Nightfall (novel)

1

It was a dazzling four-sun afternoon. Great golden Onos was high in the west, and little red Dovim was rising fast on the horizon below it. When you looked the other way you saw the brilliant white points of Trey and Patru bright against the purplish eastern sky. The rolling plains of Kalgash’s northernmost continent were flooded with wondrous light. The office of Kelaritan 99, director of the Jonglor Municipal Psychiatric Institute, had huge windows on every side to display the full magnificence of it all.

Sheerin 501 of Saro University, who had arrived in Jonglor a few hours before at Kelaritan’s urgent request, wondered why he wasn’t in a better mood. Sheerin was basically a cheerful person to begin with; and four-sun days usually gave his normally ebullient spirits an additional lift. But today, for some reason, he was edgy and apprehensive, although he was trying his best to keep that from becoming apparent. He had been summoned to Jonglor as an expert on mental health, after all.

“Would you like to start by talking with some of the victims?” Kelaritan asked. The director of the psychiatric hospital was a gaunt, angular little man, sallow and hollow-chested. Sheerin, who was ruddy and very far from gaunt, was innately suspicious of anyone of adult years who weighed less than half of what he did. Perhaps it’s the way Kelaritan looks that’s upsetting me, Sheerin thought. He’s like a walking skeleton.—“Or do you think it’s a better idea for you to get some personal experience of the Tunnel of Mystery first, Dr. Sheerin?”

Sheerin managed a laugh, hoping it didn’t sound too forced.

“Maybe I ought to begin by interviewing a victim or three,” he said. “That way I might be able to prepare myself a little better for the horrors of the Tunnel.”

Kelaritan’s dark beady eyes flickered unhappily. But it was Cubello 54, the sleek and polished lawyer for the Jonglor Centennial Exposition, who spoke out. “Oh, come now, Dr. Sheerin! ‘The horrors of the Tunnel!’ That’s a little extreme, don’t you think? After all, you’ve got nothing but newspaper accounts to go by, at this point. And calling the patients ‘victims.’ That’s hardly what they are.”

“The term was Dr. Kelaritan’s,” said Sheerin stiffly.

“I’m sure Dr. Kelaritan used that word only in the most general sense. But there’s a presupposition in its use that I find unacceptable.”

Sheerin said, giving the lawyer a look compounded equally of distaste and professional dispassion, “I understand that several people died as a result of their journey through the Tunnel of Mystery. Is that not so?”

“There were several deaths in the Tunnel, yes. But there’s no necessary reason at this point to think that those people died as a result of having gone through the Tunnel, Doctor.”

“I can see why you wouldn’t want to think so, Counselor,” said Sheerin crisply.

Cubello looked in outrage toward the hospital director. “Dr. Kelaritan! If this is the way this inquiry is going to be conducted, I want to register a protest right now. Your Dr. Sheerin is here as an impartial expert, not as a witness for the prosecution!”

Sheerin chuckled. “I was expressing my view of lawyers in general, Counselor, not offering any opinion about what may or may not have happened in the Tunnel of Mystery.”

“Dr. Kelaritan!” Cubello exclaimed again, growing red-faced.

“Gentlemen, please,” Kelaritan said, his eyes moving back and forth quickly from Cubello to Sheerin, from Sheerin to Cubello. “Let’s not be adversaries, shall we? We all have the same objective in this inquiry, as I see it. Which is to discover the truth about what happened in the Tunnel of Mystery, so that a repetition of the—ah—unfortunate events can be avoided.”

“Agreed,” said Sheerin amiably. It was a waste of time to be sniping at the lawyer this way. There were more important things to be doing.

He offered Cubello a genial smile. “I’m never really much interested in the placing of blame, only in working out ways of heading off situations where people come to feel that blame has to be placed. Suppose you show me one of your patients now, Dr. Kelaritan. And then we can have lunch and discuss the events in the Tunnel as we understand them at this point, and perhaps after we’ve eaten I might be able to see another patient or two—”

“Lunch?” Kelaritan said vaguely, as though the concept was unfamiliar to him.

“Lunch, yes. The midday meal. An old habit of mine, Doctor. But I can wait just a little while longer. We can certainly visit one of the patients first.”

Kelaritan nodded. To the lawyer he said, “Harrim’s the one to start with, I think. He’s in pretty good shape today. Good enough to withstand interrogation by a stranger, anyway.”

“What about Gistin 190?” Cubello asked.

“She’s another possibility, but she’s not as strong as Harrim. Let him get the basic story from Harrim, and then he can talk to Gistin, and—oh, maybe Chimmilit. After lunch, that is.”

“Thank you,” said Sheerin.

“If you’ll come this way, Dr. Sheerin—”

Kelaritan gestured toward a glassed-in passageway that led from the rear of his office to the hospital itself. It was an airy, open catwalk with a 360-degree view of the sky and the low gray-green hills that encircled the city of Jonglor. The light of the day’s four suns came streaming in from all sides.

Pausing for a moment, the hospital director looked to his right, then to his left, taking in the complete panorama. The little man’s dour pinched features seemed to glow with sudden youth and vitality as the warm rays of Onos and the tighter, sharply contrasting beams from Dovim, Patru, and Trey converged in a brilliant display.

“What an absolutely splendid day, eh, gentlemen!” Kelaritan cried, with an enthusiasm that Sheerin found startling, coming from someone as restrained and austere as he seemed to be. “How glorious it is to see four of the suns in the sky at the same time! How good it makes me feel when their light strikes my face! Ah, where would we be without our marvelous suns, I wonder?”

“Indeed,” said Sheerin.

He was feeling a little better himself, as a matter of fact.

2

Half a world away, one of Sheerin 501’s Saro University colleagues was staring at the sky also. But the only emotion she felt was horror.

She was Siferra 89, of the Department of Archaeology, who had been conducting excavations for the past year and a half at the ancient site of Beklimot on the remote Sagikan Peninsula. Now she stood rigid with apprehension, watching a catastrophe come rushing toward her.

The sky offered no comfort. In this part of the world the only real light visible just then was that of Tano and Sitha, and their cold, harsh gleam had always seemed joyless, even depressing, to her. Against the deep somber blue of the two-sun-day sky it was a baleful, oppressive illumination, casting jagged, ominous shadows. Dovim was in view also—barely, just rising now—right on the horizon, a short distance above the tips of the distant Horkkan Mountains. The dim glow of the little red sun, though, was hardly any more cheering.

But Siferra knew that the warm yellow light of Onos would come drifting up out of the east before long to cheer things up. What was troubling her was something far more serious than the temporary absence of the main sun.

A killer sandstorm was heading straight toward Beklimot. In another few minutes it would sweep over the site, and then anything might happen. Anything. The tents could be destroyed; the carefully sorted trays of artifacts might be overturned and their contents scattered; their cameras, their drafting equipment, their laboriously compiled stratigraphic drawings—everything that they had worked on for so long might be lost in a moment.

Worse. They could all be killed.

Worse yet. The ancient ruins of Beklimot itself—the cradle of civilization, the oldest known city on Kalgash—were in jeopardy.

The trial trenches that Siferra had sliced in the surrounding alluvial plain stood wide open. The onrushing wind, if it was strong enough, would lift even more sand than it was already carrying, and hurl it with terrible force against the fragile remains of Beklimot—scouring, eroding, reburying, perhaps even ripping whole foundations loose and hurling them across the parched plain.

Beklimot was a historical treasure that belonged to the entire world. That Siferra had exposed it to possible harm by excavating in it had been a calculated risk. You could never do any sort of archaeological work without destroying something: it was the nature of the job. But to have laid the whole heart of the plain bare like this, and then to have the lousy luck of being hit by the worst sandstorm in a century—

No. No, it was too much. Her name would be blackened for aeons to come if the Beklimot site was shattered by this storm as a result of what she had done here.

Maybe there was a curse on this place, as certain superstitious people were known to say. Siferra 89 had never had much tolerance for crackpots of any sort. But this dig, which she had hoped would be the crowning achievement of her career, had been nothing but headaches ever since she started. And now it threatened to finish her professionally for the rest of her life—if it didn’t kill her altogether.

Eilis 18, one of her assistants, came running up. He was a slight, wiry man who looked insignificant beside the tall, athletic figure of Siferra.

“We’ve got everything nailed down that we were able to!” he called to her, half breathless. “It’s all up to the gods now!”

She replied, scowling, “Gods? What gods? Do you see any gods around here, Eilis?”

“I simply meant—”

“I know what you meant. Forget it.”

From the other side came Thuvvik 443, the foreman of the workers. He was wild-eyed with fear. “Lady,” he said. “Lady, where can we hide? There is no place to hide!”

“I told you, Thuvvik. Down below the cliff.”

“We will be buried! We will be smothered!”

“The cliff will shelter you, don’t worry,” Siferra told him, with a conviction she was far from feeling. “Get over there! And make sure everybody else stays there!”

“And you, lady? Why are you not there?”

She gave him a sudden startled glance. Did he think she had some private hiding place where she’d be safer than the rest?

“I’ll be there, Thuvvik. Go on! Stop bothering me!”

Across the way, near the six-sided brick building that the early explorers had called the Temple of the Suns, Siferra caught sight of the stocky figure of Balik 338. Squinting, shading his eyes against the chilly light of Tano and Sitha, he stood looking toward the north, the direction from which the sandstorm was coming. The expression on his face was one of anguish.

