by Isaac Asimov
Beenay gasped. He didn’t want to believe it.
He turned to Faro. The young graduate student’s round face was pale with shock.
Huskily Beenay said, “All right. I’m done, and I’ve got a number. But first you tell me yours.”
“Eclipse of Dovim by Kalgash Two, periodicity of two thousand and forty-nine years.”
“Yes,” Beenay said leadenly. “My number exactly. Once every two thousand and forty-nine years.”
He felt dizzy. The entire universe seemed to be reeling around him.
Once every two thousand and forty-nine years. The exact length of a Year of Godliness, according to the Apostles of Flame. The very same figure that was given in the Book of Revelations.
“—the suns will all disappear—”
“—the Stars will shoot flame down out of a black sky—”
He didn’t know what Stars were. But Siferra had discovered a hill on the Sagikan Peninsula where cities had been destroyed by flame with astonishing regularity, approximately every two thousand years. When she had had a chance to run exact carbon-14 tests, would the precise figure of the time between each conflagration on the Hill of Thombo turn out to be—two thousand and forty-nine years?
“—a black sky—”
Beenay stared helplessly across the room at Faro.
“When’s the next Dovim-only day due to occur?” he asked.
“In eleven months and four days,” Faro said grimly. “On the nineteenth of Theptar.”
“Yes,” Beenay said. “The same day when, Mondior 71 tells us, the sky is going to turn black and the fire of the gods is going to descend and destroy our civilization.”
[17]
“For the first time in my life,” Athor said, “I find myself praying with all my heart that my calculations are wrong. But I fear the gods have granted me no such mercy. We find ourselves inexorably swept along toward a conclusion that is terrible to contemplate.”
He looked around the room, letting his gaze rest for a moment on each of the people he had called together. Young Beenay 25, of course. Sheerin 501, from the Psychology Department. Siferra 89, the archaeologist.
By sheer force of will alone Athor fought to conceal from them the vast fatigue he felt, the sense of growing despair, the crushing impact of all that he had learned in the weeks just past. He fought to conceal all those things even from himself. Now and then lately he had found himself thinking that he had lived too long, found himself wishing that he had been allowed to go to his rest a year or two ago. But he swept such thoughts mercilessly from his mind. An iron will and unflagging strength of spirit had always been Athor’s prime characteristics. He refused now, with age making inroads on his vigor, to let those traits slip away.
To Sheerin he said, “Your field, as I understand it, is the study of Darkness?”
The plump psychologist seemed amused. “I suppose that’s one way of putting it. My doctoral thesis was on Darkness-related mental disorders. But Darkness research has been only one facet of my work. I’m interested in mass hysteria of all sorts—in the irrational responses of the human mind to overwhelming stimuli. The whole roster of human nuttiness, that’s what keeps the bread on my table.”
“Very well,” Athor said coolly. “Be that as it may. Beenay 25 says you’re the ranking authority on Darkness at the university. You’ve just seen our little astronomical demonstration on the computer screen. I assume you comprehend the essential implications of what we’ve discovered.”
The old astronomer could not find some way of preventing that from sounding patronizing. But Sheerin didn’t seem particularly offended.
Calmly he said, “I think I grasped it well enough. You’re saying that there’s a mysterious invisible planetary-sized astronomical body of such-and-such mass in orbit around Kalgash at such-and-such a distance, and what with one such-and-such and the other, its force of attraction exactly accounts for certain deviations from theory in Kalgash’s orbit that my friend Beenay here has discovered. Am I right so far?”
“Yes,” Athor said. “Quite correct.”
“Well,” Sheerin continued, “it turns out that sometimes this body would get between us and one of our suns. This is termed an eclipse. But only one sun lies in its plane of revolutions in such a way that it can ever be eclipsed, and that sun is Dovim. It has been shown that the eclipse will occur only when”—Sheerin paused, frowning,—“when Dovim is the only sun in the sky, and both it and this so-called Kalgash Two are lined up in such a way that Kalgash Two completely covers the disk of Dovim and no light at all gets through to us. Am I still doing okay?”
