by Isaac Asimov
A small bonfire was burning just to the left of the door. Beside it was a pile of chopped logs, elaborately stacked, every piece of wood very neatly arranged according to size with astonishing precision and care. It looked more like some sort of meticulous architect’s model than like a woodpile.
A sickening sense of fear and disorientation swept over her. What was this place? Was it really the Sanctuary? Who were these people?
“Stay right where you are,” said the man at the front of the group. He spoke quietly, but there was whip-snapping authority in his tone. “Put your hands in the air.”
He held a small sleek needle-gun in his hand. It was pointing straight at her midsection.
Siferra obeyed without a word.
He appeared to be about fifty years old, a strong, commanding figure, almost certainly the leader here. His clothing looked costly and his manner was poised and confident. The green neckerchief he wore had the sheen of fine silk.
“Who are you?” he asked calmly, keeping the weapon trained on her.
“Siferra 89, Professor of Archaeology, Saro University.”
“That’s nice. Are you planning to do any archaeology around here, Professor?”
The others laughed as though he had said something very, very funny.
Siferra said, “I’m trying to find the university Sanctuary. Can you tell me where it is?”
“I think this might have been it,” the man replied. “The university people all cleared out of here a few days back. This is Fire Patrol headquarters now. —Tell me, are you carrying any combustibles, Professor?”
“Combustibles?”
“Matches, lighter, a pocket generator, anything that could be used to start a fire.”
She shook her head. “Not any of those things.”
“Fire-starting’s prohibited under Article One of the Emergency Code. If you’re in violation of Article One the punishment is severe.”
Siferra stared at him blankly. What was he talking about?
A thin, sallow-faced man standing beside the leader said, “I don’t trust her, Altinol. It was those professors that started all this. Two to one she’s got something hidden away in her clothes, out of sight somewhere.”
“I have no fire-making equipment anywhere on me,” Siferra said, irritated.
Altinol nodded. “Perhaps. Perhaps not. We won’t take the chance, Professor. Strip.”
She stared at him, startled. “What did you say?”
“Strip. Remove your clothes. Demonstrate that you have no concealed illegal devices anywhere on your person.”
Siferra hefted her club, rubbing her hand uneasily along its shaft. Blinking in astonishment, she said, “Hold on, here. You can’t be serious.”
“Article Two of the Emergency Code, Fire Patrol may take any precaution deemed necessary to prevent unauthorized fire-starting. Article Three, this may include immediate and summary execution of those who resist Fire Patrol authority. Strip, Professor, and do it quickly.”
He gestured with the needle-gun. It was a very serious-looking gesture.
But still she stared at him, still she made no move to remove her garments. “Who are you? What’s this Fire Patrol stuff all about?”
“Citizen vigilantes, Professor. We’re attempting to restore law and order in Saro after the Breakdown. The city’s been pretty much destroyed, you know. Or maybe you don’t. The fires are continuing to spread, and there’s no functioning fire department to do anything about it any more. And maybe you haven’t noticed, but the whole province is full of crazy people who think we haven’t quite had enough fires yet as it is, so they’re starting even more. That can’t go on. We intend to stop the starters by any means available. You are under suspicion of possessing combustibles. The accusation has been placed and you have sixty seconds to clear yourself of the charge. If I were you, I’d start getting my clothes off, Professor.”
Siferra could see him silently counting off the seconds.
Strip, in front of a dozen strangers? A red haze of fury surged through her at the thought of the indignity. Most of these people were men. They weren’t even bothering to hide their impatience. This wasn’t any sort of security precaution, despite Altinol’s solemn citing of an Emergency Code. They just wanted to see what her body looked like, and they had the power to make her submit. It was intolerable.
But then, after a moment, she found her indignation beginning to slip away.
What did it matter? Siferra asked herself wearily. The world had ended. Modesty was a luxury that only civilized people indulged in, and civilization was an obsolete concept.
In any case this was a blunt order, at gunpoint. She had wandered into a remote, isolated place far down a country road. No one was going to come to her rescue here. The clock was ticking. And Altinol didn’t seem to be bluffing.
It wasn’t worth dying just for the sake of concealing her body from them.
She tossed her club to the ground.
Then, in cold anger but without permitting herself to make any outward show of rage, she began methodically to peel away her garments and drop them down beside it.
“My underwear too?” she asked sardonically.
“Everything.”
“Does it look as if I’ve got a lighter hidden in here?”
“You’ve got twenty seconds left, Professor.”
Siferra glowered at him and finished undressing without another word.
It was surprisingly easy, now that she had done it, to stand naked in front of these strangers. She didn’t care. That was the essential thing that came with the end of the world, she realized. She didn’t care. She pulled herself up to her full imposing height and stood there, almost defiantly revealed, waiting to see what they’d do next. Altinol’s eyes traveled over her body in an easy, self-assured way. Somehow she found herself not even caring about that. A kind of burned-out indifference had come over her.
“Very nice, Professor,” he said finally.
“Thank you.” Her tone was icy. “May I cover myself now?”