Balik was their chief stratigrapher, but he was also the expedition’s meteorological expert, more or less. It was part of his job to keep the weather records for them and to watch out for the possibility of unusual events.

There wasn’t much in the way of weather on the Sagikan Peninsula, normally: the whole place was unthinkably arid, with measurable rainfall no more often than every ten or twenty years. The only unusual climatic event that ever occurred there was a shift in the prevailing pattern of air currents that set cyclonic forces in motion and brought about a sandstorm, and even that didn’t happen more than a few times a century.

Was Balik’s despondent expression a hint of the guilt he must feel for having failed to foresee the coming of the storm? Or did he look so horrified because he was able now to calculate the full extent of the fury that was about to descend?

Everything might have been different, Siferra told herself, if they’d had a little more time to prepare for the onslaught. In hindsight, she could see that all the telltale signs had been there for those with the wit to notice them—the burst of fierce dry heat, excruciating even by the standards of the Sagikan Peninsula, and the sudden dead calm that replaced the usual steady breeze from the north, and then the strange moist wind that began to blow from the south. The khalla-birds, those weird scrawny scavengers that haunted the area like ghouls, had all taken wing when that wind started blowing, vanishing into the dune-choked western desert as though demons were on their tails.

That should have been the clue, Siferra thought. When the khalla-birds took off and went screaming into the dune country.

But they had all been too busy working at the dig to pay attention to what was going on. Sheer denial, most likely. Pretend that you don’t notice the signs of an approaching sandstorm and maybe the sandstorm will go somewhere else.

And then that little gray cloud appearing out of nowhere in the far north, that dull stain on the fierce shield of the desert sky, which ordinarily was always as clear as glass—

Cloud? Do you see a cloud? I don’t see any clouds.

Denial again.

Now the cloud was an immense black monster filling half the sky. The wind still blew from the south, but it was no longer moist—a searing furnace-blast was what it was, now—and there was another wind, an even stronger one, bearing down from the opposite direction. One wind fed the other. And when they met—

“Siferra!” Balik yelled. “Here it comes! Take cover!”

“I will! I will!”

She didn’t want to. What she wanted to do was run from one zone of the dig to another, looking after everything at once, holding the flaps of the tents down, wrapping her arms around the bundles of precious photographic plates, throwing herself against the face of the newly excavated Octagon House to protect the stunning mosaics that they had discovered the month before. But Balik was right. Siferra had done all she could, this frantic morning, to batten down the site. Now the thing to do was to huddle in, down there below the cliff that loomed at the upper edge of the site, and hope that it would be a bulwark for them against the fullest force of the storm.

She ran for it. Her sturdy, powerful legs carried her easily over the parched, crackling sand. Siferra was not quite forty years old, a tall, strong woman in the prime of her physical strength, and until this moment she had never felt anything but optimism about any aspect of her existence. But suddenly everything was imperiled now: her academic career, her robust good health, maybe even her life itself.

The others were crowded together at the base of the cliff, behind a hastily improvised screen of bare wooden poles with tarpaulins lashed to them. “Move over,” Siferra said, pushing her way in among them.

“Lady,” Thuvvik moaned. “Lady, make the storm turn back!” As though she were some sort of goddess with magical powers. Siferra laughed harshly. The foreman made some kind of gesture at her—a holy sign, she imagined.

The other workers, all of them men of the little village just east of the ruins, made the same sign and began to mutter at her. Prayers? To her? It was a spooky moment. These men, like their fathers and grandfathers, had been digging at Beklimot all their lives in the employ of one archaeologist or another, patiently uncovering the ancient buildings and sifting through the sand for tiny artifacts. Presumably they had been through bad sandstorms before. Were they always this terrified? Or was this some kind of super storm?

“Here it is,” Balik said. “This is it.” And he covered his face with his hands.

The full power of the sandstorm broke over them.

Siferra remained standing at first, staring through an opening in the tarpaulins at the monumental cyclopean city wall across the way, as though simply by keeping her gaze fixed on the site she would be able to spare it from harm. But after a moment that became impossible. Gusts of incredible heat came sweeping down, so ferocious that she thought her hair and even her eyebrows would burst into flame. She turned away, raising one arm to shield her face.

Then came the sand, and all vision was blotted out.

It was like a rainstorm, a downpour of all too solid rain. There was a tremendous thundering sound, not thunder at all but only the drumming of a myriad tiny sand particles against the ground. Within that great sound were other ones, a slithery whispering sound, a jagged scraping sound, a delicate drumming sound. And a terrible howling. Siferra imagined tons of sand cascading down, burying the walls, burying the temples, burying the vast sprawling foundations of the residential zone, burying the camp.

And burying all of them.

She turned away, face to the wall of the cliff, and waited for the end to come. A little to her surprise and chagrin, she found herself sobbing hysterically, sudden deep wails rising from the core of her body. She didn’t want to die. Of course not: who did? But she had never realized until this moment that there might be something worse than dying.

Beklimot, the most famous archaeological site in the world, the oldest known city of mankind, the foundation of civilization, was going to be destroyed—purely as a result of her negligence. Generations of Kalgash’s great archaeologists had worked here in the century and a half since Beklimot’s discovery: first Galdo 221, the greatest of them all, and then Marpin, Stinnupad, Shelbik, Numoin, the whole glorious roster—and now Siferra, who had foolishly left the whole place uncovered while a sandstorm was approaching.

So long as Beklimot had been buried beneath the sands, the ruins had slumbered peacefully for thousands of years, preserved as they had been on the day when its last inhabitants finally yielded to the harshness of the changing climate and abandoned the place. Each archaeologist who had worked there since Galdo’s day had taken care to expose just a small section of the site, and to put up screens and sand-fences to guard against the unlikely but serious danger of a sandstorm. Until now.

She had put up the usual screens and fences too, of course. But not in front of the new digs, not in the sanctuary area where she had focused her investigations. Some of Beklimot’s oldest and finest buildings were there. And she, impatient to begin excavating, carried away by her perpetual buoyant urge to go on and on, had failed to take the most elementary precautions. It hadn’t seemed that way to her at the time, naturally. But now, with the demonic roaring of the sandstorm in her ears, and the sky black with destruction—

Just as well, Siferra thought, that I won’t survive this. And therefore won’t have to read what they’re going to say about me in every book on archaeology that gets published in the next fifty years. “The great site of Beklimot, which yielded unparalleled data about the early development of civilization on Kalgash until its unfortunate destruction as a result of the slipshod excavation practices employed by the young, ambitious Siferra 89 of Saro University—”

“I think it’s ending,” Balik whispered.

“What is?” she said.

“The storm. Listen! It’s getting quiet out there.”

“We must be buried in so much sand that we can’t hear anything, that’s all.”

“No. We aren’t buried, Siferra!” Balik tugged at the tarpaulin in front of them and managed to lift it a little way. Siferra peered out into the open area between the cliff and the wall of the city.

She couldn’t believe her eyes.

What she saw was the clear deep blue of the sky. And the gleam of sunlight. It was only the bleak, chilly white glow of the double suns Tano and Sitha, but just now it was the most beautiful light she ever wanted to see.

The storm had passed through. Everything was calm again.

And where was the sand? Why wasn’t everything entombed in sand?

The city was still visible: the great blocks of the stone wall, the shimmering glitter of the mosaics, the peaked stone roof of the Temple of the Suns. Even most of their tents were still standing, including nearly all of the important ones. Only the camp where the workers lived had been badly damaged, and that could be repaired in a few hours.

Astounded, still not daring to believe it, Siferra stepped out of the shelter and looked around. The ground was clear of loose sand. The hard-baked, tight-packed dark stratum that had formed the surface of the land in the excavation zone could still be seen. It looked different now, abraded in a curious scrubbed way, but it was clear of any deposit the storm might have brought.

Balik said wonderingly, “First came the sand, and then came wind behind it. And the wind picked up all the sand that got dropped on us, picked it up as fast as it fell, and scooped it right on along to the south. A miracle, Siferra. That’s the only thing we can call it. Look—you can see where the ground’s been scraped, where the whole shallow upper layer of ground sand’s been cleaned away by the wind, maybe fifty years’ worth of erosion in five minutes, but—”

Siferra was scarcely listening. She caught Balik by the arm and turned him to the side, away from the main sector of their excavation site.

“Look there,” she said.

“Where? What?”

She pointed. “The Hill of Thombo.”

The broad-shouldered stratigrapher stared. “Gods! It’s been slit right up the middle!”

The Hill of Thombo was an irregular middling-high mound some fifteen minutes’ walk south of the main part of the city. No one had worked it in well over a hundred years, not since the second expedition of the great pioneer Galdo 221, and Galdo hadn’t found anything of significance in it. It was generally considered to be nothing but a midden-heap on which the citizens of old Beklimot had tossed their kitchen garbage—interesting enough of itself, yes, but trivial in comparison with the wonders that abounded everywhere else in the site.

Apparently, though, the Hill of Thombo had taken the fullest brunt of the storm: and what generations of archaeologists had not bothered to do, the violence of the sandstorm had achieved in only a moment. An erratic zigzagging strip had been ripped from the face of the hill, like some terrible wound laying bare much of the interior of its upper slope. And experienced field workers like Siferra and Balik needed only a single glance to understand the importance of what was now exposed.

“A town site under the midden,” Balik murmured.

“More than one, I think. Possibly a series,” Siferra said.

