Nightfall (25 page)

Theremon nodded numbly.

Sheerin said, “Where will light come from, when the generators stop? The godlights, I suppose. They’ve all got batteries. But you may not have a godlight handy. You’ll be out there on the street in the Darkness, and your godlight will be sitting at home, right next to your bed. And you want light. So you burn something, eh, Mr. Theremon? Ever see a forest fire? Ever go camping and cook a stew over a wood fire? Heat isn’t the only thing burning wood gives off, you know. It gives off light, and people are very well aware of that. And when it’s dark they want light, and they’re going to
get it.
”

“So they’ll burn logs,” Theremon said without much conviction.

“They’ll burn whatever they can get. They’ve got to have light. They’ve got to burn something, and wood won’t be handy, not on city streets. So they’ll burn whatever is nearest. A pile of newspapers? Why not? The Saro City
Chronicle
will give a little brightness for a while. What about the newsstands that the papers on sale are stacked up in? Burn them too! Burn clothing. Burn books. Burn roof-shingles. Burn anything. The
people will have their light—and every center of habitation goes up in flames! There are your fires, Mr. Newspaperman. There is the end of the world you used to live in.”

“
If
the eclipse comes,” said Theremon, an undertone of stubbornness in his voice.

“If, yes,” said Sheerin. “I’m no astronomer. And no Apostle, either. But my money’s on the eclipse.”

He looked straight at Theremon. Eyes held each other as though the whole matter were a personal affair of respective will powers, and then Theremon broke away, wordlessly. His breathing was harsh and ragged. He put his hands to his forehead and pressed hard.

Then came a sudden hubbub from the adjoining room.

Beenay said, “I think I heard Yimot’s voice. He and Faro must have showed up, finally. Let’s go in and see what kept them.”

“Might as well!” muttered Theremon. He drew a long breath and seemed to shake himself. The tension was broken—for the moment.

The main room was in an uproar. Everyone clustered around Faro and Yimot, who were trying to parry a burst of eager questions while they removed their outer garments.

Athor bustles through the crowd and faced the newcomers angrily. “Do you realize that it’s practically E-hour? Where have you two been?”

Faro 24 seated himself and rubbed his hands. His round, fleshy cheeks were red with the outdoor chill. He was smirking strangely. And he seemed curiously calm, almost as if he had been drugged.

“I’ve never seen him like that before,” Beenay whispered to Sheerin. “He’s always been very obsequious, very much the humble junior astronomer deferring to the great people around him. Even to me. But now—”

“Shh. Listen,” Sheerin said.

Faro said, “Yimot and I have just finished carrying through a
little crazy experiment of our own. We’ve been trying to see if we couldn’t construct an arrangement by which we could simulate the appearance of Darkness and Stars so as to get an advance notion as to how it looked.”

There was a confused murmur from the listeners.

“Stars?” Theremon said. “You know what Stars are? How did you find out?”

Smirking again, Faro said, “By reading the Book of Revelations. It seems pretty clear that Stars are something very bright, like suns but smaller, that appear in the sky when Kalgash enters the Cave of Darkness.”

“Absurd!” someone said.

“Impossible!”

“The Book of Revelations! That’s where they did their research! Can you imagine—”

“Quiet,” Athor said. There was a sudden look of interest in his eyes, a touch of his old vigor. “Go on, Faro. What was this ‘arrangement’ of yours? How did you go about it?”

“Well,” said Faro, “the idea came to Yimot and me a couple of months ago, and we’ve been working it out in our spare time. Yimot knew of a low one-story house down in the city with a domed roof—some kind of warehouse, I think. Anyway, we bought it—”

“With what?” interrupted Athor peremptorily. “Where did you get the money?”

“Our bank accounts,” grunted the lanky, pipestem-limbed Yimot 70. “It cost us two thousand credits.” Then, defensively, “Well, what of it? Tomorrow two thousand credits will be two thousand pieces of paper and nothing else.”

“Sure,” Faro said. “So we bought the place and rigged it up with black velvet from top to bottom so as to get as perfect a Darkness as possible. Then we punched tiny holes in the ceiling and through the roof and covered them with little metal caps, all of which could be shoved aside simultaneously at the close of a switch. At least, we didn’t do that part ourselves; we got a carpenter and an electrician and some others—money didn’t count. The point was that we could get the light to shine through those holes in the roof, so that we could get a Starlike effect.”

