Nightfall

by Isaac Asimov

  The mob! Sheerin shuddered at the recollection.

  The rotund psychologist knew that he would never forget the moment when that mob had come bursting into the Observatory. It would haunt him as long as he lived—those twisted, distorted faces, those berserk eyes, those howling cries of rage. These were people who had lost their fragile grip on sanity even before the totality of the eclipse. The deepening Darkness had been enough to push them over the edge—that, and the skillful rabble-rousing of the Apostles of Flame, triumphant now in their moment of fulfilled prophecy. So the mob had come, by the thousands, to root out the despised scientists in their lair; and there they were, now, rushing in, waving torches, clubs, brooms, anything at all with which they could hit, smash, ruin.

  Paradoxically enough, it was the coming of the mob that had jolted Sheerin into being able to get a grip on himself. He had had a bad moment, back there when he and Theremon first went downstairs to barricade the doors. He had felt all right, even strangely buoyant, on the way down; but then the first reality of the Darkness had hit him, like a whiff of poison gas, and he had folded up completely. Sitting huddled up there on the stairs, cold with panic, remembering his trip through the Tunnel of Mystery and realizing that this time the trip would last not only a few minutes but for hour upon intolerable hour.

  Well, Theremon had pulled him out of that one, and Sheerin had recovered some of his self-control as they returned to the upper level of the Observatory. But then came totality—and the Stars. Though Sheerin had turned his head away when that ungodly blast of light first came bursting through the opening in the Observatory roof, he had not been able completely to avoid the shattering sight of it. And for an instant he could feel his mind’s grip giving way—could feel the delicate thread of sanity beginning to sunder—

  But then had come the mob, and Sheerin knew that the issue wasn’t simply one of preserving his sanity, any more. It was one of saving his life. If he wanted to survive this night he had no choice but to hold himself together and find a place of safety. Gone was his naive plan to observe the Darkness phenomena like the aloof, dispassionate scientist he pretended to be. Let someone else observe the Darkness phenomena. He was going to hide.

  And so, somehow, he had made his way to the basement level, to that cheery little storeroom with its cheery little god-light casting a feeble but very comforting glow. And bolted the door, and waited it out.

  He had even slept, a little.

  And now it was morning. Or perhaps afternoon, for all he knew. One thing was certain: the terrible night was over, and everything was calm, at least in the vicinity of the Observatory. Sheerin tiptoed into the hall, paused, listened, started warily up the stairs.

  Silence everywhere. Puddles of dirty water, from the sprinklers. The foul reek of old smoke.

  He halted on the stairway and thoughtfully removed a firehatchet from a bracket on the wall. He doubted very much that he could ever bring himself to use a hatchet on another living thing; but it might be a useful thing to be carrying, if conditions outside were as anarchic as he expected to find them.

  Up to the ground floor, now. Sheerin pulled the basement door open—the same door that he had slammed behind him in his frenzied downward flight the evening before—and looked out.

  The sight that greeted him was horrifying.

  The great hall of the Observatory was full of people, all scrambled together on the floor, sprawled every which way, as though some colossal drunken orgy had been going on all night. But these people weren’t drunk. Many of them lay twisted in ghastly impossible angles that only a corpse could have adopted. Others lay flat, stacked like discarded carpets in heaps two or three people high. They too seemed dead, or lost in the last unconsciousness of life. Still others were plainly alive, but sat whimpering and mewling like shattered things.

  Everything that once had been on display in the great hall, the scientific instruments, the portraits of the great early astronomers, the elaborate astronomical charts, had been pulled down and burned or simply pulled apart and trampled. Sheerin could see the charred and battered remains jutting up here and there amidst the crush of bodies.

  The main door was open. The warm and heartening glow of sunlight was visible beyond.

  Carefully Sheerin picked his way through the chaos toward the exit.

  “Dr. Sheerin?” a voice said suddenly, unexpectedly.

  He whirled, brandishing his hatchet so fiercely that he came close to laughing at his own feigned belligerence.

  “Who’s there?”

  “Me. Yimot.”

  “Who?”

  “Yimot. You remember me, don’t you?”

