Nightfall

by Isaac Asimov

  Easily, he told himself, laughing even harder at his own foolishness. This is how you do it.

  He swung the hatchet.

  But it wasn’t all that easy. His starvation-weakened muscles rebelled at the effort. He could lift the hatchet, all right, and he could swing it, but the blow seemed pathetically weak, and a line of fire shot through his arms and back as the blade made contact with the stout wooden door. Had he split the door? No. Cracked it a little? Maybe. Maybe a little chip. He swung again. Again. Harder. There you go, Sheerin. You’re getting the hang of it now. Swing! Swing!

  He scarcely felt the pain, after the first few swings. He closed his eyes, pulled breath deep into his lungs, and swung. And swung again. The door was cracking now. There was a perceptible crevice. Another swing—another—maybe five or six more good blows and it would break in half—

  Food. Bath. Bed.

  Swing. And swing. And—

  And the door opened in his face. He was so astonished that he nearly fell through. He staggered and lurched, braced himself with the haft of the ax against the door-frame, and looked up.

  Half a dozen fierce wild-eyed faces looked back at him.

  “You knocked, sir?” a man said, and everyone howled in manic glee.

  Then they reached out for him, caught him by his arms, pulled him inside.

  “You won’t be needing this,” someone said, and effortlessly twisted the hatchet from Sheerin’s grasp. “You can only hurt yourself with a thing like that, don’t you know?”

  More laughter—a crazed howling. They pushed him into the center of the room and formed a ring around him.

  There were seven, eight, maybe nine of them. Men and women both, and one half-grown boy. Sheerin could see at a glance that they weren’t the rightful residents of this house, which must have been neat and well maintained before they moved into it. Now there were stains on the wall, half the furniture was overturned, there was a sodden puddle of something—wine?—on the carpet.

  He knew what these people were. These were squatters, rough and ragged-looking, unshaven, unwashed. They had come drifting in, had taken possession of the place after its owners fled. One of the men was wearing only a shirt. One of the women, hardly more than a girl, was clad just in a pair of shorts. They all had an acrid, repellent odor. Their eyes had that intense, rigid, off-center look that he had seen a thousand times in recent days. You didn’t need any clinical experience to know that those were the eyes of the insane.

  Cutting through the stink of the squatters’ bodies, though, was another odor, a much more pleasing one, one that almost drove Sheerin out of his mind too: the aroma of cooking food. They were preparing a meal in the next room. Soup? Stew? Something was boiling in there. He swayed, dizzied by his own hunger and the sudden hope of soothing it at last.

  Mildly he said, “I didn’t know the house was occupied. But I hope you’ll let me stay with you this evening, and then I’ll be moving along.”

  “You from the Patrol?” a big, heavily bearded man asked suspiciously. He seemed to be the leader.

  Sheerin said uncertainly, “The Patrol? No, I don’t know anything about them. My name is Sheerin 501, and I’m a member of the faculty of—”

  “Patrol! Patrol! Patrol!” they were chanting suddenly, moving in a circle around him.

  “—Saro University,” he finished.

  It was as though he had uttered a magic spell. They halted in their tracks as his quiet voice cut through their shrill screaming, and they fell silent, staring at him in a terrifying way.

  “You say you’re from the university?” the leader asked in a strange tone.

  “That’s right. Department of Psychology. I’m a teacher and I do a little hospital work on the side. —Look, I don’t intend to make any trouble for you at all. I just need a place to rest for a few hours, and a little food, if you can spare it. Just a little. I haven’t eaten since—”

  “University!” a woman cried. The way she said it, it sounded like something filthy, something blasphemous. Sheerin had heard that tone before, from Folimun 66 the night of the eclipse, referring to scientists. It was a frightening thing to hear.

  “University! University! University!”

  They began to circle around him again, chanting again, pointing at him, making bizarre signs with their hooked fingers. He could no longer understand their words. It was a raucous nightmare chant, nonsense syllables.