He waved grandly. “Of course. Sorry for the inconvenience. But we had to be absolutely sure.” He slipped the needle-gun into a band at his waist and stood with his arms folded, casually watching her as she dressed. Then he said, “You must think you’ve fallen in among savages, isn’t that so, Professor?”
“Does what I think really interest you?”
“You’ll notice that we didn’t leer or drool or wet our clothes while you were—ah—demonstrating that you had no concealed fire-making apparatus. Nor did anyone attempt to molest you in any way.”
“That was extremely kind.”
Altinol said, “I point these things out, even though I realize it’s not likely to make much difference to you while you’re still this angry at us, because I want you to know that what you’ve stumbled across here may in fact be the last remaining bastion of civilization in this godforsaken world. I don’t know where our beloved governmental leaders have disappeared to, and I certainly don’t consider our cherished brethren of the Apostles of Flame to be in any way civilized, and your university friends who used to be hidden out here have picked up and gone away. Just about everybody else seems to be clear out of his mind. Except, that is, for you and us, Professor.”
“How flattering of you to include me.”
“I never flatter anybody. You give an appearance of having withstood the Darkness and the Stars and the Breakdown better than most. What I want to know is whether you’re interested in staying here and becoming part of our group. We need people like you, Professor.”
“What does that mean? Scrub floors for you? Cook soup?”
Altinol seemed impervious to her sarcasms. “I mean helping in the struggle to keep civilization alive, Professor. Not to sound too high-pitched about it, but we see ourselves as having a holy mission. Day after day we are making our way through that madhouse out there, disarming the crazies, taking the fire-making apparatus away from them, reserving to ourselves exclusi
vely the right to light fires. We can’t put out the fires that are already burning, at least not yet, but we can do our best to keep new ones from being lit. That’s our mission, Professor. We are taking control of the concept of fire. It’s the first step toward making the world fit to live in again. You seem sane enough to join us and therefore I invite you in. What do you say, Professor? Do you want to be part of the Fire Patrol? Or would you rather try your luck back there in the forest?”
[35]
The morning was misty and cool. Thick swirls of fog blew through the ruined streets, fog so heavy that Sheerin was unable to tell which suns were in the sky. Onos, certainly—somewhere. But its golden light was diffused and almost completely concealed by the fog. And that patch of slightly brighter sky off to the southwest very likely indicated the presence of one of the pairs of twin suns, but whether they were Sitha and Tano or Patru and Trey he had no way of discerning.
He was very tired It was already abundantly clear to him that his notion of making his way alone and on foot across the hundreds of miles between Saro City and Amgando National Park was an absurd fantasy.
Damn Theremon! Together, at least, they might have stood a chance. But the newspaperman had been unshakable in his confidence that he would somehow find Siferra in the forest. Talk about fantasy! Talk about absurdity!
Sheerin stared ahead, peering through the fog. He needed a place to rest for a while. He needed to find something fit to eat, and perhaps a change of clothing, or at least a way of bathing himself. He had never been this filthy in his life. Or as hungry. Or as weary. Or as despondent.
Through the whole long episode of the coming of the Darkness, from the first moment that he had heard from Beenay and Athor that such a thing was likely, Sheerin had bounced around from one end of the psychological spectrum to the other, from pessimism to optimism and back again, from hope to despair to hope. His intelligence and experience told him one thing, his naturally resilient personality told him another.
Perhaps Beenay and Athor were wrong and the astronomical cataclysm wouldn’t happen at all.
No, the cataclysm will definitely happen.
Darkness, despite his own disturbing experiences with it at the Tunnel of Mystery two years before, would turn out not to be such a troublesome thing after all, if indeed it did come.
Wrong. Darkness will cause universal madness.
The madness would be only temporary, a brief period of disorientation.
The madness will be permanent, in most people.
The world would be disrupted for a few hours and then go back to normal.
The world will be destroyed in the chaos following the eclipse.
Back and forth, back and forth, up and down, up and down. Twin Sheerins, locked in endless debate.
But now he had hit the bottom of the cycle and he seemed to be staying there, unmoving and miserable. His resilience and optimism had evaporated in the glare of what he had seen during his wanderings these past few days. It would be decades, possibly even a century or more, before things returned to normal. The mental trauma had scored too deep a scar, the destruction that had already occurred to the fabric of society was too widespread. The world he had loved had been vanquished by Darkness and smashed beyond repair. That was his professional opinion and he could see no reason to doubt it.
This was the third day, now, since Sheerin had parted from Theremon in the forest and gone marching off, in his usual jaunty fashion, toward Amgando. That jauntiness was hard to recapture now. He had managed to get out of the forest in one piece—there had been a couple of bad moments, times when he had had to wave his hatchet around and look menacing and lethal, a total bluff on his part, but it had worked—and for the last day or so he had been moving in a plodding way through the once-pleasant southern suburbs.
Everything was burned out around here. Entire neighborhoods had been destroyed and abandoned. Many of the buildings were still smoldering.