“You think?”

“Look. Look there, on the left.”

Balik whistled. “Isn’t that a wall in crosshatch style, under the corner of that cyclopean foundation?”

“You’ve got it.”

A shiver ran down Siferra’s spine. She turned to Balik and saw that he was as astounded as she was. His eyes were wide, his face was pale.

“In the name of Darkness!” he muttered huskily. “What do we have here, Siferra?”

“I’m not sure. But I’m going to start finding out right this minute.” She looked back at the shelter under the cliff, where Thuvvik and his men still crouched in terror, making holy signs and babbling prayers in low stunned voices as if unable to comprehend that they were safe from the power of the storm. “Thuvvik!” Siferra yelled, gesturing vigorously, almost angrily, at him. “Come on out of there, you and your men! We’ve got work to do!”

3

Harrim 682 was a big beefy man of about fifty, with great slabs of muscle bulging on his arms and chest, and a good thick insulating layer of fat over that. Sheerin, studying him through the window of the hospital room, knew right away that he and Harrim were going to get along.

“I’ve always been partial to people who are, well, oversized,” the psychologist explained to Kelaritan and Cubello. “Having been one myself for most of my life, you understand. Not that I’ve ever been a muscleman like this one.” Sheerin laughed pleasantly. “I’m blubber through and through. Except for here, of course,” he added, tapping the side of his head.—“What kind of work does this Harrim do?”

“Longshoreman,” Kelaritan said. “Thirty-five years on the Jonglor docks. He won a ticket to the opening day of the Tunnel of Mystery in a lottery. Took his whole family. They were all affected to some degree, but he was the worst. That’s very embarrassing to him, that a great strong man like him should have such a total breakdown.”

“I can imagine,” Sheerin said. “I’ll take that into account. Let’s talk with him, shall we?”

They entered the room.

Harrim was sitting up, staring without interest at a spinner cube that was casting light in half a dozen colors on the wall opposite his bed. He smiled affably enough when he saw Kelaritan, but seemed to stiffen when he noticed the lawyer Cubello walking behind the hospital director, and his face turned completely glacial at the sight of Sheerin.

“Who’s he?” he asked Kelaritan. “Another lawyer?”

“Not at all. This is Sheerin 501, from Saro University. He’s here to help you get well.”

“Huh,” Harrim snorted. “Another double-brain! What good have any of you done for me?”

“Absolutely right,” Sheerin said. “The only one who can really help Harrim get well is Harrim, eh? You know that and I know that, and maybe I can persuade the hospital people here to see that too.” He sat down on the edge of the bed. It creaked beneath the psychologist’s bulk. “At least they have decent beds in this place, though. They must be pretty good if they can hold the two of us at the same time.—Don’t like lawyers, I gather? You and me both, friend.”

“Miserable troublemakers is all they are,” Harrim said. “Full of tricks, they are. They make you say things you don’t mean, telling you that they can help you if you say such-and-such, and then they end up using your own words against you. That’s the way it seems to me, anyway.”

Sheerin looked up at Kelaritan. “Is it absolutely necessary that Cubello be here for this interview? I think it might go a little more smoothly without him.”

“I am authorized to take part in any—” Cubello began stiffly.

“Please,” Kelaritan said, and the word had more force than politeness behind it. “Sheerin’s right. Three visitors at once may be too many for Harrim—today, anyway. And you’ve already heard his story.”

“Well—” Cubello said, his face dark. But after a moment he turned and went out of the room.

Sheerin surreptitiously signaled to Kelaritan that he should take a seat in the far corner.

Then, turning to the man in the bed, he smiled his most agreeable smile and said, “It’s been pretty rough, hasn’t it?”

“You said it.”

“How long have you been in here?”

Harrim shrugged. “I guess a week, two weeks. Or maybe a little more. I don’t know, I guess. Ever since—”

He fell silent.

“The Jonglor Exposition?” Sheerin prompted.

“Since I took that ride, yes.”

“It’s been a little more than just a week or two,” Sheerin said.

“Has it?” Harrim’s eyes took on a glazed look. He didn’t want to hear about how long he’d been in the hospital.

Changing tack, Sheerin said, “I bet you never dreamed a day would come when you’d tell yourself you’d be glad to get back to the docks, eh?”

With a grin, Harrim said, “You can say that again! Boy, what I wouldn’t give to be slinging those crates around tomorrow.” He looked at his hands. Big, powerful hands, the fingers thick, flattened at the tips, one of them crooked from some injury long ago. “I’m getting soft, laying here all this time. By the time I get back to work I won’t be any good any more.”

“What’s keeping you here, then? Why don’t you just get up and put your street clothes on and get out of here?”

Kelaritan, from the corner, made a warning sound. Sheerin gestured at him to keep quiet.

Harrim gave Sheerin a startled look. “Just get up and walk out?”

“Why not? You aren’t a prisoner.”

“But if I did that—if I did that—”

The dockworker’s voice trailed off.

“If you did that, what?” Sheerin asked.

For a long while Harrim was silent, face downcast, brow heavily knitted. Several times he began to speak but cut himself off. The psychologist waited patiently. Finally Harrim said, in a tight, husky, half-strangled tone, “I can’t go out there. Because of the—because—because of the—” He struggled with himself. “The Darkness,” he said.

“The Darkness,” said Sheerin.

The word hung there between them like a tangible thing.

Harrim looked troubled by it, even abashed. Sheerin remembered that among people of Harrim’s class it was a word that was rarely used in polite company. To Harrim it was, if not actually obscene, then in some sense sacrilegious. No one on Kalgash liked to think about Darkness; but the less education one had, the more threatening it was to let one’s mind dwell on the possibility that the six friendly suns might somehow totally disappear from the sky all at once, that utter blackness might reign. The idea was unthinkable—literally unthinkable.

“The Darkness, yes,” Harrim said. “What I’m afraid of is that—that if I go outside I’ll find myself in the Darkness again. That’s what it is. The Dark, all over again.”

“Complete symptom reversal in the last few weeks,” Kelaritan said in a low voice. “At first it was just the opposite. You couldn’t get him to go indoors unless you sedated him. A powerful case of claustrophobia first, that is, and then after some time the total switch to claustrophilia. We think it’s a sign that he’s healing.”

“Maybe so,” Sheerin said. “But if you don’t mind—”

To Harrim he said, gently, “You were one of the first to ride through the Tunnel of Mystery, weren’t you?”

“On the very first day.” A note of pride came into Harrim’s voice. “There was a city lottery. A hundred people won free rides. There must have been a million tickets sold, and mine was the fifth one picked. Me, my wife, my son, my two daughters, we all went on it. The very first day.”

“Do you want to tell me a little about what it was like?”

“Well,” Harrim said. “It was—” He paused. “I never was in Darkness ever, you know. Not even a dark room. Not ever. It wasn’t something that interested me. We always had a godlight in the bedroom when I was growing up, and when I got married and had my own house I just naturally had one there too. My wife feels the same way. Darkness, it isn’t natural. It isn’t anything that was meant to be.”

“Yet you entered the lottery.”

“Well, this was just once. And it was like entertainment, you know? Something special. A holiday treat. The big exposition, the five hundredth year of the city, right? Everybody was buying tickets. And I figured, this must be something different, this must be something really good, or why else would they have built it? So I bought the ticket. And when I won, everybody at the docks was jealous, they all wished they had the ticket, some of them even wanted to buy it from me—‘No, sir,’ I told them, ‘not for sale, me and my family, this is our ticket—’ ”

“So you were excited about taking the ride in the Tunnel?”

“Yeah. You bet.”

“And when you were actually doing it? When the ride started? What did that feel like?”

“Well—” Harrim began. He moistened his lips, and his eyes seemed to look off into a great distance. “There were these little cars, you see, nothing but slats inside for seats, and the cars were open on top. You got in, six people in each one, except they let just the five of us go together, because we were all one family, and it was almost enough to fill a whole car without putting a stranger in with us. And then you heard music and the car started to move into the Tunnel. Very slow, it went, not like a car on the highway would, just creeping along. And then you were inside the Tunnel. And then—then—”

Sheerin waited again.

“Go on,” he said after a minute, when Harrim showed no sign of resuming. “Tell me about it. I really want to know what it was like.”

“Then the Darkness,” Harrim said hoarsely. His big hands were trembling at the recollection. “It came down on you like they dropped a giant hat over you, you know? And everything turned black all at once.” The trembling was becoming a violent tremor. “I heard my son Trinit laugh. He’s a wise guy, Trinit is. He thought the Darkness was something dirty, I bet you. So he was laughing, and I told him to shut up, and then one of my daughters began to cry a little, and I told her it was okay, that there was nothing to worry about, that it was just going to be for fifteen minutes, and she ought to look at it like it was a treat, not something to be scared of. And then—then—”

Silence again. This time Sheerin didn’t prompt.

“Then I felt it closing in on me. Everything was Darkness—Darkness—you can’t imagine what it was like—you can’t imagine—how black it was—how black—the Darkness—the Darkness—”

Suddenly Harrim shuddered, and great racking sobs came from him, almost like convulsions.

“The Darkness—oh, God, the Darkness—!”

“Easy, man. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. Look at the sunlight! Four suns today, Harrim. Easy, man.”

“Let me take care of this,” Kelaritan said. He had come rushing to the bedside when the sobbing began. A needle glinted in his hand. He touched it to Harrim’s burly arm, and there was a brief whirr of sound. Harrim grew calm almost at once. He slumped back against his pillow, smiling glassily.—“We need to leave him now,” said Kelaritan.