  “Yimot, yes.” The gangling, gawky young graduate astronomy student from some backwoods province. Sheerin saw the boy now, half hidden in an alcove. His face was blackened with ashes and soot and his clothing was torn, and he looked stunned and shaken, but he seemed otherwise to be all right. As he came forward, in fact, he moved in a far less comical way than usual, none of his jerky mannerisms, no wild swings of his arms or twitches of his head. Terror does strange things to people, Sheerin told himself. —“Have you been hiding here all through the night?”

  “I tried to get out of the building when the Stars came, but I got jammed up in here. Have you seen Faro, Dr. Sheerin?”

  “Your friend? No. I haven’t seen anyone.”

  “We were together for a while. But then, with all the shoving and pushing, things got so wild—” Yimot managed an odd smile. “I thought they would burn the building down. But then the sprinklers came on.” He pointed at the townspeople who lay all around. —“Are they all dead, do you think?”

  “Some of them are just insane. They saw the Stars.”

  “I did too, just for a moment,” Yimot said. “Just for a moment.”

  “What were they like?” Sheerin asked.

  “You didn’t see them, Doctor? Or is it that you just don’t remember?”

  “I was in the basement. Nice and snug.”

  Yimot craned his long neck upward as though the Stars were still blazing in the ceiling of the hallway. “They were—awesome,” he whispered. “I know that doesn’t tell you anything, but that’s the only word I can use. I saw them only for two seconds, maybe three, and I could feel my mind spinning, I could feel the top of my head starting to lift off, so I looked away. Because I’m not very brave, Dr. Sheerin.”

  “No. Neither am I.”

  “But I’m glad I had those two or three seconds. The Stars are very frightening, but they’re also very beautiful. At least to an astronomer they are. They were nothing at all like those silly little pinpricks of light that Faro and I created in that stupid experiment of ours. We must be right in the middle of an immense cluster of them, you know. We have our six suns in a tight group close by us—some of them closer than others, I mean—and then farther back, five or ten light-years back, or more, there’s this whole giant sphere of Stars, which are suns, thousands of suns, a tremendous globe of suns completely enclosing us, but invisible to us normally because of the light of our own suns shining all the time. Just as Beenay said. Beenay’s a wonderful astronomer, you know. He’ll be greater than Dr. Athor some day. —You didn’t see the Stars at all?”

  “Just the merest quick glimpse,” said Sheerin, a little sadly. “Then I went and hid. —Look, boy, we’ve got to get ourselves out of this place.”

  “I’d like to try to find Faro first.”

  “If he’s all right, he’s outside. If he isn’t, there’s nothing you can do for him.”

  “But if he’s underneath one of those heaps—”

  “No,” Sheerin said. “You can’t go poking around those people. They’re all still stunned, but if you provoke them there’s no telling what they’ll do. The safest thing is to get out of here. I’m going to try to make it to the Sanctuary. If you’re smart, you’ll come with me.”

  “But Faro—”

  “Very well,” Sheerin said, with a sigh. “Let’s look for Faro. Or
Beenay, or Athor, or Theremon, any of the others.”

  But it was hopeless. For perhaps ten minutes they picked through the heaps of dead and unconscious and semi-conscious people in the hallway; but none of them were university people. Their faces were appalling, horribly distorted by fear and madness. Some stirred when they were disturbed, and began to froth and mutter in a horrifying way. One snatched at Sheerin’s hatchet, and Sheerin had to use the butt end to push him away. It was impossible to ascend the stairs to the upper levels of the building; the staircase was blocked by bodies, and there was broken plaster everywhere. Pools of muddy water had collected on the floor. The harsh, piercing smell of smoke was intolerable.

  “You’re right,” Yimot said finally. “We’d better go.”

  Sheerin led the way, stepping out into the sunlight. After the hours that had just passed, golden Onos was the most welcome sight in the universe, though the psychologist found his eyes unaccustomed to so much bright light after the long hours of Darkness. It hit him with almost tangible force. For a few moments after he emerged he stood blinking, waiting for his eyes to readapt. After a time he was able to see, and gasped at what he saw.