The main highway running to the southern provinces, Sheerin had believed, began just a few miles below the park—a couple of minutes’ drive, if you were driving. But he wasn’t driving. He had had to make the horrendous climb up out of the forest to the imposing hill that was Onos Heights practically on hands and knees, clawing his way through the underbrush. It took him half a day just to ascend those few hundred yards.
Once he was on top, Sheerin saw that the hill was more like a plateau—but it stretched on endlessly before him, and though he walked and walked and walked he did not come to the highway.
Was he going the right way?
Yes. Yes, from time to time he saw a road sign at a street corner that told him he was indeed heading toward the Great Southern Highway. How far was it, though? The signs didn’t say. Every ten or twelve blocks there was another sign, that was all. He kept going. He had no choice.
But reaching the highway was only the first step in getting to Amgando. He would still be in Saro City, essentially, at that point. Then what? Keep on walking? What else? He could hardly hitch a ride with someone. No vehicles seemed to be running anywhere. The public fuel stations must have gone dry days ago, those that had not been burned. How long was it likely to take him, at this pace, to get down to Amgando on foot? Weeks? Months? No—it would take him forever. He’d be dead of starvation long before he came anywhere near the place.
Even so, he had to go on. Without a sense of purpose, he was finished right now, and he knew it.
Something like a week had passed since the eclipse, maybe more. He was beginning to lose track of time. He neither ate regularly nor slept regularly any more, and Sheerin had always been a man of the most punctual habits. Suns came and went in the sky, now, the light brightened or dimmed, the air grew warmer or grew cooler, and time passed: but without the progression of breakfast, lunch, dinner, sleep, Sheerin had no idea of how it was passing. He knew only that he was rapidly running out of strength.
He hadn’t eaten properly since the coming of the Nightfall. From that dark moment onward, it had been scraps and shards for him, nothing more—a bit of fruit from some tree when he could find it, any unripe seeds that didn’t look as though they’d be poisonous, blades of grass, anything. It wasn’t making him sick, somehow, but it wasn’t sustaining him very well, either. The nutritional content must have been close to zero. His clothes, worn and tattered, hung from him like a shroud. He didn’t dare look underneath them. He imagined that his skin must lie now in loose folds over his jutting bones. His throat was dry all the time, his tongue seemed swollen, there was a frightful pounding behind his eyes. And that dull, numb, hollow sensation in his gut, all the time.
Well, he told himself in his more cheerful moments, there must have been some reason why he had devoted himself so assiduously for so many years to building up such an opulent layer of fat, and now he was learning what that reason was.
But his cheerful moments were fewer and farther between every day. Hunger was preying on his spirits. And he realized that he couldn’t hold out much longer like this. His body was big; it was accustomed to regular feedings, and robust ones; he could live only so long on his accumulated backlog of Sheerin, and then he would be too weak to pull himself onward. Before long it would seem simpler just to curl up behind some bush and rest … and rest … and rest.…
He had to find food. Soon.
The neighborhood he was moving through now, though deserted like all the rest, seemed a little less devastated than the areas behind him. There had been fires here too, but not everywhere, and the flames appeared to have jumped randomly past this house and that without harming them. Patiently Sheerin went from one to the next, trying the door of each house that didn’t seem to have been seriously damaged.
Locked. Every one of them.
How fastidious of these people! he thought. How tidy! The world has fallen in around their ears, and they are abandoning their homes in blind terror, running off to the forest, the campus, the city, the gods only knew where—and they take the trouble to lock thei
r houses before they go! As if they mean simply to have a brief holiday during the time of chaos, and then go home to their books and their bric-a-brac, their closets full of nice clothing, their gardens, their patios. Or hadn’t they realized that everything was over, that the chaos was going to go on and on and on?
Perhaps, Sheerin thought dismally, they aren’t gone at all. They’re in there hiding behind those locked doors of theirs, huddling in the basement the way I did, waiting for things to get normal again. Or else staring at me from the upstairs windows, hoping I’ll go away.
He tried another door. Another. Another. All locked. No response.
“Hey! Anybody home? Let me in!”
Silence.
He stared bleakly at the thick wooden door in front of him. He envisioned the treasures behind it, the food not yet spoiled and waiting to be eaten, the bathtub, the soft bed. And here he was outside, with no way of getting in. He felt a little like the small boy in the fable who has been given the magic key to the garden of the gods, where fountains of honey flow and gum-drops grow on every bush, but who is too small to reach up and put it in the keyhole. He felt like crying.
He realized, then, that he was carrying a hatchet. And he began to laugh. Hunger must have been making him simple-minded! The little boy in the fable perseveres, offering his mittens and his boots and his velvet cap to various animals who are passing by so that they will help him: each one gets on another one’s back, and he climbs on the top of the heap and puts the key in the keyhole. And here was not-so-little Sheerin, staring at a locked door, and he was holding a hatchet!
Break the door down? Just break it down?
It went against everything that he thought was right and proper.
Sheerin looked at the hatchet as though it had turned to a serpent in his hand. Breaking in—why, that was burglary! How could he, Sheerin 501, Professor of Psychology at Saro University, simply smash down the door of some law-abiding citizen’s house and casually help himself to whatever he found there?