“What we imagined a Starlike effect would be,” Yimot amended.

Not a breath was drawn during the pause that followed. Athor said stiffly:

“You had no right to make a private—”

Faro seemed abashed. “I know, sir—but, frankly, Yimot and I thought the experiment was a little dangerous. If the effect really worked, we half expected to go mad—from what Dr. Sheerin says about all this, we thought that would be rather likely. We felt that we alone should take the risk. Of course, if we found that we could retain our sanity, it occurred to us that we might be able to develop immunity to the real thing, and then expose the rest of you to what we had experienced. But things didn’t work out at all—”

“Why? What happened?”

It was Yimot who answered. “We shut ourselves in and allowed our eyes to get accustomed to the dark. It’s an extremely creepy feeling because the total Darkness makes you feel as if the walls and ceiling are crashing in on you. But we got over that and pulled the switch. The caps fell away and the roof glittered all over with little dots of light.”

“And?”

“And—nothing. That was the wacky part of it. So far as we understood the Book of Revelations, we were experiencing the effect of seeing Stars against a background of Darkness. But nothing happened. It was just a roof with holes in it, and bright points of light coming through, and that’s just what it looked like. We tried it over and over again—that’s what kept us so late—but there just wasn’t any effect at all.”

There was a shocked silence. All eyes turned to Sheerin, who stood motionless, mouth open.

Theremon was the first to speak. “You know what this does to the whole theory you’ve built up, Sheerin, don’t you?” He was grinning with relief.

But Sheerin raised his hand. “Not so fast, Theremon. Just let me think this through. These so-called ‘Stars’ that the boys constructed—the total time of their exposure to Darkness—” He fell silent. Everyone watched him. And then he snapped his fingers, and when he lifted his head there was neither surprise nor uncertainty in his eyes. “Of course—”

He never finished. Thilanda, who had been up in the Observatory dome exposing photographic plates of the sky at tensecond intervals as the time of eclipse drew near, came rushing in, waving her arms in wild circles that would have been worthy of Yimot at his most excited.

“Dr. Athor! Dr. Athor!”

Athor turned. “What is it?”

“We just found—he came walking right into the dome—you won’t believe this, Dr. Athor—”

“Slow down, child. What happened? Who came walking in?”

There were the sounds of a scuffle in the hall, and a sharp clang. Beenay, starting to his feet, rushed out the door and came to a sudden halt, crying, “What the deuce!”

Davnit and Hikkinan, who should have been up in the dome with Thilanda, were out there. The two astronomers were struggling with a third figure, a lithe, athletic-looking man in his late thirties, with strange curling red hair, a thin sharpfeatured face, icy blue eyes. They dragged him into the room and stood holding him with his arms gripped tightly behind his back.

The stranger wore the dark robe of the Apostles of Flame.

“Folimun 66!” Athor cried.

And in the same breath, from Theremon: “Folimun! What in the name of Darkness are you doing here?”

Quietly, in a cold, commanding tone, the Apostle said, “It’s not in the name of Darkness that I’ve come to you this evening but in the name of light.”

Athor stared at Thilanda. “Where did you find this man?”

“I told you, Dr. Athor. We were busy with the plates, and then we heard him. He had come right in and was standing behind us. ‘Where is Athor,’ he said. ‘I must see Athor.’ ”

“Call the security guards,” Athor said, his face darkening with rage. “The Observatory is supposed to be sealed this evening. I want to know how this man succeeded in getting past the guards.”

“Obviously you’ve got an Apostle or two on the payroll,” Theremon said pleasantly. “Naturally they’d have been only too obliging when the Apostle Folimun showed up and asked them to unlock the gate.”

Athor shot him a blistering glance. But the look on his face
indicated that the old astronomer realized the probable accuracy of Theremon’s guess.

Everyone in the room had formed a ring around Folimun now. They were all staring at him in astonishment—Siferra, Theremon, Beenay, Athor, and the rest.