“But I’ve hardly only begun to—”

“He won’t make any sense again for hours, now. We might as well go for lunch.”

“Lunch, yes,” Sheerin said halfheartedly. To his own surprise he felt almost no appetite at all. He could scarcely remember a time when he had felt that way. “And he’s one of your strongest ones?”

“One of the most stable, yes.”

“What are the others like, then?”

“Some are completely catatonic. Others need sedation at least half the time. In the first stage, as I said, they don’t want to come in out of the open. When they emerged from the Tunnel they seemed to be in perfect order, you understand, except that they had developed instant claustrophobia. They would refuse to go into buildings—any buildings, including palaces, mansions, apartment houses, tenements, huts, shacks, lean-tos, and tents.”

Sheerin felt a profound sense of shock. He had done his doctoral work in darkness-induced disorders. That was why they had asked him to come here. But he had never heard of anything as extreme as this. “They wouldn’t go indoors at all? Where’d they sleep?”

“In the open.”

“Did anyone try to force them inside?”

“Oh, they did, of course they did. Whereupon these people went into violent hysterics. Some of them even became suicidal—they’d run up to a wall and hit their heads against it, things like that. Once you did get them inside, you couldn’t keep them there without a straitjacket and a good stiff injection of some strong sedative.”

Sheerin looked at the big longshoreman, who was sleeping now, and shook his head.

“The poor devils.”

“That was the first phase. Harrim’s in the second phase now, the claustrophilic one. He’s adapted to being here, and the whole syndrome has swung completely around. He knows that it’s safe in the hospital: bright lights all the time. But even though he can see the suns shining through the window he’s afraid to go outside. He thinks it’s dark out there.”

“But that’s absurd,” Sheerin said. “It’s never dark out there.”

The instant he said it, he felt like a fool.

Kelaritan rubbed it in all the same, though. “We all realize that, Dr. Sheerin. Any sane person does. But the trouble with the people who have undergone trauma in the Tunnel of Mystery is that they are no longer sane.”

“Yes. So I gather,” said Sheerin shamefacedly.

“You can meet some of our other patients later today,” Kelaritan said. “Perhaps they’ll provide you with some other perspectives on the problem. And then tomorrow we’ll take you over to see the Tunnel itself. We have it closed down, of course, now that we know the difficulties, but the city fathers are very eager to find some way to reopen it. The investment, I understand, was immense. But we should have lunch first, yes, Doctor?”

“Lunch, yes,” said Sheerin once again, even less enthusiastically than before.

4

The great dome of the Saro University Observatory, rising majestically to dominate the forested slopes of Observatory Mount, glinted brilliantly in the light of late afternoon. The small red orb of Dovim had already slipped beyond the horizon, but Onos was still high in the west, and Trey and Patru, crossing the eastern sky on a sharp diagonal, etched shining trails of brightness along the dome’s immense face.

Beenay 25, a slender, agile young man with a quick, alert way of carrying himself, darted briskly about the small apartment below the Observatory in Saro City that he shared with his contract-mate, Raissta 717, gathering his books and papers together.

Raissta, sprawled comfortably on the worn green upholstery of their little couch, looked up and frowned.

“Going somewhere, Beenay?”

“To the Observatory.”

“It’s so early, though. You usually don’t go there until after Onos sets. And that won’t be for hours yet.”

“I’ve got an appointment today, Raissta.”

She gave him a warm, seductive look. They were both graduate students in their late twenties, each an assistant professor, he in astronomy, she in biology, and they had been contractmates only seven months. Their relationship was still in its first bloom of excitement. But problems had already arisen. He did his work in the late hours, when usually only a few of the lesser suns were in the sky. She was at her freshest and best in the period of high daylight, under the golden glow of bright Onos.

Lately he had spent more and more time at the Observatory, and it was getting so that they were almost never awake at the same time. Beenay knew how trying that was for her. It was trying for him. All the same, the work he was doing on Kalgash’s orbit was demanding stuff, and it was leading him into ever more difficult regions that he found both challenging and frightening. If only Raissta would be patient just another few weeks—a month or two, maybe—

“Can’t you stay here a little while longer this evening?” she asked.

His heart sank. Raissta was giving him her come-here-and-let’s-play look. Not easy to resist, nor did he really want to. But Yimot and Faro would be waiting.

“I told you. I have an—”

“—appointment, yes. Well, so do I. With you.”

“Me?”

“You said yesterday you might have some free time this afternoon. I was counting on that, you know. I cleared a whole swatch of free time of my own—did my lab work in the morning, as a matter of fact, just so—”

Worse and worse, Beenay thought. He did remember saying something about this afternoon, completely overlooking the fact that he had arranged to meet the two younger students.

She was pouting now, and somehow smiling at the same time, a trick that she managed to perfection. Beenay wanted to forget all about Faro and Yimot and go to her right away. But if he did that, he might be an hour late for his appointment with them, which wasn’t fair. Two hours, maybe.

And he had to admit to himself that he was desperately eager to know whether their calculations had confirmed his own.

It was practically an even struggle: the powerful appeal of Raissta on the one hand, and the desire to put his mind at rest concerning a major scientific issue on the other. And though he had an obligation to be on time for his appointment, Beenay realized in some confusion that he had made an appointment of sorts with Raissta too—and that was a matter not only of obligation but of delight.

“Look,” he said, going to the couch and taking her hand in his. “I can’t be in two places at once, okay? And when I told you what I did yesterday, it had slipped my mind that Faro and Yimot would be coming to the Observatory to see me. But I’ll make a deal with you. Let me get up there and take care of the thing with them, and then I’ll skip out and be back here a couple of hours from now. How does that sound?”

“You’re supposed to be photographing those asteroids this evening,” she said, pouting again, and not smiling at all this time.

“Damn! Well, I’ll ask Thilanda to do the camera work for me, or Hikkinan. Or somebody. I’ll be back by Onos-set, that’s a promise.”

“A promise?”

He squeezed her hand and gave her a quick sly grin. “One that I’ll actually keep. You can bet on that. Okay? You aren’t angry?”

“Well—”

“I’ll get Faro and Yimot out of the way as fast as I can.”

“You’d better.” As he began to assemble his papers again she said, “What is this business with Faro and Yimot that’s so terribly important, anyway?”

“Lab work. Gravitational studies.”

“Doesn’t sound all that important to me, I have to say.”

“I hope it turns out not to be important to anybody,” Beenay replied. “But that’s something I need to find out right now.”

“I wish I knew what you were talking about.”

He glanced at his watch and took a deep breath. He could stay here another minute or two, he supposed. “You know I’ve been working lately on the problem of the orbital motion of Kalgash around Onos, don’t you?”

“Of course.”

“All right. A couple of weeks ago I turned up an anomaly. My orbital numbers didn’t fit the Theory of Universal Gravitation. So I checked them, naturally, but they came out the same way the second time. And the third. And the fourth. Always the same anomaly, no matter what method of calculation I used.”

“Oh, Beenay, I’m so very sorry to hear that. You’ve worked so hard on this, I know, and to discover that your conclusions aren’t right—”

“What if they are, though?”

“But you said—”

“I don’t know if my math is right or wrong, at this point. As far as I can tell it is, but it doesn’t seem conceivable that that can be so. I’ve checked and checked and checked, and I get the same result each time, with all sorts of cross-checks built in to tell me that I haven’t made an error in computation. But the result that I’m getting is an impossible one. The only explanation I can come up with is that I’m starting from a cockeyed assumption and doing everything else right from then on, in which case I’m going to come up with the same wrong answer no matter which method of checking my calculations I use. I might just be blind to a fundamental problem at the base of my whole set of postulates. If you start with the wrong figure for planetary mass, for instance, you’ll get the wrong orbit for your planet no matter how accurate the rest of your calculations may be. Are you following me?”

“So far, yes.”

“Therefore I’ve given the problem to Faro and Yimot, without really telling them what it’s all about, and asked them to calculate the whole thing from scratch. They’re bright kids. I can count on them to do decent math. And if they end up with the same conclusion I did, even though they’re coming at it from an angle that completely excludes whatever error I might have built into my own line of reasoning, then I’ll have to admit that my figures are right after all.”

“But they can’t be right, Beenay. Didn’t you say that your findings are contrary to the Universal Law of Gravitation?”

“What if the Universal Law is wrong, Raissta?”

“What? What?”

She stared at him. There was utter bewilderment in her eyes.

“You see the problem?” Beenay asked. “Why I need to know right away what Yimot and Faro have found?”

“No,” she said. “No, I don’t understand at all.”

“We can talk about it later. I promise.”

“Beenay—” Half in despair.

“I’ve got to go. But I’ll be back as fast as I can. It’s a promise, Raissta! A promise!”

5

Siferra paused only long enough to snatch a pick and a brush from the equipment tent, which had been knocked askew by the sandstorm but was still reasonably intact. Then she went scrambling up the side of the Hill of Thombo, with Balik ponderously hauling himself right behind her. Young Eilis 18 had appeared from the shelter by the cliff now, and he stood below, staring up at them. Thuvvik and his corps of workmen were a little farther back, watching, scratching their heads in puzzlement.

“Watch out,” Siferra called to Balik, when she had reached the beginning of the open gouge in the hill that the sandstorm had carved. “I’m going to run a trial cut.”

