So it was, then, that when Asimov came to his story conference with John Campbell on March 17, 1941, the April issue of Astounding containing “Reason” was only three days from appearing on the newsstands, with “Liar!” due to follow in just one month.
If Asimov at this point could still look on himself as no more than a hopeful third-rater, this was because he had no way to appreciate the degree of importance his robot stories had for Campbell. The editor was bound to value these stories. More than any other work printed in the Golden Age Astounding, they visibly showed transcendent power responding to a set of explicitly stated operating principles.
But young Isaac Asimov had no basis as yet to perceive himself as a writer of bedrock modern science fiction—an exemplar of what the new Campbell Astounding was all about. The applause and recognition he would receive all lay in the future. In fact, Asimov tells us quite frankly:
In time to come, van Vogt, Heinlein, and I would be universally listed among the top authors of the Golden Age, but van Vogt and Heinlein were that from the very beginning. Each blazed forth as a first-magazine star at the moment his first story appeared, and their status never flagged throughout the remainder of the Golden Age. I, on the other hand (and this is not false modesty), came up only gradually. I was very little noticed for a while and came to be considered a major author by such gradual steps that despite the healthy helping of vanity with which I am blessed, I myself was the last to notice.419
“Nightfall” was the story that would first cause Asimov to be taken as a writer of significance. When Asimov came to the crucial story conference in March 1941 that resulted in “Nightfall,” he was right in the midst of his great leap from SF apprentice to master of modern science fiction.
Asimov may not have been consciously aware that he was in the middle of making this kind of shift at the moment that he was handed the crucial quotation from Emerson’s Nature and asked, “What do you think would happen, Asimov, if men were to see the stars for the first time in a thousand years?”
But Campbell most certainly did know what was happening to Asimov, and knew what he was doing in assigning him “Nightfall.” He may even have seen this plum of a story idea as a way to provide Asimov with an opportunity for self-recognition, the chance to wake to his own nature and discover that unbeknownst to himself he had become Isaac Asimov, master science fiction writer.
In the event, the youngster did make the most of his opportunity. Asimov sat right down to work on “Nightfall,” the writing went without a hitch, and early in April, only three weeks after their story conference, he turned in a 13,000-word novelet, the second-longest story he had ever attempted.
Campbell was thoroughly pleased with the story, asking only for minor revision to speed the opening. Not only did he offer Asimov hearty and unqualified praise for “Nightfall,” but this time he kicked in a twenty-five percent bonus.
Asimov’s story was placed in the lead spot of the September 1941 issue of Astounding, its advent heralded at length in the “In Times to Come” column in the preceding issue. And on the September cover, the climax of “Nightfall” was depicted in a particularly striking picture by Hubert Rogers.
For Isaac Asimov—who had grown up treating the SF magazines on sale in his father’s candy store with the utmost reverence, calculating the calendar of his life from one magazine on-sale date to the next, then reading each new magazine without breathing and putting it back on the newsstand without the slightest mar so that he could do it again the next time—it was all a dream come true, his fondest boyhood wish fulfilled. A lead story in Astounding!
And a cover by Rogers, too—that wasn’t bad. Through the heart of the Golden Age, from April 1940 until August 1942, it was Hubert Rogers who painted every Astounding cover. Rogers’ pictures—simple, clean-cut, modern and definite—captured and expressed the pure visual essence of Campbellian science fiction.
SF cover illustration of the Thirties had emphasized great cities and gigantic machines. People were either not visible or were tiny dots lost in immensity. Rogers’ Astounding covers moved men into the foreground of the future, portraying them as powerful and confident citizens of the world of tomorrow, masters of the mighty machines and cities.
However, the cover for “Nightfall” was not Rogers’ usual thing:
In this picture we are within a cavernous astronomical observatory dominated by a massive telescope. The aperture of the observatory dome gapes open, and in the slice of sky visible to us an overwhelming torrent of stars seems to tumble, cascade and. explode in a great showering display of cosmic fireworks. A man is running toward us, his eyes bright with fear, a torch in his hand newly extinguished and trailing smoke. Behind him, other men are frozen in postures of alarm and panic. And at the horizon, a city is on fire.
Here human mastery and control have collapsed. The heavens have opened wide, and the sky is falling.
The locus of Asimov’s story is the astronomical observatory of Saro University on the world of Lagash, a planet somewhere in time and space that has six suns in its sky. Four of these are named for us—Alpha, Beta, Gamma and Delta. (Presumably the two unnamed suns are Epsilon and Zeta.) Once in every two thousand forty-nine years, five suns set, while the remaining sun—Beta, a red dwarf—is eclipsed by a moon of Lagash that ordinarily cannot be seen. Then night falls on this perennially sunlit world, and the hidden stars shine forth.
This is the picture, at least, as it has been slowly and carefully pieced together by the scientists of Saro University, calling upon evidence and argument from a number of different fields of study. They may never have experienced the fall of night, they may not know what “the Stars”420 are, but they are ready to say that darkness and disaster are coming.