  “How awful,” Yimot murmured.

  More bodies. Madmen wandering in circles, singing to themselves. Burned-out vehicles by the side of the road. The shrubbery and trees hacked up as though by blind monstrous forces. And, off in the distance, a ghastly pall of brown smoke rising above the spires of Saro City.

  Chaos, chaos, chaos.

  “So this is what the end of the world looks like,” Sheerin said quietly. “And here we are, you and I. Survivors.” He laughed bitterly. “What a pair we are. I’m carrying a hundred pounds too many around my middle and you’ve got a hundred pounds too few. But we’re still here. I wonder if Theremon made it out of there alive. If anyone did, he would have. But I wouldn’t have bet very much on you or me. —The Sanctuary’s midway between Saro City and the Observatory. We ought to be able to walk it in half an hour or so, if we don’t get into any trouble. Here, take this.”

  He scooped up a thick gray billy-club that was lying beside one of the fallen rioters and tossed it to Yimot, who caught it clumsily and stared at it as though he had no idea what it might be.

  “What will I do with it?” he asked finally.

  Sheerin said, “Pretend that you’ll use it to bash in the skull of anybody that bothers us. Just as I’m pretending that I’d use this hatchet if I needed to defend myself. And if necessary I will. It’s a new world out here, Yimot. Come on. And keep your wits about you as we go.”

  [30]

  The Darkness was still upon the world, the Stars still were flooding Kalgash with their diabolical rivers of light, when Siferra 89 came stumbling out of the gutted Observatory building. But the faint pink glow of dawn was showing on the eastern horizon, the first hopeful sign that the suns might be returning to the heavens.

  She stood on the Observatory lawn, legs far apart, head thrown back, pulling breath deep down into her lungs.

  Her mind was numb. She had no idea how many hours had passed since the sky had turned dark and the Stars had erupted into view like the blast of a million trumpets. All the night long she had wandered the corridors of the Observatory in a daze, unable to find her way out, struggling with the madmen who swarmed about her on all sides. That she had gone mad too was not something she stopped to think about. The only thing on her mind was survival: beating back the hands that clutched at her; parrying the swinging clubs with blows of the club that she herself had snatched up from a fallen man; avoiding the screaming, surging stampedes of maniacs who rumbled arm in arm in groups of six or eight through the hallways, trampling everyone in their way.

  It seemed to her that there were a million townsfolk loose in the Observatory. Wherever she turned she saw distended faces, bulging eyes, gaping mouths, lolling tongues, fingers crooked into monstrous claws.

  They were smashing everything. She had no idea where Beenay was, or Theremon. She vaguely remembered seeing Athor in the midst of ten or twenty bellowing hoodlums, his thick mane of white hair rising above them—and then seeing him go down, swept under and out of sight.

  Beyond that Siferra remembered nothing very clearly. For the whole duration of the eclipse she had run back and forth, up one hallway and down the other like a rat caught in a maze. She had never really been familiar with the layout of the Observatory, but getting out of the building should not have been that difficult for her—if she had been sane. Now, though, with the Stars blazing relentlessly at her out of every window, it was as if an icepick had been driven through her brain. She could not think. She could not think. She could not think. All she could do was run this way and that, shoving leering gibbering fools aside, shouldering her way through clotted gangs of ragged strangers, searching desperately and ineffectually and futilely for one of the main exits. And so it went, for hour after hour, as though she were caught in a dream that would not end.

  Now, at last, she was outside. She didn’t know how she had gotten there. Suddenly there had been a door in front of her, at the end of a corridor that she was sure she had traversed a thousand times before. She pushed and it yielded and a cool blast of fresh air struck her, and she staggered through.

  The city was burning. She saw the flames far away, a bright furious red stain against the dark background of sky.

  She heard screams, sobs, wild laughter from all sides.

  Below her, a little way down the hillside, some men were mindlessly pulling down a tree—tugging at its branches, straining fiercely, ripping its roots loose from the ground by sheer force. She couldn’t guess why. Probably neither could they.

