* * * *
In the dome, only Yimot, at the solarscope, had kept his place. The rest were clustered about the cameras, and Beenay was giving his instructions in a hoarse, strained voice.
“Get it straight, all of you. I'm snapping Beta just before totality and changing the plate. That will leave one of you to each camera. You all know about ... about times of exposure—"
There was a breathless murmur of agreement.
Beenay passed a hand over his eyes. “Are the torches still burning? Never mind, I see them!” He was leaning hard against the back of a chair. “Now remember, don't ... don't try to look for good shots. Don't waste time trying to get t-two stars at a time in the scope field. One is enough. And ... and if you feel yourself going, get away from the camera."
At the door, Sheerin whispered to Theremon, “Take me to Aton. I don't see him."
The newsman did not answer immediately. The vague form of the astronomers wavered and blurred, and the torches overhead had become only vague splotches.
“It's dark,” he whimpered.
Sheerin held out his hand. “Aton.” He stumbled forward. “Aton!"
Theremon stepped after and seized his arm. “Wait, I'll take you.” Somehow he made his way across the room. He closed his eyes against the Darkness and his mind against the chaos within it.
No one heard them or paid attention to them. Sheerin stumbled against the wall. “Aton!"
The psychologist felt shaking hands touching him, then withdrawing, and a voice muttering, “Is that you, Sheerin?"
“Aton!” He strove to breathe normally. “Don't worry about the mob. The place will hold them off."
* * * *
Latimer, the Cultist, rose to his feet, and his face twisted in desperation. His word was pledged, and to break it would mean placing his soul in mortal peril. Yet that word had been forced from him and had not been given freely. The Stars would come soon; he could not stand by and allow—And yet his word was pledged.
Beenay's face was dimly flushed as it looked upward at Beta's last ray, and Latimer, seeing him bend over his camera, made his decision. His nails cut the flesh of his palms as he tensed himself.
He staggered crazily as he started his rush. There was nothing before him but shadows; the very floor beneath his feet lacked substance. And then someone was upon him and he went down with clutching fingers at his throat.
He doubled his knee and drove it hard into his assailant. “Let me up or I'll kill you."
Theremon cried out sharply and muttered through a blinding haze of pain, “You double-crossing rat!"
The newsman seemed conscious of everything at once. He heard Beenay croak, “I've got it. At your cameras, men!” and then there was the strange awareness that the last thread of sunlight had thinned out and snapped.
Simultaneously he heard one last choking gasp from Beenay, and a queer little cry from Sheerin, a hysterical giggle that cut off in a rasp—and a sudden silence, a strange, deadly silence from outside.
And Latimer had gone limp in his loosening grasp. Theremon peered into the Cultist's eyes and saw the blankness of them, staring upward, mirroring the feeble yellow of the torches. He saw the bubble of froth upon Latimer's lips and heard the low animal whimper in Latimer's throat.
With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one 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 shone 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.
Theremon staggered to his feet, his throat constricting him to breathlessness, all the muscles of his body writhing in a tensity of terror and sheer fear beyond bearing. He was going mad, and knew it, and somewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight off the hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and know that you were going mad—to know that in a little minute you would be here physically and yet all the real essence would be dead and drowned in the black madness. For this was the Dark—the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. The bright walls of the universe were shattered and their awful black fragments were falling down to crush and squeeze and obliterate him.
He jostled someone crawling on hands and knees, but stumbled somehow over him. Hands groping at his tortured throat, he limped toward the flame of the torches that filled all his mad vision.
“Light!” he screamed.
Aton, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened child. “Stars—all the Stars—we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars is a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything—"
Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them.
On the horizon outside the window, in the direction of Saro City, a crimson glow began growing, strengthening in brightness, that was not the glow of a sun.
The long night had come again.
“Nightfall” by Isaac Asimov originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction in September 1941. Copyright (c) 1941 by Street & Smith Publications; copyright renewed, (c) 1968 by Isaac Asimov, and (c) 1996 by Nightfall, Inc.
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* * *
Short Story: LEONID SKIES
by Carl Frederick
As a boy, Carl Frederick's favorite time was winter where, in the early darkness, the stars came out before his mandatory bedtime. In other seasons, he spent many hours in his local planetarium where he'd achieved something of the status of a mascot. His early addiction to the night sky likely led to his becoming a theoretical physicist. Carl regards his second story for Asimov's as an homage to the awe of the night and to the firmament-obsession of his younger self.
Rising huge from the coastal island, the dome looked like a bug's reticulated eye. Mark Frey gazed through the windshield at the far-off structure, the seven-foot perimeter wall supporting a transparent hemispherical dome some quarter of a mile in diameter. At this distance away, five or six miles with water intervening, Mark more recalled to mind than actually saw the dome's thin spiderweb of support beams cradling countless squares of Hyperglass. The material, which could be electrically commanded from transparent to opaque, had been developed for domes on the Moon.
His hands involuntarily tightened their grip on the steering wheel. Domes on the Moon. Wouldn't happen, at least not in his lifetime. He'd spent the last eight months of that lifetime on the Moon doing surveys. And then the government had yanked the funding.