  Were these people some subchapter of the Apostles of Flame, convening here to practice an arcane rite? No, he doubted that. They had a different look, too ragged, too shabby, too demented. The Apostles, such few of them as he had seen, had always appeared crisp, self-contained, almost frighteningly controlled. Besides, the Apostles hadn’t been in evidence since the eclipse. Sheerin supposed that they had all withdrawn to some sanctuary of their own to enjoy the vindication of their beliefs in private.

  These people, he thought, were simply unaffiliated wandering crazies.

  And it seemed to Sheerin that he saw murder in their eyes.

  “Listen,” he said, “if I’ve disturbed some ceremony of yours in any way, I apologize, and I’m perfectly willing to leave right now. I only tried to come in here because I thought the house was empty and I was so hungry. I didn’t mean to—”

  “University! University!”

  He had never seen a look of such intense hatred as these people were giving him. But there was fear there too. They kept back from him, tense, trembling, as if in dread of some terrible power that he might unexpectedly unleash.

  Sheerin held his hands out to them imploringly. If only they’d stop prancing and chanting for a moment! The smell of the food cooking in the next room was making him wild. He caught one of the women by the arm, hoping to halt her long enough to appeal to her for a crust, a bowl of broth, anything. But she jumped away, hissing as though Sheerin had burned her with his touch, and rubbed frantically at the place on her arm where his fingers had briefly rested.

  “Please,” he said. “I don’t intend any harm. I’m as harmless as anyone there is, believe me.”

  “Harmless!” the leader cried, spitting the word out. “You? You, university? You’re worse than the Patrol. The Patrol just makes a little trouble for people. But you, you destroyed the world.”

  “I what?”

  “Be careful, Tasibar,” a woman said. “Get him out of here before he makes a magic on us.”

  “A magic?” Sheerin said. “Me?”

  They were pointing at him again, stabbing the air vehemently, terrifyingly. Some had begun to chant under their breaths, a low, fierce chant that had the rhythms of a motor steadily gaining speed and soon to spin out of control.

  The girl who wore only a pair of shorts said, “It was the university that called down the Darkness on us.”

  “And the Stars,” said the man who wore just a shirt. “They brought the Stars.”

  “And this one might bring them back,” said the woman who had spoken before. “Get him out of here! Get him out of here!”

  Sheerin stared incredulously. He told himself that he should have been able to predict this. It was an all too likely development: pathological suspicion of all scientists, all educated people, an unreasoning phobia that must be raging now like a virus among the survivors of the night of terror.

  “Do you think I can bring back the Stars with a snap of my fingers? Is that what’s frightening you?”

  “You are university,” the man called Tasibar said. “You knew the secrets. University brought the Darkness, yes. University brought the Stars. University brought doom.”

  It was too much.

  Bad enough to be dragged in here and forced to inhale the maddening flavor of that food without being allowed to have any of it. But to be blamed for the catastrophe—to be looked upon as some sort of malevolent witch by these people—

  Something snapped in Sheerin.

  Derisively he cried, “Is that what you believe? You idiots! You deranged superstitious fools! Blam
ing the university? We brought the Darkness? By all the gods, what stupidity! We were the very ones who tried to warn you!”

  He gestured angrily, clenching his fists, clashing them furiously together.

  “He’s going to bring them again, Tasibar! He’ll make it go dark on us! Stop him! Stop him!”

  Suddenly they were clustering all about him, closing in, reaching for him.

  Sheerin, standing in their midst, held out his hands helplessly, apologetically, toward them and did not try to move. He regretted having insulted them just now, not because it had endangered his life—they probably hadn’t even paid attention to the names he was calling them—but because he knew that the way they were was not their fault. If anything it was his fault, for not having tried harder to help them protect themselves against what he knew was coming. Those articles of Theremon’s—if only he had spoken with the newspaperman, if only he had urged him in time to change his mocking tack—

  Yes, he regretted that now.