  In the Observatory parking lot, other men were tipping cars over. Siferra wondered whether one of those cars might be hers. She couldn’t remember. She couldn’t remember very much at all. Remembering her name was something of an effort.

  “Siferra,” she said aloud. “Siferra 89. Siferra 89.”

  She liked the sound of that. It was a good name. It had been her mother’s name—or her grandmother’s, perhaps. She wasn’t really sure.

  “Siferra 89,” she said again. “I am Siferra 89.”

  She tried to remember her address. No. A jumble of meaningless numbers.

  “Look at the Stars!” a woman screamed, rushing past her. “Look at the Stars and die!”

  “No,” Siferra replied calmly. “Why should I want to die?”

  But she looked at the Stars all the same. She was almost getting used to the sight of them now. They were like very bright lights—very bright—so close together in the sky that they seemed to merge, to form a single mass of brilliance, like a kind of shining cloak that had been draped across the heavens. When she looked for more than a second or two at a time she thought she could make out individual points of light, brighter than those around them, pulsing with a bizarre vigor. But the best that she could manage was to look for five or six seconds; then the force of all that pulsating light would overwhelm her, making her scalp tingle and her face turn burning hot, and she would have to lower her head and rub her fingers against the fiery, throbbing, angry place of pain between her eyes.

  She walked through the parking lot, ignoring the frenzy going on all about her, and emerged on the far side, where a paved road led along a level ridge on the flank of Observatory Mount. From some still-functioning region of her mind came the information that this was the road from the Observatory to the main part of the university campus. Up ahead, Siferra could see some of the taller buildings of the university now.

  Flames were dancing on the roofs of some of them. The bell tower was burning, and the theater, and the Hall of Student Records.

  You ought to save the tablets, said a voice within her mind that she recognized as her own.

  Tablets? What tablets?

  The Thombo tablets.

  Oh. Yes, of course. She was an archaeologist, wasn’t she? Yes. Yes. And what archaeologists did was dig for ancient things. She had been digg
ing in a place far away. Sagimot? Beklikan? Something like that. And had found tablets, prehistoric texts. Ancient things, archaeological things. Very important things. In a place called Thombo.

  How am I doing? she asked herself.

  And the answer came: You’re doing fine.

  She smiled. She was feeling better moment by moment. It was the pink light of dawn on the horizon that was healing her, she thought. The morning was coming: the sun, Onos, entering the sky. As Onos rose, the Stars became less bright, less terrifying. They were fading fast. Already those in the east were dimmed by Onos’s gathering strength. Even at the opposite end of the sky, where Darkness still reigned and the Stars thronged like minnows in a pool, some of the intensity was starting to go from their formidable gleam. She could look at the sky for several moments at a stretch now without feeling her head begin to throb painfully. And she was feeling less confused. She remembered clearly now where she lived, and where she worked, and what she had been doing the evening before.

  At the Observatory—with her friends, the astronomers, who had predicted the eclipse—

  The eclipse—

  That was what she had been doing, she realized. Waiting for the eclipse. For the Darkness. For the Stars.

  Yes. For the Flames, Siferra thought. And there they were. Everything had happened right on schedule. The world was burning, as it had burned so many times before—set ablaze not by the hand of the gods, nor by the power of the Stars, but by ordinary men and women, Star-crazed, cast into a desperate panic that urged them to restore the normal light of day by any means they could find.

  Despite the chaos all around her, though, she remained calm. Her injured mind, numbed, all but stupefied, was unable to respond fully to the cataclysm that Darkness had brought. She walked on and on, down the road, into the main quadrangle of the campus, past scenes of horrifying devastation and destruction, and felt no shock, no regret for what had been lost, no fear of the difficult times that must lie ahead. Not enough of her mind was restored yet for such feelings. She was a pure observer, tranquil, detached. The blazing building over there, she knew, was the new university library that she had helped to plan. But the sight of it stirred no emotion in her. She could just as well have been walking through some two-thousand-year-old site whose doom was a cut-and-dried matter of historical record. It would never have occurred to her to weep for a two-thousand-year-old ruin. It did not occur to her to weep now, as the university went up in flames all around her.