We are here at the observatory in the company of Theremon 762, a skeptical reporter who views the predicted eclipse as a failure of nerve by science, a capitulation to ancient nonsense and superstition. What the academics are proposing sounds to him and to many other people like the central myth of the Cultists, a remnant religious group.
This myth is summarized for us by Sheerin 501, a psychologist at the university:
“The Cultists said that every two thousand and fifty years Lagash entered a huge cave, so that all the suns disappeared, and there came total darkness all over the world! And then, they say, things called Stars appeared, which robbed men of their souls and left them unreasoning brutes, so that they destroyed the civilization they themselves had built up. Of course, they mix all this up with a lot of religio-mystic notions, but that’s the central idea.”421
For Theremon, it is the scientists of Saro University who have become mixed up by a lot of religio-mystic notions. And he is ready to face university director Aton 77 and tell him so:
“This is not the century to preach ‘the end of the world is at hand’ to Lagash. You have to understand that people don’t believe the ‘Book of Revelations’ any more, and it annoys them to have scientists turn about face and tell us the Cultists are right after all—”422
But Aton cuts him off to say:
“No such thing, young man. . . . While a great deal of our data has been supplied to us by the Cult, our results contain none of the Cult’s mysticism. Facts are facts, and the Cult’s so-called ‘mythology’ has certain facts behind it. We’ve exposed them and ripped away their mystery. I assure you that the Cult hates us now worse than you do.”423
So Theremon asks to be informed of the science that lies behind the scientists’ prediction of universal darkness and insanity. And in the hours before the great eclipse descends, psychologist Sheerin takes him aside for a drink and lays all the evidence out for him, bit by bit.
What a truly wonderful situation it is that we find ourselves in! Such is the power of modern science fiction to set forth any special case that it can actually locate and describe a planet like Lagash, with its six suns, its moon that is never directly seen, and its incredibly lopsided cycle of day and night.
But w
hat turns this unique situation into a marvel is that Lagash is also a near twin of contemporary Earth. Whatever can be the same in both places is the same.
Men are men on Lagash, with teeth and with toes and with Adam’s apples that bob when they swallow. Their blood is red, and they whistle and sweat and frown. They listen to the radio. They read the papers. For amusement, they ride the roller coaster. They work as photographers, astronomers, carpenters and electricians.
On Lagash, just as in 1941 America, liquor is poured from bottles and drunk in glasses, floors are covered by carpets, clothes have collars, time is reckoned in hours and minutes, and crazy people are trussed up in straitjackets and given injections of morphine to cool them out.
Even the current states of social development here and there are identical. On Lagash, a societal stage in which traditional religious belief was central has been superseded by a phase based upon rationality, science and technology—exactly as in the Twentieth Century Western culture which formed Isaac Asimov and for which he was writing this story.
There are certain differences between the two worlds. Perhaps because the people of Lagash live all their lives in a state of perpetual daylight, in the ordinary way of things they would appear to be a tad more rational than Earthmen have ever managed to be. At least they all have scientific-utopian zip-code names like Beenay 25 and Yimot 70, and apparently always have. Even a prophet in the ancient “Book of Revelations” was named Vendret 2.
But if the Lagashans are more regular-minded than we when the lights are on, they overcompensate for this by flying all to pieces when the lights go out. Sheerin tells Theremon about one particularly vivid example of the power of this phobia—a world exposition two years earlier where thrill-seekers were exposed to the Tunnel of Mystery, a fifteen-minute ride through total darkness. Most people were left breathless and trembling by this experience, but some were actually driven crazy or even outright frightened to death.
Sheerin provides Theremon with a sample of this disorienting alternate state by having him draw the curtains against the last ruddy light provided by the distant red dwarf, Beta. And sure enough, Theremon finds the darkness far more upsetting than he is willing to admit and is thoroughly relieved when the curtains are thrown open again.
The many parallels that exist between Lagash and Earth become all the more remarkable when we discover how very different Lagashan history actually is from our own. It seems that time and time again the Lagashans have worked themselves up to something like their present level of civilization, only to crash out.
This becomes one of the subjects expounded by Sheerin. He says:
“You realize, of course, that the history of civilization on Lagash displays a cyclic character—but I mean, cyclic!”
“I know,” replied Theremon cautiously, “that this is the current archaeological theory. Has it been accepted as a fact?”
“Just about. In this last century it’s been generally agreed upon. This cyclic character is—or rather, was—one of the great mysteries. We’ve located series of civilizations, nine of them definitely, and indications of others as well, all of which have reached heights comparable to our own, and all of which, without exception, were destroyed by fire at the very height of their culture.”424
The planet of Lagash must be the ultimate spawning ground of lost civilizations! Again and again and again these people build, they crash, they forget.
