by Isaac Asimov
Then came the first of the series of columns in which he denounced the Observatory theories, questioned Athor’s sanity, compared the scientists’ prediction of the eclipse to the mad ravings of the Apostles of Flame.
Siferra didn’t believe it, at first. Was this some sort of joke? Beenay’s friend—her friend now, for that matter—attacking them so viciously?
A couple of months went by. The attacks continued. She didn’t hear from Theremon.
Finally she couldn’t remain silent any longer.
She called him at the newspaper office.
“Siferra! What a delight! Believe it or not, I was going to call you later this afternoon, to ask if you’d be interested in going to—”
“I wouldn’t,” she said. “Theremon, what are you doing?”
“Doing?”
“These columns about Athor and the Observatory.”
There was silence at the other end of the line for a long while.
Then he said, “Ah. You’re upset.”
“Upset? I’m livid!”
“You think I’ve been a little too harsh. Look, Siferra, when you write for a large audience of ordinary folks, some of them very ordinary, you’ve got to put things in black and white terms or run the risk of being misunderstood. I can’t simply say that I think Athor and Beenay are wrong. I’ve got to say that they’re nuts. Do you follow me?”
“Since when do you think they’re wrong? Does Beenay know how you feel?”
“Well—”
“You’ve been covering the story for months. Now you’ve turned around a hundred eighty degrees. To listen to you, one would think that everyone at the campus is a disciple of Mondior and that we’re all out of our minds besides. If you needed to find somebody to be the butt of your jokes, couldn’t you have looked somewhere else than the university?”
“These aren’t just jokes, Siferra,” Theremon said quietly.
“You believe what you’re writing?”
“I do. I honestly do. There isn’t going to be any cataclysm, that’s what I think. And here’s Athor pulling on the fire alarm in a crowded theater. By my jokes, my poking a little good-natured fun here and there, I’m trying to tell people that they don’t necessarily have to take him seriously—not to panic, not to get into an uproar—”
“What?” she cried. “But there is going to be a fire, Theremon! mon! And you’re playing a dangerous game with everyone’s welfare by your mockery. Listen to me: I’ve seen the ashes of past fires, fires thousands of years old. I know what’s going to happen. The Flames will come. I have no doubt about that whatsoever. You’ve seen the evidence too. And for you to take the position you’re taking now is the most destructive imaginable thing you could do, Theremon. It’s cruel and foolish and hateful. And utterly irresponsible.”
“Siferra—”
“I thought you were an intelligent man. I see now that you’re exactly like all the rest of them out there.”
“Sifer—”
She broke the contact.
And kept it broken, refusing to return any of his calls, until just a few weeks before the fateful day itself.
Early in the month of Theptar, Theremon called once more, and Siferra found herself on the line with him before she knew who it was.
“Don’t hang up,” he said quickly. “Just give me a minute.”
“I’d rather not.”
“Listen, Siferra. You can hate me all you like, but I want you to know this: I’m not cruel and I’m not foolish.”
“Whoever said you were?”
“You did, months ago, the last time we spoke. But it isn’t so. Everything I’ve written in my column about the eclipse has been there because I believe it.”
“Then you are foolish. Or stupid, at any rate. Which may be slightly different, but not any better.”
“I’ve looked at the evidence. I think you people have all been jumping to conclusions.”
She said coldly, “Well, we’ll all know whether that’s so on the nineteenth, won’t we?”
“I wish I could believe you, because you and Beenay and the rest of you are all such fine people, so obviously dedicated and brilliant and all. But I can’t. I’m a skeptic by nature. I have been all my life. I can’t accept any kind of dogma that other people want to sell me. It’s a serious flaw in my character, I suppose—it makes me seem frivolous. Maybe I am frivolous. But at least I’m honest. I simply don’t think there’ll be an eclipse, or madness, or fires.”
“It’s no dogma, Theremon. It’s a hypothesis.”
“That’s playing with words. I’m sorry if what I’ve written has offended you, but I can’t help it, Siferra.”
She was quiet a moment. Something in his voice had oddly moved her. She said at last, “Dogma, hypothesis, whatever it is, it’s going to be tested in a few weeks. I’ll be at the Observatory on the evening of the nineteenth. You come there too, and we’ll see which one of us is right.”
“But hasn’t Beenay told you? Athor’s declared me persona non grata at the Observatory!”
“Has that ever stopped you?”
“He refuses even to talk to me. You know, I have a proposal for him, something that could be of great help to him after the nineteenth when all this tremendous buildup misfires into whopping anticlimax and the world comes yelling for his skin, but Beenay says there’s no chance he’ll talk to me at all, let alone allow me to come in that evening.”
“Come as my guest. My date,” she said acidly. “Athor’ll be too busy to care. I want you to be in the room when the sky turns black and the fires start. I want to see the look on your face. I want to see if you’re as experienced at apologizing as you are at seduction, Theremon.”
[22]
That had been three weeks ago. Fleeing angrily from Theremon now, Siferra rushed to the far side of the room and caught sight of Athor, standing by himself, looking through a set of computer printouts. He was sadly turning the pages over and over and over as though he hoped to find a reprieve for the world buried somewhere in the dense columns. Then he looked up and saw her.