Athor nodded. “You’ve grasped it perfectly.”
“I was afraid of that. I was hoping I had misunderstood.”
“Now, as to the effects of the eclipse—” Athor said.
Sheerin took a deep breath. “All right. The eclipse—which happens only once every two thousand and forty-nine years, the gods be thanked!—will cause an extended period of universal Darkness on Kalgash. As the world turns, each continent will be totally dark for periods ranging from—what did you say?—nine to fourteen hours, depending on latitude.”
“Now: if you please,” Athor said, “what is your opinion, as a professional psychologist, of the effect that this will create in the minds of human beings?”
“The effect,” Sheerin said unhesitatingly, “will be madness.”
It was suddenly very quiet in the room.
At length Athor said, “Universal madness, is that what you’re predicting?”
“Very likely. Universal Darkness, universal madness. My guess is that people will be affected to varying degrees, ranging from short-range disorientation and depression to complete and permanent destruction of the reasoning powers. The greater the psychological stability one has to begin with, naturally, the less likely one is to be entirely shattered by the impact of the absence of all light. But no one, I think, will be entirely unscathed.”
“I don’t understand,” Beenay said. “What is there in Darkness to drive people mad?”
Sheerin smiled. “We simply aren’t adapted for it. Imagine, if you can, a world that has only one sun. As that world rotates on its axis, each hemisphere will receive light for half the day and will be entirely dark for the other half.”
Beenay made an involuntary gesture of horror.
“Do you see?” Sheerin cried. “You don’t even like the sound of it! But the inhabitants of that planet will be quite accustomed to a daily dose of Darkness. Very likely they’ll find the daylight hours cheerier and more to their liking, but they’ll shrug off the Darkness as an ordinary everyday event, nothing to get excited about, just something to sleep through while waiting for morning to come. Not us, though. We’ve evolved under conditions of perpetual sunlight, every hour of the day, all year round. If Onos isn’t in the sky, Tano and Sitha and Dovim are, or Patru and Trey, and so forth. Our minds, even the physiologies of our bodies, are accustomed to constant brightness. We don’t like even a brief moment without it. You sleep with a godlight on in your room, I take it?”
“Of course,” Beenay said.
“Of course? Why ‘of course’?”
“Why—? But everybody sleeps with a godlight!”
“My point exactly. Tell me this: have you ever experienced Darkness, friend Beenay?”
Beenay leaned against the wall next to the big picture window and considered. “No. Can’t say I have. But I know what it is. Just—uh—” He made vague motions with his fingers, and then brightened. “Just an absence of light. Like in caves.”
“Have you ever been in a cave?”
“In a cave! Of course I haven’t been in a cave.”
“I thought not. I tried, once, long ago when I was beginning my studies of Darkness-induced disorders. But I got out in a hurry I went in until the mouth of the cave was just visible as a blur of light, with black everywhere else.” Sheerin chuckled pleasantly. “I never thought a person of my weight could run that fast.”
The psychologist smiled gently at the young astronomer.
“Bravely said! I admire your courage, my friend.” Turning to Athor, Sheerin said, “May I have your permission, sir, to perform a little psychological experiment?”
“Whatever you wish.”
“Thank you.” Sheerin looked toward Beenay again. “Do you mind drawing the curtain next to you, friend Beenay?”
Beenay looked surprised. “What for?”
“Just draw the curtain. Then come over here and sit down next to me.”
“Well, if you insist—”
Heavy red draperies hung by the windows. Athor couldn’t remember a time when they had ever been drawn, and this room had been his office for some forty years. Beenay, with a shrug, reached for the tasseled string and jerked. The red curtain slid across the wide window, the brass rings hissing their way along the crossbar. For a moment the dusk-red light of Dovim could still be seen. Then all was in shadows, and even the shadows became indistinct.