It seems that the Lagashans have been up and down, up and down forever like a yo-yo, each time putting the previous go-around out of mind completely, except for imperfect and distorted accounts like the one to be found in the “Book of Revelations.” Their Stone Age now lies so deeply buried in the past that they know nothing about it at all and even imagine that men of those distant days must have been little more than intelligent apes—which, if true, would certainly make the original establishment of civilization on Lagash all the more marvelous.
If anyone ever needed to escape from the eternal round of cyclical history, it surely must be these people. And because they have finally managed to apply the tools of modern science to the problem and figure out what has been happening to them, they may actually accomplish the feat this time.
In this world, the most novel and advanced concept of science is the Law of Universal Gravitation—so abstruse a subject that popular wisdom holds that only a dozen men on the whole planet are capable of understanding it. Sheerin tells Theremon—and us—about that, too:
“After Genovi 41 discovered that Lagash rotated about the sun Alpha, rather than vice versa—and that was four hundred years ago—astronomers have been working. The complex motions of the six suns were recorded and analyzed and unwoven. Theory after theory was advanced and checked and counterchecked and modified and abandoned and revived and converted to something else. . . . It was twenty years ago . . . that it was finally demonstrated that the Law of Universal Gravitation accounted exactly for the orbital motions of the six suns. it was a great triumph.”425
There is, however, one major exception to the perfection of this theory:
“In the last decade, the motions of Lagash about Alpha were computed according to gravity, and it did not account for the orbit observed; not even when all perturbations due to the other suns were included. Either the law was invalid, or there was another, as yet unknown, factor involved.426
It was Aton 77—an astronomer as well as a university director—who solved this particular mystery by calling upon certain data held by but not understood by the Cult. This new information has led him to theorize the existence of a moon of Lagash that is too dull to be seen in the brilliant wash of light from the six suns, but whose presence would account for the deviations in Lagash’s orbit. And in further leaps of insight, Aton has come to recognize that a satellite of the proper mass and distance and orbit to affect Lagash in exactly the right way would inevitably eclipse a lone Beta once in every two thousand forty-nine years. And also to realize that just such an epochal eclipse is due now.
If we add all these various elements of mystery together—the mystery of the periodic event described in the “Book of Revelations”; the mystery of darkness and its destabilizing effect on the Lagashan psyche; the mystery of one civilization after another inevitably destroyed at its height by fire; and the mystery of the invisible moon of Lagash—we begin to see the picture that Sheerin is drawing for Theremon.
Sheerin summarizes it like this: “ ‘First the eclipse—which will start in three quarters of an hour—then universal Darkness, and, maybe these mysterious Stars—then madness, and end of the cycle.’ ”427 If Aton and Sheerin and the other scientists are correct, then just one mystery remains to be unveiled: the actual nature of the Stars. And one member of the observatory staff has a speculation to offer on that score, too. He suggests that these unknown whatever-they-ares just might be other suns too distant to be detected by their gravitational effects. Perhaps as many as a dozen or even two dozen such suns. Maybe as far away from Lagash as four light years.
This great speculative leap captures the imagination of Theremon the reporter. He can’t help blurting out, “ ‘What an idea for a good Sunday supplement article. Two dozen suns in a universe eight light years across. Wow! That would shrink our universe into insignificance. The readers would eat it up.’ ”428
But Theremon may never have his chance to print all the juicy stuff he has been told. The hour for good Sunday supplement articles may be past and not return again for a couple of thousand years.
Already the outline of Beta has begun to be chipped away by blackness, and at the sight, Theremon grows pale and trembles. There can be no question now about the existence of that invisible moon or about the true meaning of the mumbo-jumbo in the “Book of Revelations.” Soon the mysterious Stars will become visible and then there will be no need for speculations.
Here is the climactic moment of total eclipse as Theremon experiences it:
With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on on
e arm and turned his eyes toward the blood-curdling blackness of the window.
Through it shone the Stars!
Not Earth’s feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye—Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shown down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.429
This last paragraph—with its apt but almost certainly unintended pun of “shown” for “shone”—was an interpolation by John Campbell. And even though Asimov would retain the paragraph in all later reprintings of “Nightfall,” he would never really be happy about it. Not only isn’t it written in that cool, unadorned style that Asimov had worked so hard to cultivate, but it makes explicit mention of Earth, which Asimov had been at particular pains throughout the story not to do.
Asimov would be half-right in having negative feelings about this; no caring writer ever enjoys having his work tampered with. But he would also be half-wrong.
It is true that Earth is nowhere else mentioned directly in this story, but as we have already seen and will see further, its existence is certainly reflected everywhere. So this flaw, if it is one, may be relatively minor.
And if the paragraph isn’t written in Asimov’s own usual style it also may be that a cool and unadorned modern style wasn’t appropriate or adequate to express this moment of cosmic breakthrough. “Nightfall” is simultaneously an old-time scientifiction story and a story of modern science fiction. But Isaac Asimov was by now so much the modern science fiction writer that the old purple-tinged scientifictional manner didn’t come easily to him, even when a touch of emoting was called for.
The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence Page 46