“Shouldn’t we photograph it first, and—”

“I told you to watch out,” she said sharply, as she dug her pick into the hillside and sent a shower of loose soil tumbling down onto his head and shoulders.

He jumped aside, spitting out sand.

“Sorry,” she said, without looking down. She cut into the hillside a second time, widening the storm gouge. It wasn’t the best of technique, she knew, to be slashing away like this. Her mentor, grand old Shelbik, was probably whirling in his grave. And the founder of their science, the revered Galdo 221, no doubt was looking down from his exalted place in the pantheon of archaeologists and shaking his head sadly.

On the other hand, Shelbik and Galdo had had chances of their own to uncover whatever lay in the Hill of Thombo, and they hadn’t done it. If she was a little too excited now, a little too hasty in her attack, well, they would simply have to forgive her. Now that the seeming calamity of the sandstorm had been transformed into serendipitous good fortune, now that the apparent ruination of her career had turned unexpectedly into the making of it, Siferra could not hold herself back from finding out what was buried here. Could not. Absolutely could not.

“Look—” she muttered, knocking a great mass of overburden away and going to work with her brush. “We’ve got a charred layer here, right at the foundation level of the cyclopean city. The place must have burned clear down to the stone. But you look a little lower on the hill and you can see that the cross-hatch-style town is sitting right under the fire line—the cyclopean people simply plunked this whole monumental foundation down on top of the older city—”

“Siferra—” said Balik uneasily.

“I know, I know. But let me at least begin to see what’s here. Just a quick probe now, and then we can go back to doing things the proper way.” She felt as though she were perspiring from head to toe. Her eyes were starting to ache, so fiercely was she staring. “Look, will you? We’re way up on top of the hill, and we’ve already got two towns. And it’s my guess that if we unzip the mound a little further, someplace around where we’d expect to find the foundations of the crosshatch people, we’ll—yes! Yes! There! By Darkness, will you look at that, Balik! Just look!”

She pointed triumphantly with the tip of her pick.

Another dark line of charcoal was apparent, near the foundations of the crosshatch-style building. The second highest level had also been destroyed by fire just as the cyclopean one had. And from the way things looked, it was sitting atop the ruins of an even older village.

Balik now had caught her fervor too. Together they worked to lay bare the outer face of the hill, midway between ground level and the shattered summit. Eilis called up to them to ask what on Kalgash they were doing, but they ignored him. Aflame with eagerness and curiosity, they cut swiftly through the ancient packing of windblown sand, moving three inches farther down the hill, six, eight—

“Do you see what I see?” Siferra cried, after a time.

“Another village, yes. But what kind of style of architecture is that, would you say?”

She shrugged. “It’s a new one on me.”

“And me too. Something very archaic, that’s for sure.”

“No question of it. But I think it’s not the most archaic thing we’ve got here, not by plenty.” Siferra peered down toward the distant ground. “You know what I think, Balik? We’ve got five towns here, six, seven, maybe eight, each one right on top of the next. You and I may spend the rest of our lives digging in this hill!”

They looked at each other in wonder.

“We’d better get down and take some photos now,” he said quietly.

“Yes. Yes, we’d better do that.” She felt almost calm, suddenly. Enough of this furious hacking and slashing, she thought. It was time to go back to being a professional now. Time to approach this hill like a scholar, not a treasure-hunter or a journalist.

Let Balik take his photographs, first, from every side. Then take the soil samples at the surface level, and put in the first marker stakes, and go through all the rest of the standard preliminary procedures.

Then a trial trench, a bold shaft right through the hill, to give us some idea of what we’ve really got here.

And then, she told herself, we’ll peel this hill layer by layer. We’ll take it apart, carving away each stratum to look at the one below it, until we’re down to virgin soil. And by the time we’re done with that, she vowed, we’ll know more about the prehistory of Kalgash than all my predecessors put together have been able to learn since archaeologists first came here to Beklimot to dig.

6

Kelaritan said, “We’ve arranged everything for your inspection of the Tunnel of Mystery, Dr. Sheerin. If you’ll be down in front of your hotel in about an hour, our car will pick you up.”

“Right,” Sheerin said. “See you in about an hour.”

The plump psychologist put down the phone and stared solemnly at himself in the mirror opposite his bed.

The face that looked back at him was a troubled one. He seemed so wasted and haggard that he tugged at his cheeks to assure himself that they were still there. Yes, there they were, his familiar fleshy cheeks. He hadn’t lost an ounce. The haggardness was all in his mind.

Sheerin had slept badly—had scarcely slept at all, so it seemed to him now—and yesterday he had only picked at his food. Nor did he feel in the least hungry now. The thought of going downstairs for breakfast had no appeal whatever. That was an alien concept to him, not to feel hungry.

Was the bleakness of his mood, he wondered, the result of his interviews with Kelaritan’s hapless patients yesterday?

Or was he simply terrified of going through the Tunnel of Mystery?

Certainly seeing those three patients hadn’t been easy. It was a long time since he’d done any actual clinical work, and obviously his sojourn among the academics at Saro University had attenuated the professional detachment that allows members of the healing arts to confront the ill without being overwhelmed by compassion and sorrow. Sheerin was surprised at that, how tenderhearted he seemed to have become, how thin-skinned.

That first one, Harrim, the longshoreman—he looked tough enough to withstand anything. And yet fifteen minutes of Darkness on his trip through the Tunnel of Mystery had reduced him to such a state that merely to relive the trauma in memory sent him into babbling hysteria. How terribly sad that was.

And then the other two, in the afternoon—they had been in even worse shape. Gistin 190, the schoolteacher, that lovely frail woman with the dark, intelligent eyes—she hadn’t been able to stop sobbing for a moment, and though she was able to speak clearly and well, at least in the beginning, her story had degenerated into mere incoherent blurtings within a few sentences. And Chimmilit 97, the high school athlete, obviously a perfect physical specimen—Sheerin wasn’t going quickly to forget how the boy had reacted to the sight of the afternoon sky when Sheerin opened the blinds in his room. There was Onos blazing away in the west, and all that huge handsome boy could manage to say was, “The Darkness—the Darkness—” before he turned away and tried to scuttle down under his bed!

The Darkness—the Darkness—

And now, Sheerin thought gloomily, it’s my turn to take a ride in the Tunnel of Mystery.

Of course, he could simply refuse. There was nothing in his consulting contract with the Municipality of Jonglor that required him to risk his sanity. He’d be able to render a valid enough opinion without actually sticking his neck into peril.

But something in him rebelled at such timidity. His professional pride, if nothing else, was pushing him toward the Tunnel. He was here to study the phenomenon of mass hysteria, and to help these people work out ways not only of healing the present victims but of preventing recurrences of these tragedies. How could he deign to explain what had happened to the Tunnel’s victims if he didn’t make a close study of the cause of their disturbances? He had to. It would be sheer malfeasance to back out.

Nor did he want anyone, not even these strangers here in Jonglor, to be able to accuse him of cowardice. He remembered the taunts of his childhood: “Fatty is a coward! Fatty is a coward!” All because he hadn’t wanted to climb a tree that was obviously beyond the capabilities of his heavy, ill-coordinated body.

But Fatty wasn’t a coward. Sheerin knew that. He was content with himself: a sane, well-balanced man. He simply didn’t want other people making incorrect assumptions about him because of his unheroic appearance.

Besides, fewer than one out of ten of those who had gone through the Tunnel of Mystery had come out of it showing any symptoms of emotional disturbance. And those people must have been vulnerable in some special way. Precisely because he was so sane, Sheerin told himself, because he was so well balanced, he had nothing to fear.

Nothing—

To—

Fear—

He kept repeating those words to himself until he felt almost calm.

Even so, Sheerin was something other than his customary jolly self as he went downstairs to wait for the hospital car to pick him up.

Kelaritan was there, and Cubello, and a striking-looking woman named Varitta 312, who was introduced to him as one of the engineers who had designed the Tunnel. Sheerin greeted them all with hearty handshakes and a broad smile that he hoped seemed convincing.

“A nice day for a trip to the amusement park,” he said, trying to sound jovial.

Kelaritan looked at him oddly. “I’m glad you feel that way. Did you sleep well, Dr. Sheerin?”

“Very well, thanks.—As well as could be expected, I should say. After seeing those unhappy people yesterday.”

Cubello said, “You aren’t optimistic about their chances of recovery, then?”

“I’d like to be,” Sheerin told the lawyer ambiguously.

The car moved smoothly down the street.

“It’s about a twenty-minute drive to the Centennial Exposition grounds,” Kelaritan said. “The Exposition itself will be crowded—it is every day—but we’ve had a big section of the amusement area roped off so that we won’t be disturbed. The Tunnel of Mystery itself, as you know, has been shut down since the full extent of the troubles became apparent.”

“You mean the deaths?”

“Obviously we couldn’t allow the ride to remain open after that,” Cubello said. “But you must realize that we were considering shutting down much earlier. It was a question of determining whether the people who appeared to have been disturbed by their trips through the Tunnel were actually suffering harm or were merely falling in with popular hysteria.”

“Of course,” Sheerin said, his tone a dry one. “The City Council wouldn’t have wanted to close down such a profitable attraction except for a really good reason. Such as having a bunch of the customers drop dead from fright, I suppose.”

The atmosphere in the car became exceedingly chilly.

