by Isaac Asimov
Sheerin said, “Have you been having trouble breathing, Beenay?”
“A little.” He sniffled. “A cold, I guess.”
“A touch of claustrophobia, more likely.”
“You think?”
“I’m pretty sure. Anything else feel strange?”
“Well,” Beenay said, “I get the impression that my eyes are going back on me. Things seem to blur, and—well, nothing is as clear as it ought to be. And I’m cold, too.”
“Oh, that’s no illusion. It’s cold, all right,” Theremon said, grimacing. “My toes feel as if I’ve been shipping them cross country in a refrigeration car.”
“What we need right now,” Sheerin said intensely, “is to distract ourselves from the effects we’re feeling. Keep our minds busy, that’s the thing. I was telling you a moment ago, Theremon, why Faro’s experiments with the holes in the roof came to nothing.”
“You were just beginning,” Theremon replied, playing along. He huddled down, encircling a knee with both arms and nuzzling his chin against it. What I ought to do, he thought, is excuse myself and go upstairs to find Siferra, now that the time before totality is running out. But he found himself curiously passive, unwilling to move. Or, he wondered, am I just afraid to face her?
Sheerin said, “What I was about to propose was that they were misled by taking the Book of Revelations literally. There probably wasn’t any sense in attaching any physical significance to the concept of Stars. It might be, you know, that in the presence of total and sustained Darkness the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light. This illusion of light might be all that the Stars really are.”
“In other words,” Theremon said, starting to get caught up in it now, “you mean the Stars are the results of the madness and not one of the causes? Then what good will the photographs that the astronomers are taking this evening be?”
“To prove that the Stars are an illusion, maybe. Or to prove the opposite, for all I know. Then again—”
Beenay had drawn his chair closer, and there was an expression of sudden enthusiasm on his face. “As long as you’re on the subject of Stars—” he began. “I’ve been thinking about them myself, and I’ve come up with a really interesting notion. Of course, it’s just a wild speculation, and I’m not trying to put it forth in any serious way. But it’s worth thinking about. Do you want to hear it?”
“Why not?” Sheerin said, leaning back.
Beenay looked a little reluctant. He smiled shyly and said, “Well then, supposing there were other suns in the universe.”
Theremon repressed a laugh. “You said this was really wild, but I didn’t imagine—”
“No, it isn’t as crazy as that. I don’t mean other suns right close at hand that we somehow mysteriously aren’t able to see. I’m talking about suns that are so far away that their light isn’t bright enough for us to make them out. If they were nearby, they’d be as bright as Onos, maybe, or Tano and Sitha. But as it is, the light they give off seems to us like nothing more than a little point of illumination, and it’s drowned out by the constant glare from our six suns.”
Sheerin said, “But what about the Law of Universal Gravitation? Aren’t you overlooking that? If these other suns are there, wouldn’t they be disturbing our world’s orbit the way Kalgash Two does, and why, then, haven’t you observed it?”
“Good point,” said Beenay. “But these suns, let’s say, are really far off—maybe as much as four light-years away, or even more.”
“How many years is a light-year?” Theremon asked.
“Not how many. How far. A light-year is a measure of distance—the distance light travels in a year. Which is an immense number of miles, because light is so fast. We’ve measured it at something like 185,000 miles per second, and my suspicion is that that isn’t a really precise figure, that if we had better instruments we’d find out that the speed of light is even a little faster than that. But even figuring at 185,000 miles per second, we can calculate that Onos is about ten light-minutes from here, and Tano and Sitha about eleven times as far as that, and so on. So a sun that’s a few light-years away, why, that would be really distant. We’d never be able to detect any perturbations they might be causing in Kalgash’s orbit, because they’d be so minor. All right: let’s say that there are a lot of suns out there, everywhere around us in the heavens, at a distance of four to eight light-years—say, a dozen or two such suns, maybe.”
Theremon whistled. “What an idea for a great Weekend Supplement piece! Two dozen suns in a universe eight light-years across! Gods! That would shrink our universe into insignificance! Imagine it—Kalgash and its suns just a little trivial suburb of the real universe, and here we’ve been thinking that we’re the whole thing, just us and our six suns, all alone in the cosmos!”
“It’s only a wild notion,” said Beenay with a grin, “but you see where I’m heading, I hope. During eclipse, these dozen suns would suddenly become visible, because for a little while there’d be no real sunlight to drown them out. Since they’re so far off, they’d appear small, like so many little marbles. But there you’d have it: the Stars. The suddenly emerging points of light that the Apostles have been promising us.”
“The Apostles talk of ‘countless numbers’ of Stars,” Sheerin said. “That doesn’t seem like a dozen or two to me. More like a few million, wouldn’t you think?”
“Poetic exaggeration,” said Beenay. “There just isn’t room enough in the universe for a million suns—not even if they were jammed right up against each other so that they touched.”
“Besides,” Theremon offered, “once we get up to a dozen or two, can we really grasp distinctions of numbers? Two dozen Stars would seem like a ‘countless’ number, I bet—especially if there happens to be an eclipse going on and everybody is wacky already from staring at Darkness. You know, there are tribes in the backwoods that have only three numbers in their language—‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘many,’ We’re a little more sophisticated than that, maybe. So for us one to two dozen are comprehensible, and then it just feels like ‘countless’ to us.” He shivered with excitement. “A dozen suns, suddenly! Imagine it!”