Through the rear view mirror, he saw his son studying the brochure, and, next to him, his son's best friend Adrian gazing out the window. Suddenly, Adrian turned and caught his eye.
“Do you think, Mr. Frey,” said the boy, “that the weather will be clear for the meteor shower?"
“Shower?” said Mark, “It'll be a storm if the predictions are anywhere near accurate. And yes. I did have to use some influence to have the weather changed. The camp people didn't know about the Leonids."
“Really?"
“Really.” Mark chuckled. “Are you looking forward to it?"
“Oh, yes, sir."
Mark regarded Adrian in the mirror—obliquely, trying not to clue Adrian in that he was being observed. The boy, English and super polite, seemed as if he'd just popped out of a Dickens novel. He seemed natural, self-assured and, well, perfect—the idealization of a ten-year-old. Mark gave the bare hint of a shake of his head. Then again, all parents seem to think their children's friends are more together than their own offspring. He switched his gaze to his son. “Kev, are you looking forward to it, too?"
“Yeah. Sure,”
said Kevin, not looking up from the brochure.
Mark let out a mental sigh. Before he'd gone to the Moon, Kevin had been as spontaneous and enthusiastic as Adrian, but now ... but now, he couldn't even get the kid to make eye contact.
His wife had thought a father-and-son camping trip might be a way of re-bonding. She said it in a matter of fact way, as if bonding were something trivial, something that could be accomplished with Superglue. Eight months lost and wasted on moon base—the abandoned gateway to space.
Yes, he'd been away, but not out of contact. They'd talked daily—Earth daily, that is. But with the three-second delay, the time it took radio waves to travel from the Earth to the Moon and back, those talks soon became expressions of the trivial—greeting cards rather than human interaction.
Watching Kevin through the small window, Mark felt disconnected still from his son. There still seemed to be a time-delay barrier between them. Maybe his wife was right; maybe it was a question of re-bonding.
It was painful watching his son's flat expression; he transferred his gaze to the boy's brochure.
“Campground-X” it proclaimed in big letters. “X for Xtreme fun!"
Mark was aware of his mouth forming a tight-lipped smile—covering a scowl. X for Xtreme fun. He didn't know about that, but he did understand the subtext. X, meaning “NO": No mosquitoes, no West Nile virus, no harmful solar UV, no riffraff—an absolutely safe, family camping experience.
As he drove, Mark noticed something by its absence: the sign for his favorite campground was gone. West Nile did that, no doubt. Even though there were just a few hundred cases of the virus per year, fear of it had virtually wiped out conventional camping. West Nile, bird flu, Brazilian Puffweed, the ozone hole, the unpredictable weather caused by global warming—so now we have domed campgrounds, guaranteed mosquito free.
“Wouldn't you guys rather camp out under the real sky?” Mark looked into the rearview window. “Wouldn't it be more fun taking our chances—not knowing the weather months in advance?"
“I think the dome's great,” said Kevin. “And it's a planetarium. If the outside is cloudy, we'll still see the meteor shower."
“Only a simulation,” said Mark.
“Yeah. And better probably. Real special effects."
“The weather report says the sky—the real sky—will be clear overnight,” said Mark, more harshly than he'd intended.
“Anyway,” said Adrian, “if we camped outside, we'd probably freeze to death."
Mark smiled. The boy was right. It was mid-November. With the freaky weather of the last few years, even though the days were as warm as summer, the nights felt like the High Arctic.
As the dome loomed ever larger—the island on which it stood was less than a half mile from the mainland—even Mark became taken by its grandeur. And he'd read the brochure. He knew of the advanced white-laser planetarium projector, the lake for swimming stocked with token fish, the forested nature walk. The campground was really a huge greenhouse. He heard the kids in the back also discussing the place: the Saturday-night movies and laser light shows, the cutting edge video games in the activity center, the rabbits.
“No flashlights with more than two cells are allowed,” said Kevin, browsing the brochure, “and anyone caught shining a laser pointer at the dome will be kicked out.” He flipped to the next page and pointed to a picture. “Did you know that they have winter camping in August?"
“So we can freeze to death indoors,” said Adrian, looking down at the picture. He transferred his gaze from the brochure to the real thing. “Wow, it's big. Gee, look at all that glass. It looks weird with the sun shining through from the other side."
Mark smiled, but sadly. Adrian sounded the way Kevin used to: happy, enthusiastic.
“How do they keep the bird poop off?” said Kevin.
“It's made of Hyperglass,” said Mark. “And there's a high-voltage ionizing cleaning system—laser triggered. And see those towers—bird flyover repellers. And inside, there's surface lamellar airflow to minimize the need for cleaning.” Mentally, he slapped himself. He was beginning to sound like the gung-ho engineer he'd been before the Moon colony project had been canceled.
“Kevin told me you designed it, Mr. Frey,” said Adrian.
“A small part of it.” Mark gazed longingly at the structure. “You know, Adrian, these domes were designed for colonies on the Moon."
“But there aren't any colonies on the Moon,” said Adrian. “Are there, sir?"
Mark understood that Adrian's question was for politeness’ sake. “No, there aren't.” He forced a laugh. “But for the Moon design, we didn't have to worry about bird poop."
