Nightfall (20 page)

But he had to write what he believed. And what he believed, to the depths of his soul, was that the Observatory group was
every bit as loopy as the Apostles of Flame, and just as dangerous to the stability of society.

There was no way he could make himself take what they said seriously. The more time he spent around the Observatory, the nuttier it all seemed to him.

An invisible and apparently undetectable planet soaring through the sky on an orbit that brought it close to Kalgash every few decades? A combination of solar positions that would leave only Dovim overhead when the invisible planet arrived this time? Dovim’s light thereby blotted out, throwing the world into Darkness? And everyone going insane as a result? No, no, he couldn’t buy it.

To Theremon, all of it seemed just as wild as the stuff the Apostles of Flame had been peddling for so many years. The only extra thing that the Apostles threw in was the mysterious advent of the phenomenon known as Stars. Even the Observatory people had the good grace to admit that they couldn’t imagine what Stars were. Some other sort of invisible heavenly bodies, apparently, which suddenly came into view when the Year of Godliness ended and the wrath of the gods descended on Kalgash—so the Apostles indicated.

“It can’t be,” Beenay had told him, one evening at the Six Suns Club. It was still six months before the date of the eclipse. “The eclipse and the Darkness, yes. The Stars, no. There’s nothing in the universe except our world and the six suns and some insignificant asteroids—and Kalgash Two. If there are Stars also, why can’t we measure their presence? Why can’t we detect them by orbital perturbations, the way we’ve detected Kalgash Two? No, Theremon, if there are Stars out there, then something’s got to be wrong with the Theory of Universal Gravitation. And we know the theory’s all right.”

“We
know
the theory’s all right,” that was what Beenay had said. But wasn’t that just like Folimun saying, “We know that the Book of Revelations is a book of truth”?

In the beginning, when Beenay and Sheerin first told him of their emerging awareness that there was going to be a devastating period of Darkness upon all the world, Theremon, half skeptical and half awed and impressed by their apocalyptic visions, had indeed done his best to be helpful. “Athor wants to meet with Folimun,” Beenay said. “He’s trying to find out if
the Apostles have any sort of ancient astronomical records that might confirm what we’ve found. Can you do anything to arrange it?”

“A funny notion,” Theremon said. “The irascible old man of science asking to see the spokesman of the forces of anti-science, of non-science. But I’ll see what I can do.”

That meeting had turned out to be surprisingly easy to arrange. Theremon had been intending to interview Folimun again anyway. The sharp-faced Apostle granted Theremon an audience for the following day.

“Athor?” Folimun said, when the newspaperman had passed Beenay’s message along. “Why would he want to see
me?
”

“Perhaps he’s planning to become an Apostle,” Theremon suggested playfully.

Folimun laughed. “Not very likely. From what I know of him, he’d sooner paint himself purple and go for a stroll in the nude down Saro Boulevard.”

“Well, maybe he’s undergone a conversion,” said Theremon. Cautiously he added, after a tantalizing pause, “I know for a fact that he and his staff have turned up some data that might just tend to support your belief that Darkness is going to sweep over the world on the nineteenth of Theptar next.”

Folimun allowed himself the smallest sort of carefully controlled display of interest, an almost imperceptible raising of one eyebrow. “How fascinating, if it’s true,” he said calmly.

“You’ll have to see him yourself to find that out.”

“I may just do that,” the Apostle said.

And indeed he did. Exactly what the nature of the meeting between Folimun and Athor was, Theremon never succeeded in finding out, despite all his best efforts. Athor and Folimun were the only ones present, and neither of them said a thing to anyone else about it afterward, so far as Theremon could discover. Beenay, Theremon’s chief link to the Observatory, was able to offer only vague guesses.

“It had something to do with the ancient astronomical records that the Chief believes are in the Apostles’ possession, that’s all I can tell you,” Beenay reported. “Athor suspects that they’ve been handing things down over the centuries, maybe even since before the last eclipse. Some of the passages in the
Book of Revelations are in an old forgotten language, you know.”

“Old forgotten gibberish, you mean. Nobody’s ever been able to make any sense out of that stuff.”