Beenay’s footsteps sounded hollowly in the silence as he made his way to the table, and then they stopped halfway.
“I can’t see you, Sheerin,” he whispered forlornly.
“Feel your way,” Sheerin ordered in a strained voice.
“But I can’t see you!” The young astronomer was breathing harshly. “I can’t see anything!”
“What did you expect? This is Darkness.” Sheerin waited a moment. “Come on. You must know your way around this room even with your eyes closed. Just walk over here and sit down.”
The footsteps sounded again, waveringly. There was the sound of someone fumbling with a chair. Beenay’s voice came thinly: “Here I am.”
“How do you feel?”
“I’m—ulp—all right.”
“You like it, do you?”
A long pause.
“No.”
“No, Beenay?”
“Not at all. It’s awful. It’s as if the walls are—” He paused again. “They seem to be closing in on me. I keep wanting to push them away. —But I’m not going mad at all. In fact, I think I’m getting used to it.”
“All right. Siferra? What about you?”
“I can take a little Darkness. I’ve gone crawling around in some underground passages now and then. But I can’t say I care for it much.”
“Athor?”
“I’m also still surviving. But I think you’ve proved your point, Dr. Sheerin,” said the Observatory head, sharply.
“All right. Beenay, draw the curtains back again.”
There were cautious footsteps through the dark, the rustle of Beenay’s body against the curtain as he felt for the tassel, and then the relief of hearing the curtain’s ro-o-osh as it slithered open. The red light of Dovim flooded the room, and with a cry of joy Beenay looked out the window at the smallest of the six suns.
Sheerin wiped the moistness off his forehead with the back of a hand and said shakily, “And that was just a few minutes in a dark room.”
“It can be tolerated,” said Beenay lightly.
“Yes, a dark room can. At least for a short while. But you all know about the Jonglor Centennial Exposition, don’t you? The Tunnel of Mystery scandal? Beenay, I told you the story that evening last summer at the Six Suns Club, when you were with that newspaperman Theremon.”
“Yes. I remember. The people who took that ride through Darkness in the amusement park and came out insane.”
“Just a mile-long tunnel—with no lights. You got into a little open car and jolted along through Darkness for fifteen minutes. Some who took the ride died of fright. Others came out permanently deranged.”
“And why was that? What drove them crazy?”
“Essentially the same thing that was operating on you just now when we had the curtain closed and you thought the walls of the room were crushing in on you in the dark. There’s a psychological term for mankind’s instinctive fear of the absence of light. We call it ‘claustrophobia,’ because the lack of light is always tied up with enclosed places, so that the fear of one is fear of the other. You see?”
“And those people of the Tunnel who went crazy?”
“Those people of the Tunnel who went—ah—crazy, to use your word, were those unfortunate ones who didn’t have sufficient psychological resilience to overcome the claustrophobia that engulfed them in the Darkness. It was a powerful feeling. Believe me. I took the Tunnel ride myself. You had only a couple of minutes without light just now, and I believe you were fairly upset. Now imagine fifteen minutes.”
“But didn’t they recover afterward?”
“Some did. But some will suffer for years, or perhaps for the rest of their lives, from claustrophobic fixations. Their latent fear of Darkness and enclosed places has crystallized and become, so far as we can tell, permanent. And some, as I said, died of shock. No recovery for them, eh? That’s what fifteen minutes in the dark can do.”
“To some people,” Beenay said stubbornly. His forehead wrinkled slowly into a frown. “I still don’t believe it’s going to be that bad for most of us. Certainly not for me.”
Sheerin sighed in exasperation. “Imagine Darkness—everywhere. No light, as far as you can see. The houses, the trees, the fields, the earth, the sky—black! And Stars thrown in, if you listen to the preaching of the Apostles—Stars, whatever they are. Can you conceive it?”
“Yes, I can,” declared Beenay, even more truculently.