Beenay said, “There’s more. Another cute little notion. Have you ever thought what a simple problem gravitation would be if only you had a sufficiently simple system? Supposing you had a universe in which there was a planet with only one sun. The planet would travel in a perfect ellipse and the exact nature of the gravitational force would be so evident it could be accepted as an axiom. Astronomers on such a world would start off with gravity probably before they even invent the telescope. Naked-eye observation would be enough to let them figure things out.”
Sheerin looked doubtful. “But would such a system be dynamically stable?” he asked.
“Sure! They call it the ‘one-and-one’ case. It’s been worked out mathematically, but it’s the philosophical implications that interest me.”
“It’s nice to think about,” admitted Sheerin, “as a pretty abstraction—like a perfect gas or absolute zero.”
“Of course,” continued Beenay, “there’s the catch that life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn’t get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total Darkness half of each day. That was the planet you once asked me to imagine, remember, Sheerin? Where the native inhabitants would be fully adapted to alternating daylight and night? But I’ve been thinking about that. There wouldn’t be any native inhabitants. You couldn’t expect life—which is fundamentally dependent upon light—to develop under such extreme conditions of light-deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that. But to continue—just speaking hypothetically, the ‘one-and-one’ system would—”
“Wait a minute,” Sheerin said. “That’s pretty glib of you, saying life wouldn’t have developed there. How do you know? What’s so fundamentally impossible about life evolving in a place that has Darkness half the time?”
“I told you, Sheeri
n, life is fundamentally dependent upon light. And therefore in a world where—”
“Life here is fundamentally dependent on light. But what does that have to do with a planet that—”
“It stands to reason, Sheerin!”
“It stands to circular reason!” Sheerin retorted. “You define life as such-and-such a kind of phenomenon that occurs on Kalgash, and then you try to claim that on a world that’s totally unlike Kalgash life would be—”
Theremon burst suddenly into harsh gusts of laughter.
Sheerin and Beenay looked at him indignantly.
“What’s so funny?” Beenay demanded.
“You are. The two of you. An astronomer and a psychologist having a furious argument about biology. This must be the celebrated interdisciplinary dialogue that I’ve heard so much about, the great intellectual ferment for which this university is famous.” The newspaperman stood up. He was growing restless anyway, and Beenay’s long disquisition on abstract matters was making him even edgier. “Excuse me, will you? I need to stretch my legs.”
“Totality’s almost here,” Beenay pointed out. “You may not want to be off by yourself when that happens.”
“Just a little stroll, and then I’ll be back,” said Theremon.
Before he had taken five steps, Beenay and Sheerin had resumed their argument. Theremon smiled. It was a way of easing the tension, he told himself. Everybody was under tremendous pressure. After all, each tick of the clock was bringing the world closer to full Darkness—closer to—
To the Stars?
To madness?
To the Time of the Heavenly Flames?
Theremon shrugged. He had gone through a hundred gyrations of mood in the past few hours, but now he felt oddly calm, almost fatalistic. He had always believed that he was the master of his own destiny, that he was able to shape the course of his life: that was how he had succeeded in getting himself into places where other newspapermen hadn’t remotely had a chance. But now everything was beyond his control, and he knew it. Come Darkness, come Stars, come Flame, it would all happen without a by-your-leave from him. No sense consuming himself in jittery anticipation, then. Just relax, sit back, wait, watch it all happen.
And then, he told himself—then make sure that you survive whatever turmoil follows.
“Going up to the dome?” a voice asked.
He blinked in the half-darkness. It was the chubby little graduate-student astronomer—Faro, was that his name?
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Theremon said, though in truth he had had no particular destination in mind.
“So am I. Come on: I’ll take you there.”
A spiral metal staircase wound upward into the high-vaulted top story of the huge building. Faro went chugging up the stairs in a thudding short-legged gait, and Theremon loped along behind him. He had been in the Observatory dome once before, years ago, when Beenay wanted to show him something. But he remembered very little about the place.
Faro pulled back a heavy sliding door, and they went in.
“Come for a close look at the Stars?” Siferra asked.
The tall archaeologist was standing just inside the doorway, watching the astronomers at their work. Theremon reddened. Siferra wasn’t what he wanted to run into just now. Too late he recalled that this was where Beenay had said she had gone. Despite the ambiguous smile she had seemed to cast his way at the moment of the eclipse’s beginning, he still feared the sting of her scorn for him, her anger over what she saw as his betrayal of the Observatory group.
But she showed no sign now of hard feelings. Perhaps, now that the world was plunging headlong into the Cave of Darkness, she felt that anything that had happened before the eclipse was irrelevant, that the coming catastrophe canceled out all errors, all quarrels, all sins.
“Quite a place!” Theremon said.