“Well, I certainly can’t,” said Beenay. “But it’s the opinion of some quite respectable philologists that those passages may be actual prehistoric texts. What if the Apostles actually have a way of deciphering that language? But they keep it to themselves, thus concealing whatever astronomical data may be recorded in the Book of Revelations. That may be the key Athor’s after.”

Theremon was astonished. “You mean to say that the preeminent astronomer of our time, perhaps of all time, feels the need to consult a pack of hysterical cultists on a scientific issue?”

With a shrug, Beenay said, “All I know is that Athor doesn’t like the Apostles and their teachings any more than you do, but he thought there was something important to gain by meeting with your friend Folimun.”

“No friend of mine! He’s strictly a professional acquaintance.”

Beenay said, “Well, whatever you want to call—”

Theremon cut him off. Real wrath was rising in him now, a little to his own surprise. “And it’s not going to sit very well with me, let me tell you, if it turns out that you people and the Apostles have cut some sort of deal. So far as I’m concerned, the Apostles represent Darkness itself—the blackest, most hateful sort of reactionary ideas. Give them their way and they’ll have us all living medieval lives of fasting and chastity and flagellation again. It’s bad enough we have psychotics like them spewing forth demented delirious prophecies to disturb the tranquillity of everyday life, but if a man of Athor’s prestige is going to dignify those ludicrous creeps by incorporating some of their babble into his own findings, I’m going to be very, very suspicious, my friend, of anything at all that emanates from your Observatory from this point onward.”

Dismay was evident on Beenay’s face.

“If you only knew, Theremon, how scornfully Athor speaks of the Apostles, how little regard he has for anything they’ve ever advocated—”

“Then why is he deigning to speak with them?”

“You’ve talked with Folimun yourself!”

“That’s different. Like it or not, Folimun’s helping to make news these days. It’s my job to find out what’s going on in his mind.”

“Well,” Beenay said hotly, “maybe Athor takes the same view.”

That was the point where they had let the discussion drop. It was beginning to change from a discussion into a quarrel, and neither one of them wanted that. Since Beenay really had no idea what kind of understanding, if any, Athor and Folimun might have worked out with each other, Theremon saw there wasn’t much sense in belaboring him about it.

But, Theremon realized afterward, that conversation with Beenay was exactly when his attitude toward Beenay and Sheerin and the rest of the Observatory people had begun to shift—when he had started to move from sympathetic and curious onlooker to jeering, scornful critic. Even though he himself had been instrumental in bringing it about, the meeting between the Observatory director and the Apostle now seemed to Theremon to be a sellout of the most disastrous kind, a naive capitulation on Athor’s part to the forces of reaction and blind ignorance.

Although he had never really been able to make himself believe the theories of the scientists—despite all the so-called “evidence” they had allowed him to inspect—Theremon had taken a generally neutral position in his column when the first news stories about the impending eclipse began to appear in the
Chronicle
.

“A startling announcement,” he had called it, “and very frightening—if true. As Athor 77 quite rightly says, any prolonged period of sudden worldwide Darkness would be a calamity such as the world has never known. But from the other side of the world comes a dissenting view this morning. ‘With all due respect to the great Athor 77,’ declares Heranian 1104, Astronomer Royal of the Imperial Observatory of Kanipilitiniuk, ‘there is still no firm evidence that the so-called Kalgash Two satellite exists at all, let alone that it is capable of causing such an eclipse as the Saro group predicts. We must bear in mind that suns—even a small sun such as Dovim—are immensely larger than any wandering space satellite could possibly
be, and it strikes us as highly unlikely that such a satellite would be able to enter precisely the position in the heavens necessary to intercept all solar illumination that might reach the surface of our world—’ ”

But then came Mondior 71’s speech of Umilithar thirteenth, in which the High Apostle proudly declared that the world’s greatest man of science had given his support to the word of the Book of Revelations. “The voice of science is now one with the voice of heaven,” Mondior cried. “I urge you now: put no further hope in miracles and dreams. What must come must come. Nothing can save the world from the wrath of the gods, nothing except a willingness to abandon sin, to give up evil, to devote oneself to the path of virtue and righteousness.”