  He regretted all sorts of things, things both done and undone. But it was much too late.

  Someone punched him. He gasped in surprise and pain.

  “Liliath—” he managed to cry.

  Then they swarmed all over him.

  [36]

  There were four suns in the sky: Onos, Dovim, Patru, Trey. Four-sun days were supposed to be lucky ones, Theremon remembered. And certainly this one was.

  Meat! Actual meat at last!

  What a glorious sight!

  It was food that he had obtained strictly by accident. But that was all right. The novel charms of outdoor life had been wearing thinner and thinner for him, the hungrier he got. By now he’d gladly take his meat any way it came, thank you very much.

  The forest was full of all sorts of wild animals, most of them small, very few of them dangerous, and all of them impossible to catch—at least with your bare hands. And Theremon knew nothing about making traps, nor did he have anything out of which he might have fashioned one.

  Those children’s tales about people lost in the woods who immediately set about adapting to life in the open, and turn instantly into capable hunters and builders of dwelling-places, were just that—fables. Theremon regarded himself as a reasonably competent man, as city-dwellers went; but he knew that he had no more chance of hunting down any of the forest animals than he did of making the municipal power generators start to work again. And as for building a dwelling-place, the best he had been able to do was throw together a simple lean-to of branches and twigs, which at least had kept most of the rain away from him on the one stormy day.

  But now the weather was warm and lovely again, and he had actual meat for dinner. The only problem now was cooking it. He was damned if he was going to eat it raw.

  Ironic that in a city that had just undergone near-total destruction by fire he should be pondering how he was going to go about cooking some meat. But most of the worst fires had burned themselves out by now, and the rain had taken care of the rest. And though for a while in the first few days after the catastrophe it had seemed as though new fires were still being lit, that didn’t seem to be happening any more.

  I’ll figure something out, Theremon thought. Rub two sticks together and get a spark? Strike metal against stone and set a scrap of cloth ablaze?

  Some boys on the far side of a lake near the place where he was camped had obligingly killed the animal for him. Of course, they hadn’t known they were doing him any favor—most likely they had been planning to eat it themselves, unless they were so unhinged that they were simply chasing the creature for the sake of sport. Somehow he doubted that. They had been pretty purposeful about it, with a singlemindedness that only hunger can inspire.

  The beast was a graben—one of those ugly long-nosed bluish-furred things with slithery hairless tails that sometimes could be seen poking around suburban garbage cans after Onos had set. Well, beauty wasn’t a requirement just now. The boys had somehow flushed it out of its daytime hiding place and had driven the poor stupid thing into a little dead-end box of a canyon.

  As Theremon watched from the other side of the lake, disgusted and envious at the same time, they chased it tirelessly up and down, pelting it with rocks. For a dumb scavenger it was remarkably agile, scooting swiftly this way and that in its desperation to elude its attackers. But finally a lucky shot caromed off its head and killed it instantly.

  He had assumed that they would devour it on the spot. But at that moment a shaggy, shambling figure came into view above them, standing for a moment at the rim of the little canyon, then beginning to climb down toward the lake.

  “Run! It’s Garpik the Slasher!” one of the boys yelled.

  “Garpik! Garpik!”

  In an instant the boys scattered, leaving the dead graben behind.

  Theremon, still watching, had slipped back into the shadows on his side of the lake. He also knew this Garpik, though not by name: one of the most dreaded of the forest-dwellers, a squat, almost ape-like man who wore nothing but a belt through which an assortment of knives was thrust. He was a killer without motive, a cheerful psychopath, a pure predator.

  Garpik stood by the mouth of the canyon for a while, humming to himself, fondling one of his knives. He didn’t seem to notice the dead animal, or didn’t care. Perhaps he was waiting for the boys to come back. But plainly they weren’t planning to do that, and after a time Garpik, with a shrug, went slouching off into the forest, most likely in search of something amusing to do with his weapons.