* * * *
Mark found an open spot in the dockside parking lot. The lot was linear—two rows of parking spaces with a roadway between them. People and X-porters plied the roadway. The X-porters—golf carts painted to look like animals—served to take campers’ gear onto the ferry and then to their camping areas in the dome. There were three areas: bobcat, wolf, and bear.
Bordering the parking lot on either side stood two rows of bug zappers on poles, built to look like ceremonial torches in some jungle adventure movie.
Getting out of the car, Mark found the temperature pleasantly cool with a hint of a chill in the occasional breeze—a fair bit colder than it had been in the city. Perhaps taking only summer-weight clothing had not been all that great an idea. But then again, they'd be camping under the dome. He still had trouble accepting the notion.
They each took a small day-pack from the car trunk and then walked toward the ferryboat. The packs contained little else besides a change of clothing, swimming trunks, a flashlight, and, in the boys’ packs, video game units. Like most campers these days, they'd rent their gear at the campground.
Mark, wide-angle image stabilized binoculars hung around his neck, cast a quick glance to the sky—beautifully clear—and imagined the meteor storm to come. He hoped the display might trigger the family lust for astronomy in his son. And he had the outside hope that it just might trigger Kevin's sense of adventure. Right now, it seems as if he just wants to grow up enough to be able to hang out at the mall.
* * * *
Since the entrance to Campground-X faced the ocean, not the mainland, the ferryboat had to sail halfway around the island. Although the great domed campground took up most of the land, a grassy knoll jutted out from the entrance. Onto this island peninsula the ferryboat docked.
Following the three X-porters, Mark and the boys walked toward the dome. At the entrance, after they passed through the bug blowers, Mark paused in front of the camp office, inhaling deeply, taking in the smell of the woods—the tree-scented output of the forced air circulator. Then he sent the boys off to browse in the camp store while he went in to pay the site fee.
He walked to a counter behind which sat a woman in a leaf-green blouse and wood-brown shorts. A plastic nametag over her blouse pocket indicated she was a “Welcome-ranger.” After consulting a computer screen, she said, “Your site is Bobcat Zone, site 27.” She chuckled. “You know that means your movie is Werewolf Park?"
“I thought I had a choice of three movies to watch."
“Well, you do, really,” said the ranger. “But each movie is projected to a different area around the dome. Your site location determines which film you have the clearest view of."
"Werewolf Park." Mark winced. “Now that you mention it,” he said, “my son did have me arrange that we see a horror film."
“It is pretty horrible,” said the ranger, lightly, as she handed Mark his site receipt.
“Good. I hope he falls asleep in the middle of it. He'll need all the sleep he can get before the Leonids."
The ranger gave a quizzical look. “Before the what?"
“The Leonid Meteor Shower.” Mark could scarcely believe the woman hadn't heard of it. He'd thought that everyone had heard of it. “It's very concentrated this year,” Mark went on. “A one-day supermaximum. And tonight's the night."
“That's interesting,” said the ranger in a tone of voice that contradicted her comment. Then she added, “You know, our planetarium can do meteor showers."
“Not like this one. They predict it'll be the brightest Leonids in four hundred years."
“We can do bright."
“No, you don't understand.” Mark leaned in over the counter. “In medieval times, there was a meteor storm like this. It was brighter than all their lamps and candles—like a pale white, cold daytime. People ran into the streets, screaming. They thought it was the end of the Earth."
The woman's look of indifference changed to one of concern. “I hope it won't frighten the campers."
* * * *
In the camp store, Mark found the boys looking at the dogs. Perhaps ten of them milled free but arrayed themselves in a near straight line, each under its own scent bracelet.
“Can we rent a dog?” said Kevin.
A store-ranger looked up. He took a scent bracelet from its hook and walked over to Mark and the boys. A Golden Retriever followed—jumping and bounding to get close to the bracelet.
Mark shook his head. “I think we'll pass on the dog. We're only camping for one night."
“Aw,” said Kevin.
“I know,” said Mark. “Maybe next time. I think we have enough to keep us busy."
“Well, if we can't rent a dog, can we buy rabbit food?"
“Rabbits?"
“It's in the brochure,” said Adrian. “The rabbits just run free."
Mark canted his head. “Rabbits and dogs?"
“GM rabbits,” said the store-ranger. “They're engineered to produce a scent that dogs hate—and people can't smell at all."
“Fine. We'll take some rabbit food, then."
“Good.” The ranger took a package from a shelf. “This should suffice for a one-night stay. Do you need any gear?"
Mark laughed. “All of it."
They rented three sleeping bags, a cook kit, an assortment of foods—freeze dried, fresh, and frozen, and a bag of charcoal.
“Can't we have a wood fire?” asked Adrian.
“I'm afraid not,” said the ranger. “No wood fires permitted. It's the smoke and air pollution. And we found that smoke makes the planetarium laser beam visible. Destroys the illusion.” He put the charcoal next to the other gear they'd rented. “Special, no-smoke charcoal. But don't worry. You guys will have fun, even without the wood. Campground-X provides the absolute best in wild camping."
Asimov's SF, October-November 2007 Page 18