Mondior’s booming pronouncement had pushed Theremon out of his neutrality. In loyalty to Beenay’s friendship he had allowed himself to take the eclipse hypothesis more or less seriously, for a while. But now he began to see it as pure sillyseason stuff—a bunch of earnest, self-deluding scientists, swept away by their own enthusiasm for a lot of circumstantial evidence and reasoning from mere coincidence, willing to kid themselves into a belief in the century’s most nonsensical bit of insanity.

The next day Theremon’s column asked, “Are you wondering how the Apostles of Flame ever managed to gain Athor 77 as a convert? Of all people, the grand old man of astronomy seems about the least likely to line up in support of those robed and hooded purveyors of claptrap and abracadabra. Did some silver-tongued Apostle charm the great scientist out of his wits? Or is it simply the case, as we’ve heard whispered behind the ivy-covered walls of Saro University, that the mandatory faculty retirement age has been pegged a few years too high?”

And that was only the beginning.

Theremon saw what role he had to play now. If people started taking this eclipse thing seriously, there would be mental breakdowns on all sides, even without the coming of general Darkness to start the trouble off.

Let everyone actually begin believing that doom would arrive on the evening of Theptar nineteenth, and there would be panic in the streets long before that, universal hysteria, a collapse of law and order, a prolonged period of general instability
and troublesome apprehension—followed by the gods only knew what sort of emotional upheavals when the dreaded day came and went harmlessly. It would have to be his task to deflate the fear of Nightfall, of Darkness, of Doomsday, by poking it with the sharp spear of laughter.

So when Mondior thundered ferociously that the vengeance of the gods was on the way, Theremon 762 replied with lighthearted sketches of what the world would be like if the Apostles succeeded in “reforming” society as they wanted to—people going to the beach bundled up in ankle-length swimsuits, long sessions of prayer between each bit of action at sports events, all the great books and classic plays and shows rewritten to eliminate the slightest hint of impiety.

And when Athor and his group released diagrams showing the movements of the unseen and apparently unseeable Kalgash Two across the sky on its shadowy rendezvous with the pallid red light of Dovim, Theremon made amiable remarks about dragons, invisible giants, and other mythological monsters cavorting through the heavens.

When Mondior waved the scientific authority of Athor 77 around as an argument demonstrating secular support of the Apostles’ teachings, Theremon responded by asking how seriously anyone could take Athor 77’s scientific authority, now that he was obviously just as deranged as Mondior himself.

When Athor called for a crash program to store food supplies, scientific and technical information, and everything else that would be needed by mankind after the general insanity broke loose, Theremon suggested that in some quarters the general insanity had
already
broken loose, and provided his own list of essential items to put away in your basement (“can openers, thumbtacks, copies of the multiplication table, playing cards.…Don’t forget to write your name on a tag and tie it around your right wrist, in case you don’t remember it after the Darkness comes.…Put a tag on your left wrist that says,
To find out your name, see tag on other wrist.…”
)

By the time Theremon had finished working the story over, it was hard for his readers to decide which group was more absurd—the ripsnorting doomsayers of the Apostles of Flame, or the pathetic, gullible skywatchers of the Saro University Observatory. But one thing was certain: thanks to Theremon,
hardly any member of the general public believed that anything out of the ordinary was going to take place on the evening of Theptar nineteenth.

Athor thrust out a belligerent lower lip and glared in rage at the man from the
Chronicle.
He was able to restrain himself only by a supreme effort.

“You here? Despite everything I said? Of all the audacity!”

Theremon’s hand was outstretched in greeting as though he really had expected Athor to accept it. But after a moment he lowered it, and stood regarding the Observatory director with astonishing insouciance.

In a voice trembling with barely controlled emotion Athor said, “You display an infernal gall, sir, in coming here this evening. It astounds me that you’d dare to show your face among us.”

From a corner of the room, Beenay, running the tip of his tongue nervously across his lips, interposed nervously, “Now, sir, after all—”