  Theremon waited an endless moment, making certain Garpik didn’t intend to double back and pounce on him.

  Then—when he could no longer bear the sight of the dead graben lying there on the ground, where some other human or animal predator might suddenly come along to seize it before he did—he rushed forward, circled the lake, snatched the animal up, carried it back to his hiding place.

  It weighed as much as a small child. It might be good for two or three meals—or more, if he could restrain his hunger and if the meat didn’t spoil too quickly.

  His head was spinning with hunger. He had had nothing but fruits and nuts to eat for more days than he could remember. His skin had drawn tight over his muscles and bones; what little spare fat he had been carrying he had long since absorbed, and now he was consuming his own strength in the struggle to stay alive. But this evening, at last, he would enjoy a little feast.

  Roast graben! What a treat! he thought bitterly. —And then he thought: Be grateful for small meroies, Theremon.

  Let’s see—to build a fire, now—

  Fuel, first. Behind his shelter was a flat wall of rock with a deep lateral crack in it, in which a line of weeds was growing. Plenty of them were long dead and withered, and had dried out since the last rainstorm. Quickly Theremon moved along the rock wall, plucking yellowed stems and leaves, assembling a little heap of straw-like material that would catch fire easily.

  Now some dry twigs. They were harder to find, but he rummaged around the forest floor, looking for dead shrubs or at least shrubs with dead branches. The afternoon was well along by the time he had put together enough of that sort of tinder to matter: Dovim was gone from the sky, and Trey and Patru, which had been low on the horizon when the boys were hunting the graben, now had moved into the center of things, like a pair of glittering eyes watching the sorry events on Kalgash from far overhead.

  Carefully Theremon arranged his kindling-wood above the dried plants, building a framework as he imagined a real outdoorsman would, the bigger branches along the outside, then the thinner ones crisscrossed over the middle. Not without some difficulty, he skewered the graben on a spit he had made of a sharp, reasonably straight stick, and positioned it a short distance above the woodpile.

  So far, so good. Just one little thing missing, now.

  Fire!

  He had kept his mind away from that problem while assembling his fuel, hoping that it would solve itself somehow without his having to dwell on it. But now it had to be f
aced. He needed a spark. The old boys’-book trick of rubbing two sticks together was, Theremon was certain, nothing but a myth. He had read that certain primitive tribes had once started their fires by twirling a stick against a board with a little hole in it, but he suspected that the process wasn’t all that simple, that it probably took an hour of patient twirling to get anything going. And in any case very likely you had to be initiated into the art by the old man of the tribe when you were a boy, or some such thing, or it wouldn’t work.

  Two rocks, though—was it possible to strike a spark by banging one against the other?

  He doubted that too. But he might as well try it, he thought. He had no other ideas. There was a wide flat stone lying nearby, and after a little searching he found a smaller triangular one that could fit conveniently in the palm of his hand. He knelt beside his little fireplace and began methodically to hit the flat one with the pointed one.

  Nothing in particular happened.

  A hopeless feeling began to grow in him. Here I am, he thought, a grown man who can read and write, who can drive a car, who can even operate a computer, more or less. I can turn out a newspaper column in two hours that everybody in Saro City will want to read, and I can do it day in, day out, for twenty years. But I can’t start a fire in the wilderness.

  On the other hand, he thought, I will not eat this graben raw unless I absolutely have to. Will not. Will not. Not. Not. Not!

  In fury he struck the stones together, again, again, again.

  Spark, damn you! Light! Burn! Cook this ridiculous pathetic animal for me!

  Again. Again. Again.

  “What are you doing there, mister?” an unfriendly voice asked suddenly from a point just behind his right shoulder.

  Theremon looked up, startled, dismayed. The first rule of survival in this forest was that you must never let yourself get so involved in anything that you failed to notice strangers sneaking up on you.