Color came to her face.
“Dr. Athor, I feel I ought to ask your pardon for inviting that man to be here this evening, after all he’s said about us, about you, about—” She shook her head. “I genuinely thought it would be instructive for him to be among us when—when—Well, I was wrong. He’s even more shallow and foolish than I imagined. I should never have told him to come.”
Wanly Athor said, “It scarcely is of any importance now, is it? So long as he keeps out of my way, I hardly care whether he’s here or not. A few more hours and then nothing will make any difference.” He pointed through the window, toward the sky. “So dark! So very dark! And yet not nearly as dark as it will be. —I wonder where Faro and Yimot are. You haven’t seen them, have you? No? —When you came in, Dr. Siferra, you said there’d been a last-minute problem at your office. Not a serious one, I hope.”
“The Thombo tablets have disappeared,” she said.
“Disappeared?”
“They were in the artifact safe, of course. Just before I left to come over here, Dr. Mudrin came to see me. He was on his way to the Sanctuary, but he wanted to check one last thing in his translation, one new notion he’d had. So we opened the safe, and—nothing. Gone, all six of them. We have copies, naturally. But still—the originals, the authentic ancient objects—”
“How can this have happened?” Athor asked.
Bitterly Siferra said, “Isn’t it obvious? The Apostles have stolen them. Probably to use as some kind of holy talismans, after the—the Darkness has come and done its work.”
“Are there any clues?”
“I’m no detective, Dr. Athor. There’s no evidence that would mean anything to me. But it had to be the Apostles. They’ve wanted them ever since they knew I had them. Oh, I wish I’d never said a word to them about them! I wish I’d never mentioned those tablets to anyone!”
Athor took her by the hands. “You mustn’t g
et so upset, my girl.”
My girl! She glared at him, astonished. No one had called her that in twenty-five years! But she choked back her anger. He was old, after all. And only trying to be kind.
He said, “Let them have them, Siferra. It makes no difference now. Thanks to that man over there, nothing makes any difference, does it?”
She shrugged. “I still hate the thought that some thief in an Apostle’s robe was sniffing around in my office—jimmying my safe—taking things that I had uncovered with my own hands. It’s like a violation of my body, almost. Can you understand that, Dr. Athor? To have been robbed of those tablets—it’s almost like a rape.”
“I know how upset you are,” Athor said, in a tone that indicated he didn’t really understand at all. “Look—look there. How bright Dovim is this evening! And in just a little while how dark everything will be.”
She managed a vague smile and turned away from him.
All about her, people were buzzing to and fro, checking this, discussing that, running to the window, pointing, murmuring. Now and then someone would come rushing in with some new data from the telescope dome. She felt like a complete outsider among these astronomers. And altogether bleak, altogether hopeless. Some of Athor’s fatalism must have rubbed off on me, she thought. He seemed so depressed, so lost. It wasn’t at all like him to be that way.
She wanted to remind him that it wasn’t the world that would end this evening, it was just the present cycle of civilization. They would rebuild. Those who had gone into hiding would come forth and start everything over, as had happened a dozen times before—or twenty, or a hundred—since the beginning of civilization on Kalgash.
But for her to tell Athor that would probably do no more good than for him to have told her not to worry about the loss of the tablets. He had hoped all the world would prepare itself against the catastrophe. And instead only a small fraction had paid any heed to the warning. Just those few who had gone to the university Sanctuary, and whatever other sanctuaries might have been set up elsewhere—
Beenay came over to her. “What’s this I hear from Athor? The tablets are gone?”
“Gone, yes. Stolen. I knew I never should have allowed myself to have any sort of contact with the Apostles.”
Beenay said, “You think they stole them?”
“I’m sure of it,” she said bitterly. “They sent word to me, after the existence of the Thombo tablets first became a matter of public knowledge, that they had information that would be of use to me. Didn’t I tell you? I guess not. What they wanted was a deal similar to the one Athor worked out with that high priest, or whatever he is: Folimun 66. ‘We have maintained a knowledge of the old language,’ Folimun said, ‘the language spoken in the previous Year of Godliness.’ And so they had, apparently—texts of some sort, dictionaries, alphabets of the old script, perhaps a lot more.”
“Which Athor was able to obtain from them?”
“Some of it. Enough, at any rate, to determine that the Apostles did have genuine astronomical records of the previous eclipse—enough, Athor said, to prove that the world had been through such a cataclysm at least once before.”
Athor, she went on to tell Beenay, had given her copies of the few astronomical text fragments he had received from Folimun, and she had shown them to Mudrin. Who indeed had found them valuable in his own translation of the tablets. But Siferra had balked at sharing her tablets with the Apostles, at least not on their terms. The Apostles claimed to be in possession of a key to the early clay-tablet script, and perhaps they were. Folimun had insisted, though, that she give him the actual tablets to be copied and translated, rather than his giving her the decoding material that he had. He wouldn’t settle for copies of the tablet texts. It had to be the original artifacts, or else no deal.
“But you drew the line at that,” Beenay said.