Kelaritan said, after a time, “The Tunnel was not only a profitable attraction but also one that nearly everyone who attended the Exposition was eager to experience, Dr. Sheerin. I understand that thousands of people had to be turned away every day.”

“Even though it was obvious from the very first day that some of those who rode through the Tunnel, like Harrim and his family, were coming out of it in psychotic states?”

“Especially because of that, Doctor,” Cubello said.

“What?”

“Forgive me if I seem to be explaining your own specialty to you,” the lawyer said unctuously. “But I’d like to remind you that there’s a fascination in being frightened when it’s part of a game. A baby is born with three instinctive fears: of loud noises, of falling, and of the total absence of light. That’s why it’s considered so funny to jump at someone and shout ‘Boo!’ That’s why it’s such fun to ride a roller coaster. And that’s why the Tunnel of Mystery was something everybody wanted to see at first hand. People came out of that Darkness shaking, breathless, half dead with fear, but they kept on paying to get in. The fact that a few of those who took the ride came out of it in a rather intense state of shock only added to the appeal.”

“Because most people assumed that they’d be tough enough to withstand whatever it was that had shaken up the others so much, is that it?”

“Exactly, Doctor.”

“And when some people came out not just highly upset but actually dead of fright? Even if the Exposition managers couldn’t see their way clear to shutting the thing down after that, I’d imagine that potential customers would have become few and far between, once the news of the deaths got around.”

“Ah, quite the contrary,” said Cubello, smiling triumphantly. “The same psychological mechanism operated, though even more strongly. After all, if people with weak hearts wanted to go through the Tunnel, it was at their own risk—why be surprised at what happened to them? The City Council discussed the whole thing at great length and agreed finally to put a doctor in the front office and have every customer undergo a physical examination before getting into the car. That actually boosted ticket sales.”

“In that case,” Sheerin said, “why is the Tunnel shut down now? From what you’ve told me, I’d expect it to be doing terrific business, lines stretching from Jonglor all the way to Khunabar, mobs of people going in the front way and a steady stream of corpses being hauled out the back.”

“Dr. Sheerin!”

“Well, why isn’t it still open, if even the deaths didn’t trouble anybody?”

“The liability insurance problem,” Cubello said.

“Ah. Of course.”

“Despite your grisly little turn of phrase just now, actual deaths were very few and far between—three, I think, or maybe five. The families of those who passed away were given adequate indemnities and the cases were closed. What ultimately became a problem for us was not the death rate but the survival rate among those who underwent traumatic disturbance. It began to become clear that some might require hospitalization for prolonged periods—an ongoing expense, a constant financial drain on the municipality and its insurers.”

“I see,” Sheerin said morosely. “If they simply fall down dead, it’s a one-shot cost. Buy off the relatives and that’s that. But if they linger for months or years in a public institution, the price can get to be too high.”

“Perhaps a little harshly put,” said Cubello. “But that is essentially the calculation the City Council was forced to make.”

“Dr. Sheerin seems a little testy this morning,” Kelaritan said to the lawyer. “Possibly the idea of going through the Tunnel himself is troublesome to him.”

“Absolutely not,” said Sheerin at once.

“Of course you understand that there is no real necessity for you to—”

“There is,” Sheerin said.

There was silence in the car. Sheerin peered somberly at the changing landscape, the curious angular scaly-barked trees, the bushes with flowers of odd metallic hues, the peculiarly high and narrow houses with pointed eaves. He had rarely been this far north before. There was something very disagreeable about the look of the entire province—and about this crew of mealy-mouthed cynical people, too. He told himself that he’d be glad to get home to Saro again.

But first—the Tunnel of Mystery—

The Jonglor Centennial Exposition was spread over a vast area of parkland just east of the city. It was a mini-city in itself, and quite spectacular in its own way, Sheerin thought. He saw fountains, arcades, shining pink and turquoise towers of iridescent stone-hard plastic. Great exhibit halls offered art treasures from every province of Kalgash, industrial displays, the latest scientific marvels. Wherever he looked there was something unusual and beautiful to engage his eye. Thousands of people, perhaps hundreds of thousands, strolled its glittering, elegant boulevards and avenues.

Sheerin had always heard that the Jonglor Centennial Exposition was one of the marvels of the world, and he saw now that it was true. To be able to visit it was a rare privilege. It was open only once every hundred years, for a three-year run, to commemorate the anniversary of the city’s founding—and this, Jonglor’s Fifth Centennial Exposition, was said to be the greatest of all. Indeed he felt sudden buoyant excitement, such as he had not known in a long while, as he traveled through its well-manicured grounds. He hoped that he’d have some time later in the week to explore it on his own.

But his mood changed abruptly as the car swung around the perimeter of the Exposition and brought them to an entrance in back that led to the amusement area. Here, just as Kelaritan had said, great sections were roped off; and sullen crowds peered across the ropes in obvious annoyance as Cubello, Kelaritan, and Varitta 312 led him toward the Tunnel of Mystery. Sheerin could hear them muttering angrily, a low harsh growling that he found unsettling and even a little intimidating.

He realized that the lawyer had told the truth: these people were angry because the Tunnel was closed.

They’re jealous, Sheerin thought in wonder. They know we’re going to the Tunnel, and they want to go too. Despite everything that’s happened there.

“We can go in this way,” Varitta said.

The facade of the Tunnel was an enormous pyramidal structure, tapering away at the sides in an eerie, dizzying perspective. In the center of it was a huge six-sided entrance gate, dramatically outlined in scarlet and gold. Bars had been drawn across it. Varitta produced a key and unlocked a small door to the left of the facade, and they stepped through.

Inside, everything seemed much more ordinary. Sheerin saw a series of metal railings no doubt designed to contain the lines of people waiting to board the ride. Beyond that was a platform much like that in any railway station, with a string of small open cars waiting there. And beyond that—

Darkness.

Cubello said, “If you don’t mind signing this first, please, Doctor—”

Sheerin stared at the paper the lawyer had handed him. It was full of words, blurred, dancing about.

“What is this?”

“A release. The standard form.”

“Yes. Of course.” Airily Sheerin scrawled his name without even trying to read the paper.

You are not afraid, he told himself. You fear nothing at all.

Varitta 312 put a small device in his hand. “An abort switch,” she explained. “The full ride lasts fifteen minutes, but you just have to press this green panel here as soon as you’ve been inside long enough to have learned what you need to know—or in case you begin to feel uncomfortable—and lights will come on. Your car will go quickly to the far end of the Tunnel and circle back to the station.”

“Thank you,” Sheerin said. “I doubt that I’ll need it.”

“But you should have it. Just in case.”

“It’s my plan to experience the ride to the fullest,” he told her, enjoying his own pomposity.

But there was such a thing as foolhardiness, he reminded himself. He didn’t intend to use the abort switch, but it was probably unwise not to take it.

Just in case.

He stepped out on the platform. Kelaritan and Cubello were looking at him in an all too transparent way. He could practically hear them thinking, This fat old fool is going to turn to jelly in there. Well, let them think it.

Varitta had disappeared. No doubt she had gone to turn on the Tunnel mechanism.

Yes: there she was now, in a control booth high up to the right, signaling that everything was ready.

“If you’ll board the car, Doctor—” Kelaritan said.

“Of course. Of course.”

Fewer than one out of ten experienced harmful effects. Very likely they were unusually vulnerable to Darkness disorders to begin with. I am not. I am a very stable individual.

He entered the car. There was a safety belt; he strapped it around his waist, adjusting it with some difficulty to his girth. The car began to roll forward, slowly, very slowly.

Darkness was waiting for him.

Fewer than one out of ten. Fewer than one out of ten.

He understood the Darkness syndrome. That would protect him, he was sure: his understanding. Even though all of mankind had an instinctive fear of the absence of light, that did not mean that the absence of light was of itself harmful.

What was harmful, Sheerin knew, was one’s reaction to the absence of light. The thing to do is to stay calm. Darkness is nothing but darkness, a change of external circumstances. We are conditioned to abhor it because we live in a world where darkness is unnatural, where there is always light, the light of the many suns. At any time there might be as many as four suns shining at once; usually there were three in the sky, and at no time were there ever less than two—and the light of any of them was sufficient all by itself to hold back the Darkness.

The Darkness—

The Darkness—

The Darkness!

Sheerin was in the Tunnel now. Behind him the last vestige of light disappeared, and he peered into an utter void. There was nothing ahead of him: nothing. A pit. An abyss. A zone of total lightlessness. And he was tumbling headlong into it.

He felt sweat breaking out all over him.

His knees began to shake. His forehead throbbed. He held up his hand and was unable to see it in front of his face.

Abort abort abort abort

No. Absolutely not.

He sat upright, back rigid, eyes wide open, gazing stolidly into the nothingness through which he plunged. On and on, ever deeper. Primordial fears bubbled and hissed in the depths of his soul, and he forced them back down and away.

The suns are still shining outside the Tunnel, he told himself.

This is only temporary. In fourteen minutes and thirty seconds I’ll be back out there.

Fourteen minutes and twenty seconds.

Fourteen minutes and ten seconds.

Fourteen minutes—

Was he moving at all, though? He couldn’t tell. Maybe he wasn’t. The car’s mechanism was silent; and he had no reference points. What if I’m stuck? he wondered. Just sitting here in the dark, no way to tell where I am, what’s happening, how much time is passing? Fifteen minutes, twenty, half an hour? Until I’ve passed whatever limit my sanity can stand, and then—

There’s always the abort switch, though.