Calmly Folimun said, “I am Folimun 66, special adjutant to His Serenity Mondior 71. I have come this evening not as a criminal, as you seem to think, but as an envoy from His Serenity. Do you think you could persuade these two zealots of yours to release me, Athor?”

Athor gestured irritatedly. “Let him go.”

“Thank you,” Folimun said. He rubbed his arms and adjusted the set of his robe. Then he bowed in gratitude—or was it only mock gratitude? —to Athor. The air around the Apostle seemed to tingle with some special electricity.

“Now then,” Athor said. “What are you doing here? What do you want?”

“Nothing, I suspect, that you would give me of your own free will.”

“You’re probably right about that.”

Folimun said, “When you and I met some months ago, Athor, it was, I would say, a very tense meeting, a meeting of two men who might well have looked upon themselves as princes of hostile realms. To you, I was a dangerous fanatic. To me, you were the leader of a band of godless sinners. And yet we were able to come to a certain area of agreement, which was, you recall, that on the evening of Theptar nineteenth, Darkness would fall upon Kalgash and would remain for many hours.”

Athor scowled. “Come to the point, if there is one, Folimun. Darkness
is
about to fall, and we don’t have a lot more time.”

Folimun replied, “To me, the coming Darkness was being sent upon us by the will of the gods. To you, it represented nothing more than the soulless movement of astronomical bodies. Very well: we agreed to disagree. I provided you with certain data that had been in the possession of the Apostles since the previous Year of Godliness, certain tables of the movements of the suns in the sky, and other even more abstruse data. In return, you promised to prove the essential truth of the creed
of our faith and to make that proof known to the people of Kalgash.”

Looking at his watch, Athor said, “And I did exactly that. What does your master want of me now? I’ve fulfilled my end of the bargain.”

Folimun smiled faintly, but said nothing.

There was an uneasy stir in the room.

“I asked him for astronomical data, yes,” Athor said, looking around. “Data that only the Apostles had. And it was given to me. For that, thank you. In return I did agree, in a manner of speaking, to make public my mathematical confirmation of the Apostles’ basic tenet that Darkness would descend on Theptar nineteenth.”

“There was no real need for us to give you anything,” was the proud retort. “Our basic tenet, as you call it, was not in need of proof. It stands proven by the Book of Revelations.”

“For the handful that constitute your cult, yes,” Athor snapped. “Don’t pretend to mistake my meaning. I offered to present scientific background for your beliefs. And I did!”

The cultist’s eyes narrowed bitterly. “Yes, you did—with a fox’s subtlety, for your pretended explanation backed our beliefs and at the same time removed all necessity for them. You made of the Darkness and of the Stars a natural phenomenon and removed all their real significance. That was blasphemy.”

“If so, the fault isn’t mine. The facts exist. What can I do but state them?”

“Your ‘facts’ are a fraud and a delusion.”

Athor’s face grew mottled with rage. “How do
you
know?”

And the answer came with the certainty of absolute faith: “I
know.
”

The director purpled even more. Beenay started to go to his side, but Athor waved him away.

“And what does Mondior 71 want us to do? He still thinks, I suppose, that in trying to warn the world to take measures against the menace of madness we are somehow interfering with his attempt to seize power after the eclipse. Well, we aren’t succeeding. I hope that makes him happy.”

“The attempt itself has done harm enough. And what you are trying to achieve here this evening will make things worse.”

“What do you know of what we’re trying to achieve here this evening?” Athor demanded.

Smoothly Folimun said, “We know that you’ve never abandoned your hope of influencing the populace. Having failed to do it before the Darkness and the Flames, you intend to come forth afterward, equipped with photographs of the trnnsition from daylight to Darkness. You mean to offer a rational explanation to the survivors of what happened—and to put aside in a safe place your supposed evidence of your beliefs, so that at the end of the
next
Year of Godliness your successors in the realm of science will be able to step forward and guide humanity in such a way that the Darkness can be resisted.”

“Someone’s been saying things,” Beenay whispered.

Folimun went on, “All this works against the interests of Mondior 71, obviously. And it is Mondior 71 who is the appointed prophet of the gods, the one who is intended to lead mankind through the period ahead.”

“It’s high time you came to the point,” Athor said in a frigid tone.