“Absolutely. The tablets mustn’t leave the university. ‘Give us the textual key,’ I said to Folimun, ‘and we’ll provide you with copies of the tablet texts. Then we can each attempt a translation.’ ”
But Folimun had refused. Copies of the texts were of no use to him, since they could all too easily be dismissed as forgeries. As for giving her his own documents, no, absolutely not. What he had, he said, was sacred material, which could only be made available to Apostles. Give him the tablets and he would provide translations of them for her. But no outsider was going to get a look at the texts already in his possession.
“I was actually tempted to join the Apostles for a moment,” Siferra said, “just for the sake of getting access to the key.”
“You? An Apostle?”
“Only to get their textual material. But the idea repelled me. I turned Folimun down.” And Mudrin had had to toil on at his translations without the help of whatever material the Apostles might have. It became apparent that the tablets did indeed seem to talk about some fiery doom that the gods had sent upon the world—but Mudrin’s translations were sketchy, hesitant, sparse.
Well, now the Apostles had the tablets anyway, more likely than not. That was hard to take. In the chaos ahead, they’d be waving those tablets around—her tablets—as still more evidence of their own wisdom and holiness.
“I’m sorry that your tablets are gone, Siferra,” Beenay said.
“But maybe there’s still a chance the Apostles didn’t steal them. That they’ll turn up somewhere.”
“I’m not counting on that,” said Siferra. And she smiled ruefully and turned away to stare at the darkening sky.
The best she could do by way of comfort was take Athor’s line: that the world was ending in a little while anyway, and nothing mattered very much. But that was cold comfort indeed. She fought inwardly against any such counsel of despair. The important thing was to keep on thinking of the day after tomorrow—of survival, of rebuilding, of the struggle and its fulfillment. It was no good to fall into despondency like Athor, to accept the downfall of humanity, to shrug and give up all hope.
A high tenor voice cut suddenly across her gloomy meditations.
“Hello, everybody! Hello, hello, hello!”
“Sheerin!” Beenay cried. “What are you doing here?”
The plump cheeks of the newcomer expanded in a pleased smile. “What’s this morgue-like atmosphere in here? No one’s losing their nerve, I hope.”
Athor started in consternation and said peevishly, “Yes, what are you doing here, Sheerin? I thought you were going to stay behind in the Sanctuary.”
Sheerin laughed and dropped his tubby figure into a chair. “Sanctuary be damned! The place bored me. I wanted to be here, where things are getting hot. Don’t you suppose I have my share of curiosity? I rode in the Tunnel of Mystery, after all. I can survive another dose of Darkness. And I want to see these Stars that the Apostles have been spouting about.” He rubbed his hands and added in a soberer tone, “It’s freezing outside. The wind’s enough to hang icicles on your nose. Dovim doesn’t seem to give any heat at all, at the distance it is this evening.”
The white-haired director ground his teeth in sudden exasperation. “Why do you go out of your way to do a crazy thing like this, Sheerin? What kind of good can you be around here?”
“What kind of good am I around there?” Sheerin spread his palms in comical resignation. “A psychologist isn’t worth a damn in the Sanctuary. Not now. Not a thing I could do for them. They’re all snug and safe, laced in underground, nothing to worry about.”
“And if a mob should break in during the Darkness?”
Sheerin laughed. “I very much doubt that anyone who didn’t know where the entrance was would be able to find the Sanctuary in broad daylight, let alone once the suns have gone out. But if they do, well, they’d need men of action to defend them. Me? I’m a hundred pounds too heavy for that. So why should I huddle in down there with them? I’d rather be here.”
Siferra felt her own spirits rise as she heard Sheerin’s words. She too had chosen to spend the evening of Darkness at the Observator
y, rather than in the Sanctuary. Perhaps it was mere wild bravado, perhaps it was idiotic overconfidence, but she was sure that she could last out the hours of the eclipse—and even the coming of the Stars, if there was anything to that part of the myth—and retain her sanity. And so she had decided not to pass up the experience.
Now it appeared that Sheerin, no model of bravery, had taken the same approach. Which might mean that he had decided the impact of Darkness would not be so overwhelming after all, despite the grim predictions he had been making for months. She had heard his tales of the Tunnel of Mystery and the havoc it had wreaked, even on Sheerin himself. Yet here he was. He must have come to believe that people, some at least, would turn out ultimately to be more resilient than he had expected earlier.
Or else he was simply being reckless. Perhaps he preferred to lose his mind in one quick burst this evening, Siferra thought, rather than stay sane and have to cope with the innumerable and perhaps insuperable problems of the hard times ahead—
No. No. She was falling into morbid pessimism again.
She brushed the thought away.
“Sheerin!” It was Theremon, coming across the room to greet the psychologist. “You remember me? Theremon 762?”
“Of course I do, Theremon,” Sheerin said. He offered his hand. “Gods, fellow, you’ve been rough on us lately, haven’t you! But bygones may as well be bygones this evening.”
“I wish he was a bygone,” Siferra muttered under her breath. She scowled in distaste and stepped back a few paces.
Theremon shook Sheerin’s hand. “What’s this Sanctuary you’re supposed to have been in? I’ve heard a little about it here this evening, but I don’t have any real idea of what it is.”