But suppose it doesn’t work? What if I press it and the lights don’t come on?

I could test it, I suppose. Just to see—

Fatty is a coward! Fatty is a coward!

No. No. Don’t touch it. Once you turn the lights on you won’t be able to turn them off again. You mustn’t use the abort switch, or they’ll know—they’ll all know—

Fatty is a coward, Fatty is a coward—

Suddenly, astonishingly, he hurled the abort switch into the darkness. There was a tiny sound as it fell—somewhere. Then silence again. His hand felt terribly empty.

The Darkness—

The Darkness—

There was no end to it. He was tumbling through an infinite abyss. Falling and falling and falling into the night, the endless night, the all-devouring black—

Breathe deeply. Stay calm.

What if there’s permanent mental damage?

Stay calm, he told himself. You’ll be all right. You’ve got maybe eleven minutes more of this at the worst, maybe only six or seven. The suns are shining out there. Six or seven minutes and you’ll never be in Darkness again, not if you live to be a thousand.

The Darkness—

Oh, God, the Darkness—

Calm. Calm. You’re a very stable man, Sheerin. You’re extremely sane. You were sane when you went into this thing and you’ll be sane when you come out.

Tick. Tick. Tick. Every second gets you closer to the exit. Or does it? This ride may never end. I could be in here forever. Tick. Tick. Tick. Am I moving? Do I have five minutes left, or five seconds, or is this still the first minute?

Tick. Tick.

Why don’t they let me out? Can’t they tell how I’m suffering in here?

They don’t want to let you out. They’ll never let you out. They’re going to—

Suddenly, a stabbing pain between his eyes. An explosion of agony in his skull.

What’s that?

Light!

Could it be? Yes. Yes.

Thank God. Light, yes! Thank any god that might ever have existed!

He was at the end of the Tunnel! He was coming back to the station! It must be. Yes. Yes. His heartbeat, which had become a panicky thunder, was starting to return to normal. His eyes, adjusting now to the return of normal conditions, began to focus on familiar things, blessed things, the stanchions, the platform, the little window in the control booth—

Cubello, Kelaritan, watching him.

He felt ashamed now of his cowardice. Pull yourself together, Sheerin. It wasn’t so bad, really. You’re all right. You aren’t lying in the bottom of the car sucking your thumb and whimpering. It was scary, it was terrifying, but it didn’t destroy you—it wasn’t actually anything you couldn’t handle—

“Here we go. Give us your hand, Doctor. Up—up—”

They hauled him to a standing position and steadied him as he clambered out of the car. Sheerin sucked breath deep down into his lungs. He ran his hand across his forehead, wiping away the streaming perspiration.

“The little abort switch,” he murmured. “I seem to have lost it somewhere—”

“How are you, Doctor?” Kelaritan asked. “How was it?”

Sheerin teetered. The hospital director caught him by the arm, steadying him, but Sheerin indignantly brushed him away. He wasn’t going to let them think that those few minutes in the Tunnel had gotten to him.

But he couldn’t deny that he had been affected. Try as he might, there was no way to hide that. Not even from himself.

No force in the world could ever get him to take a second trip through that Tunnel, he realized.

“Doctor? Doctor?”

“I’m—all—right—” he said thickly.

“He says he’s all right,” came the lawyer’s voice. “Stand back. Let him alone.”

“His legs are wobbling,” Kelaritan said. “He’s going to fall.”

“No,” Sheerin said. “Not a chance. I’m fine, I tell you!”

He lurched and staggered, regained his balance, lurched again. Sweat poured from every pore he had. He glanced over his shoulder, saw the mouth of the Tunnel, and shuddered. Turning away from that dark cave, he pulled his shoulders up high, as if he would have liked to hide his face between them.

“Doctor?” Kelaritan said doubtfully.

No use pretending. This was foolishness, this vain and stubborn attempt at heroism. Let them think he was a coward. Let them think anything. Those fifteen minutes had been the worst nightmare of his life. The impact of it was still sinking in, and sinking in, and sinking in.

“It was—powerful stuff,” he said. “Very powerful. Very disturbing.”

“But you’re basically all right, isn’t that so?” the lawyer said eagerly. “A little shaken, yes. Who wouldn’t be, going into Darkness? But basically okay. As we knew you’d be. It’s only a few, a very few, who undergo any sort of harmful—”

“No,” Sheerin said. The lawyer’s face was like that of a grinning gargoyle in front of him. Like the face of a demon. He couldn’t bear the sight of it. But a good dose of the truth would exorcise the demon. No need to be diplomatic, Sheerin thought. Not when talking with demons.—“It’s impossible for anyone to go through that thing without being at grave risk. I’m certain of it now. Even the strongest psyche will take a terrible battering, and the weak ones will simply crumble. If you open that ride again, you’ll have every mental hospital in four provinces full up within six months.”

“On the contrary, Doctor—”

“Don’t ‘on the contrary’ me! Have you been in the Tunnel, Cubello? No, I didn’t think so. But I have. You’re paying for my professional opinion: you might as well have it right now. The Tunnel’s deadly. It’s a simple matter of human nature. Darkness is more than most of us can handle, and that’s never going to change, so long as we’ve got a sun left burning in the sky. Shut the Tunnel down for good, Cubello! In the name of sanity, man, shut the thing down! Shut it down!”

7

Parking his motor scooter in the faculty lot just below the Observatory dome, Beenay went jogging quickly up the footpath that led to the main entrance of the huge building. As he began to ascend the wide stone steps of the entranceway itself he was startled to hear someone calling his name from above.

“Beenay! So you are here after all.”

The astronomer looked up. The tall, heavyset, powerful figure of his friend Theremon 762 of the Saro City Chronicle stood framed in the great door of the Observatory.

“Theremon? Were you looking for me?”

“I was. But they told me you weren’t due to show up here for another couple of hours. And then, just as I was leaving, there you were anyway. Talk about serendipity!”

Beenay trotted up the last few steps, and they gave each other a quick hug. He had known the newspaperman some three or four years, ever since the time Theremon had come to the Observatory to interview some scientist, any scientist, about the latest manifesto of the crackpot Apostles of Flame group. Gradually he and Theremon had become close friends, even though Theremon was some five years older and came out of a rougher, worldlier background. Beenay liked the idea of having a friend who had no involvement whatsoever in university politics; and Theremon was delighted to know someone who wasn’t at all interested in exploiting him for his considerable journalistic influence.

“Is something wrong?” Beenay asked.

“Not in the least. But I need to get you to do the Voice of Science routine again. Mondior’s made another of his famous ‘Repent, repent, doom is coming’ speeches. Now he says he’s ready to reveal the exact hour when the world will be destroyed. In case you’re interested, it’s going to happen next year on the nineteenth of Theptar, as a matter of fact.”

“That madman! It’s a waste of space printing anything about him. Why does anyone pay the slightest bit of attention to the Apostles, anyway?”

Theremon shrugged. “The fact is that people do. A lot of people, Beenay. And if Mondior says the end is nigh, I need to get someone like you to stand up and say, ‘Not so, brothers and sisters! Have no fear! All is well!’ Or words to that effect. I can count on you, can’t I, Beenay?”

“You know you can.”

“This evening?”

“This evening? Oh, lord, Theremon, this evening’s a real mess. How much of my time do you think you’d have to have?”

“Half an hour? Forty-five minutes?”

“Look,” Beenay said, “I’ve got an urgent appointment right now—that’s why I’m here ahead of schedule. After that, I’ve sworn to Raissta that I’ll hustle back home and devote, well, an hour or two to her. We’ve been on such different tracks lately that we’ve hardly seen each other at all. And then later in the evening I’m supposed to be here at the Observatory again to supervise taking of a bunch of photographs of—”

“All right,” said Theremon. “I see I’ve picked the wrong time for this. Well, listen, no problem, Beenay. I’ve got until tomorrow afternoon to turn in my story. What if we talk in the morning?”

“The morning?” Beenay said doubtfully.

“I know morning’s an unthinkable concept for you. But what I mean is, I can get back up here at Onos-rise, just as you’re finishing up your evening’s work. If you could simply manage a little interview with me before you go home to go to sleep—”

“Well—”

“For a friend, Beenay.”

Beenay gave the journalist a weary look. “Of course I will. That’s not the issue. It’s just that I may be so groggy after a whole evening of work that I may not be of any use to you.”

Theremon grinned. “That doesn’t worry me. I’ve noticed that you’re capable of degroggifying pretty damned quickly when there’s anti-scientific nonsense for you to refute. Tomorrow at Onos-rise, then? In your office upstairs?”

“Right.”

“A million thanks, pal. I’ll owe you one for this.”

“Don’t mention it.”

Theremon saluted and began to head down the steps. “Give my best to that beautiful lady of yours,” he called. “And I’ll see you in the morning.”

“See you in the morning, yes,” Beenay echoed.

How odd that sounded. He never saw anybody—or anything—in the morning. But he’d make an exception for Theremon. That was what friendship was all about, wasn’t it?

Beenay turned and entered the Observatory.

Inside, all was dimly lit and calm, the familiar hush of the great hall of science where he had spent most of his time since his early university days. But the calm was, he knew, a deceptive one. This mighty building, like the more mundane places of the world, was constantly aswirl with conflicts of all sorts, ranging from the loftiest of philosophical disputes down to the pettiest of trivial feuds, spats, and backbiting intrigues. Astronomers, as a group, were no more virtuous than anyone else.

