. Soon.

The neighborhood he was moving through now, though deserted like all the rest, seemed a little less devastated than the areas behind him. There had been fires here too, but not everywhere, and the flames appeared to have jumped randomly past this house and that without harming them. Patiently Sheerin went from one to the next, trying the door of each house that didn’t seem to have been seriously damaged.

Locked. Every one of them.

How fastidious of these people! he thought. How tidy! The world has fallen in around their ears, and they are abandoning their homes in blind terror, running off to the forest, the campus, the city, the gods only knew where—and they take the trouble to lock their houses before they go! As if they mean simply to have a brief holiday during the time of chaos, and then go home to their books and their bric-a-brac, their closets full of nice clothing, their gardens, their patios. Or hadn’t they realized that everything was over, that the chaos was going to go on and on and on?

Perhaps, Sheerin thought dismally, they aren’t gone at all. They’re in there hiding behind those locked doors of theirs, huddling in the basement the way I did, waiting for things to get normal again. Or else staring at me from the upstairs windows, hoping I’ll go away.

He tried another door. Another. Another. All locked. No response.

“Hey! Anybody home? Let me in!”

Silence.

He stared bleakly at the thick wooden door in front of him. He envisioned the treasures behind it, the food not yet spoiled and waiting to be eaten, the bathtub, the soft bed. And here he was outside, with no way of getting in. He felt a little like the small boy in the fable who has been given the magic key to the garden of the gods, where fountains of honey flow and gum-drops grow on every bush, but who is too small to reach up and put it in the keyhole. He felt like crying.

He realized, then, that he was carrying a hatchet. And he began to laugh. Hunger must have been making him simple-minded! The little boy in the fable perseveres, offering his mittens and his boots and his velvet cap to various animals who are passing by so that they will help him: each one gets on another one’s back, and he climbs on the top of the heap and puts the key in the keyhole. And here was not-so-little Sheerin, staring at a locked door, and he was holding a hatchet!