“Isn’t it amazing? Not that I really know much of what’s going on here. They’ve got the big solarscope trained on Dovim—it’s really a camera more than it is a spyglass, they told me; you can’t just squint through it and see the heavens—and then these smaller telescopes are focused deeper out, watching for some sign that the Stars are appearing—”
“Have they spotted them yet?”
“Not so far as anyone’s told me,” Siferra said.
Theremon nodded. He looked around. This was the heart of the Observatory, the room where the actual scanning of the skies took place. It was the darkest room he had ever been in—not truly dark, of course; there were bronze sconces arrayed in a double row around the curving wall, but the glow that came from the lamps they held was faint and perfunctory. In the dimness he saw a great metal tube going upward and disappearing through an open panel in the roof of the building. He was able to glimpse the sky through the panel also. It had a terrifying dense purple hue now. The diminishing orb of Dovim was still visible, but the little sun seemed to have retreated to an enormous distance.
“How strange it all looks,” he murmured. “The sky has a texture I’ve never seen before. It’s thick—it’s like some sort of blanket, almost.”
“A blanket that will smother us all.”
“Frightened?” he asked.
“Of course. Aren’t you?”
“Yes and no,” Theremon said. “I mean, I’m not trying to sound particularly heroic, believe me. But I’m not nearly as edgy as I was an hour or two ago. Numb, more than anything.”
“I think I know what you mean.”
“Athor says there’s already been some rioting in the city.”
“It’s only the beginning,” Siferra replied. “Theremon, I can’t get those ashes out of my mind. The ashes of the Hill of Thombo. Those big blocks of stone, the foundations of the cyclopean city—and ashes everywhere at their base.”
“With older ashes below, down and down and down.”
“Yes,” she said.
He realized that she had moved a little closer to him. He realized also that the animosity she had felt toward him over the past few months seemed to be completely gone, and—could it be? —she appeared to be responding to some ghost of the attraction that he had once had for her. He knew the symptoms. He was much too experienced a man not to know them.
Fine, Theremon thought. The world is coming to an end, and now, suddenly, Siferra is finally willing to put aside her Ice Queen costume.
A weird, gawky figure, immensely tall, came slithering by them in a clumsy jerky way. He offered them a giggly greeting.
“No sign of the Stars yet,” he said. It was Yimot, the other young graduate student. “Maybe we won’t get to see them at all. It’ll all turn out to be a fizzle, like the experiment Faro and I rigged up in that dark building.”
“Plenty of Dovim’s still visible,” Theremon pointed out. “We’re nowhere near total Darkness.”
“You sound almost eager for it,” said Siferra.
He turned to her. “I’d like to get the waiting over with.”
“Hey!” someone yelled. “My computer’s down!”
“The lights—!” came another voice.
“What’s happening?” Siferra asked.
“Power failure,” Theremon said. “Just as Sheerin predicted. The generating station must be in trouble. The first wave of madmen, running amok in the city.”
Indeed the dim lights in the sconces appeared to be on the verge of going out. First they grew very much brighter, as if a quick final surge of power had gone rushing through them; then they dimmed; then they brightened again, but not as much as a moment before; and then they dropped to just a fraction of their normal light output. Theremon felt Siferra’s hand gripping his forearm tightly.
“They’re out,” someone said.
“And so are the computers—cut in the backup power, somebody! Hey! Backup power!”
“Fast! The solarscope isn’t tracking! The camera shutter won’t work!”
Theremon said, “Why didn’t they prepare for something like this?”
But apparently they had. There
came a thrumming from somewhere in the depths of the building; and then the screens of the computers scattered around the room winked back to life. The lamps in their sconces did not, though. Evidently they were on another circuit, and the emergency generator in the basement would not restore them to functioning.
The Observatory was practically in full Darkness.
Siferra’s hand still rested on Theremon’s wrist. He debated slipping a comforting arm around her shoulders.
Then Athor’s voice could be heard. “All right, give me a hand here! We’ll be okay in a minute!”
“What’s he got?” Theremon asked.
“Athor’s brought out the lights,” came the voice of Yimot.
Theremon turned to stare. It wasn’t easy to see anything, in such a low light level, but in another moment his eyes grew somewhat accustomed to it. There were half a dozen foot-long inch-thick rods cradled in Athor’s arms. He glared over them at the staff members.
“Faro! Yimot! Come here and help me.”
The young men trotted to the Observatory director’s side and took the rods from him. One by one, Yimot held them up, while Faro, in utter silence, scraped a large clumsy match into spluttering life with the air of one performing the most sacred rite of a religious ritual. As he touched the flame to the upper end of each of the rods, the little blaze hesitated a moment, playing futilely about the tip, until a sudden crackling flare cast Athor’s lined face into yellow highlights. A spontaneous cheer ran through the great room.
The rod was tipped by six inches of wavering flame!
“Fire?” Theremon wondered. “In here? Why not use godlights, or something?”
“We discussed it,” said Siferra. “But godlights are too faint. They’re all right for a small bedroom, just a little cozy presence to get you through the sleeping-period, but for a place this size—”
“And downstairs? Are they lighting torches there too?”
“I think so.”
Theremon shook his head. “No wonder the city’s going to burn this evening. If even you people are resorting to something as primitive as fire to hold back the Darkness—”