“No! No, you can’t!” Sheerin slammed his fist down upon the table in sudden passion. “You’re fooling yourself! You can’t conceive that. Your brain wasn’t built for the concept any more than—Look, Beenay, you’re a mathematician, aren’t you? Can your brain really and truly conceive of the concept of infinity? Of eternity? You can only talk about it. Reduce it to equations and pretend that the abstract numbers are the reality, when in fact they’re just marks on paper. But when you try really to encompass the idea of infinity in your mind you start getting dizzy pretty fast, I’m certain of that. A fraction of the reality upsets you. The same with the little bit of Darkness you just tasted. And when the real thing comes, your brain is going to be presented with a phenomenon outside its limits of comprehension. You’ll go insane, Beenay. Completely and permanently. I have no doubt of that whatever!”
Once again there was a sudden terrible silence in the room.
Athor said, at last. “That’s your final conclusion, Dr. Sheerin? Widespread insanity?”
“At least seventy-five percent of the population made irrational to a disabling degree. Perhaps eighty-five percent. Perhaps even a hundred percent.”
Athor shook his head. “Monstrous. Hideous. A calamity beyond belief. Though I must tell you I feel somewhat the way Beenay does—that we will get through this somehow, that the effects will be less cataclysmic than your opinion would indicate. Old as I am, I can’t help feeling a certain optimism, a certain sense of hope—”
Siferra said suddenly, “May I speak, Dr. Athor?”
“Of course. Of course! That’s why you’re here.”
The archaeologist rose and came to the center of the room. “In some ways it surprises me that I’m here at all. When I first discussed my Sagikan Peninsula discoveries with Beenay here, I begged him to keep them absolutely confidential. I was fearful for my scientific reputation, because I saw that the data I had uncovered could very easily be construed as giving support to the most irrational, the most frightening, the most dangerous religious movement that exists within our society. I’m speaking, naturally, of the Apostles of Flame.
“But then, when Beenay came back to me a little while later with bis new findings, the discovery of the periodicity of these eclipses of Dovim, I knew I had to reveal what I know. I have here photographs and charts of my excavation at the Hill of Thombo, near the Beklimot site on the Sagikan Peninsula. Beenay, you’ve already seen them, but if you’ll be go
od enough to pass them to Dr. Athor and Dr. Sheerin—”
Siferra waited until they had had a chance to glance at the material. Then she resumed speaking.
“The charts will be easier to understand if you think of the Hill of Thombo as a giant layer cake of ancient settlements, each built upon its immediate predecessor—the youngest one at the top of the hill, naturally. That one is a city of what we call the Beklimot culture. Below it is one built by those same people, we think, in an earlier phase of their civilization, and then down and down and down, for a total of at least seven different periods of settlement, perhaps even more.
“Each of those settlements, gentlemen, came to an end because it was destroyed by fire. You can see, I think, the dark boundaries between the layers. Those are the burn lines—charcoal remnants. My original guess, based purely on an intuitive sense of how long it might have taken for these cities to have arisen, flourished, decayed, and crumbled, is that each of these great fires happened something like two thousand years apart, with the most recent of them taking place about two thousand years ago, just prior to the unfolding of the Beklimot culture that we regard as the beginning of the historical period.
“But charcoal is particularly well suited for radiocarbon dating, which gives us a fairly precise indication of the age of a site. Ever since my Thombo material reached Saro City, our departmental lab has been busy doing radiocarbon analysis, and now we have our figures. I can tell you what they are from memory. The youngest of the Thombo settlements was destroyed by fire two thousand and fifty years ago, with a statistical deviation of plus or minus twenty years. The charcoal from the settlement below that is forty-one hundred years old, with a deviation of plus or minus forty years. The third settlement from the top was destroyed by fire sixty-two hundred years ago, with a deviation of plus or minus eighty years. The fourth settlement down shows a radiocarbon age of eighty-three hundred years, plus or minus a hundred. The fifth—”