All the same, the Observatory was a sanctuary for Beenay and for most of the others who worked there—a place where they could leave most of the world’s problems behind and devote themselves more or less peacefully to the everlasting struggle to answer the great questions that the universe posed.

He walked swiftly down the long main hall, trying as always without success to muffle the clatter of his boots against the marble floor.

As he invariably did, he glanced quickly into the display cases along the wall to the right and left, where some of the sacred artifacts of the history of astronomy were on perpetual exhibit. Here were the crude, almost comical telescopes that such pioneers as Chekktor and Stanta had used, four or five hundred years before. Here were the gnarled black lumps of meteorites that had fallen from the sky over the centuries, enigmatic reminders of the mysteries that lay behind the clouds. Here were first editions of the great astronomical sky-charts and textbooks, and the time-yellowed manuscripts of some of the epoch-making theoretical works of the great thinkers.

Beenay paused for a moment before the last of those manuscripts, which unlike the others seemed fresh and almost new—for it was only a single generation old, Athor 77’s classic codification of the Theory of Universal Gravitation, worked out not very long before Beenay himself had been born. Though he was not a particularly religious man, Beenay stared at that thin sheaf of paper with something very much like reverence, and found himself thinking something very much like a prayer.

The Theory of Universal Gravitation was one of the pillars of the cosmos for him: perhaps the most basic pillar. He couldn’t imagine what he would do if that pillar were to fall. And it seemed to him now that the pillar might be tottering.

At the end of the hall, behind a handsome bronze door, was Dr. Athor’s own office. Beenay glanced at it quickly and hurried past it, up the stairs. The venerable and still formidable Observatory director was the last person in the world, absolutely the last, that Beenay wanted to see at this moment.

Faro and Yimot were waiting for him upstairs in the Chart Room, where they had arranged to meet.

“Sorry I’m a little late,” Beenay said. “It’s been a complicated afternoon so far.”

They gave him nervous, owlish smiles. What a strange pair they are, he thought, not for the first time. They both came from some backwater farming province—Sithin, maybe, or Gatamber. Faro 24 was short and roly-poly, with a languid, almost indolent way of moving. His general style was easygoing and casual. His friend Yimot 70 was incredibly tall and thin, something like a hinged ladder with arms, legs, and a face, and you practically needed a telescope to see his head, looming up there in the stratosphere above you. Yimot was as tense and twitchy as his friend was relaxed. Yet they were inseparable, always had been. Of all the young graduate students, one notch down the Observatory’s table of organization from Beenay’s level, they were by far the most brilliant.

“We haven’t been waiting long,” Yimot said at once.

“Only a minute or two, Dr. Beenay,” Faro added.

“Not quite ‘doctor’ yet, thanks,” Beenay said. “I’ve still got the final inquisition to go through. How did you manage with those computations?”

Yimot said, twitching and jerking his impossibly long legs around, “This is gravitational stuff, isn’t it, sir?”

Faro nudged him so vigorously in the ribs with his elbow that Beenay expected to hear the sound of crunching bone.

“That’s all right,” Beenay said. “Yimot’s correct, as a matter of fact.” He gave the tall young man a pale smile. “I wanted this to be a purely abstract mathematical exercise for you. But it doesn’t surprise me that you were able to figure out the context. You figured it out after you had your result, didn’t you?”

“Yes, sir,” said Yimot and Faro at the same time. “We ran all the calculations first,” Faro said. “Then we took a second look, and the context became apparent,” said Yimot.

“Ah. Yes,” Beenay said. These kids were sometimes a little unnerving. They were so young—only six or seven years younger than he, as a matter of fact, but he was an assistant professor and they were students, and to him and them both that was a vast barrier. Young as they were, though, they had such extraordinary minds! He wasn’t altogether pleased that they had guessed at the conceptual matrix within which these calculations were located. In fact, he wasn’t pleased at all. In another few years they’d be right up here on the faculty with him, perhaps competing for the same professorship he hoped to get, and that might not be fun. But he tried not to think about that.

He reached for their printout.

“May I see?” he asked.

Hands fluttering wildly, Yimot handed it over. Beenay scanned the rows of figures, calmly at first, then with rising agitation.

He had been pondering, all year long, certain implications of the Theory of Universal Gravitation, which his mentor Athor had brought to such a summit of perfection. It had been Athor’s great triumph, the making of his lofty reputation, to work out the orbital motions of Kalgash and all six of its suns according to rational principles of attractive forces.

Beenay, using modern computational equipment, had been calculating some aspects of Kalgash’s orbit around Onos, its primary sun, when to his horror he observed that his figures didn’t check out properly in terms of the Theory of Universal Gravitation. The theory said that at the beginning of the present year Kalgash should have been here in relation to Onos, when in undeniable fact Kalgash was there.

The deviation was trivial—a matter of a few decimal places—but that wasn’t trivial at all, in the larger sense of things. The Theory of Universal Gravitation was so precise that most people preferred to refer to it as the Law of Universal Gravitation. Its mathematical underpinning was considered impeccable. But a theory that purports to explain the movements of the world through space has no room for even small discrepancies. Either it is complete or it is not complete: no middle way was permissible. And a difference of a few decimal places in a short-range calculation would widen into a vast abyss, Beenay knew, if more ambitious computations were attempted. What good was the whole Theory of Universal Gravitation if the position that it said Kalgash was going to hold in the sky a century from now turned out to be halfway around Onos from the planet’s actual location then?

Beenay had gone over his figures until he was sick of reworking them. The result was always the same.

But what was he supposed to believe?

His numbers, or Athor’s towering master scheme?

His piddling notions of astronomy, or the great Athor’s profound insight into the fundamental structure of the universe?

He imagined himself standing right on top of the dome of the Observatory, calling out, “Listen to me, everybody! Athor’s theory is wrong! I’ve got the figures right here that disprove it!” Which would bring forth such gales of laughter that he’d be blown clear across the continent. Who was he to set himself up against the titanic Athor? Who could possibly believe that a callow assistant professor had toppled the Law of Universal Gravitation?

And yet—and yet—

His eyes raced over the printout sheets that Yimot and Faro had prepared. The calculations on the first two pages were unfamiliar to him; he had set up the data for the two students in such a way that the underlying relationships from which the numbers were derived were not at all obvious, and evidently they had approached the problem in a way that any astronomer trying to compute a planetary orbit would regard as quite unorthodox. Which was exactly what Beenay had wanted. The orthodox ways had led him only into catastrophic conclusions; but he had too much information at his own disposal to be able to work in any other mode but the orthodox ones. Faro and Yimot hadn’t been hampered in that fashion.

But as he followed along their line of reasoning, Beenay began to notice a discomforting convergence of the numbers. By the third page they had locked in with his own calculations, which he knew by heart by this time.

And from there on, everything followed in an orderly way, step by step by step, to the same dismaying, shattering, inconceivable, totally unacceptable culminating result.

Beenay looked up at the two students, aghast.

“There’s no possibility, is there, that you’ve slipped up somewhere? This string of integrations here, for example—they look pretty tricky—”

“Sir!” Yimot cried, sounding shocked to the core. His face was bright red and his arms waved about as if moving of their own accord.

Faro said, more placidly, “I’m afraid they’re correct, sir. They tally frontwards and backwards.”

“Yes. I imagine they do,” said Beenay dully. He struggled to conceal his anguish. But his hands were shaking so badly that the printout sheets began to flutter in his grasp. He started to put them down on the table before him, but his wrist jerked uncontrollably in a very Yimot-like gesture and sent them scattering all over the floor.

Faro knelt to pick them up. He gave Beenay a troubled look.

“Sir, if we’ve upset you in any way—”

“No. No, not at all. I didn’t sleep well today, that’s the problem. But this is fine work, unquestionably very fine. I’m proud of you. To take a problem like this, one which has utterly no real-world resonance at all, which in fact is in total contradiction of real-world scientific truth, and to follow so methodically to the conclusion required by the data while succeeding in ignoring the fact that the initial premise is absurd—why, it’s a splendid job, an admirable demonstration of your powers of logic, a first-rate thought-experiment—”

He saw them exchange quick glances. He wondered if he was fooling them even slightly.

“And now,” he went on, “if you’ll excuse me, fellows—I have another conference—”

Rolling the damning papers into a tight cylinder, Beenay shoved them under his arm and rushed past them, out the door, down the hall, practically running, heading for the safety and privacy of his own tiny office.

My God, he thought. My God, my God, my God, what have I done? And what will I do now?

He buried his head in his hands and waited for the throbbing to stop. But it didn’t seem to be planning to stop. After a moment he sat up and jabbed his finger against the communicator button on his desk.

“Get me the Saro City Chronicle,” he told the machine. “Theremon 762.”

From the communicator came a long, maddening burst of cracklings and hissings. Then, suddenly, Theremon’s deep voice:

“Features desk, Theremon 762.”

“Beenay.”

“What’s that? I can’t hear what you’re saying!”

Beenay realized that he hadn’t managed to get out anything more than a croak. “It’s Beenay, I said! I—I want to change our appointment time.”

“To change it? Look, fellow, I understand how you feel about mornings, because so do I. But I’ve absolutely got to talk to you no later than noon tomorrow or I’ll have no story here. I’ll make it up to you any way I can, but—”

“You don’t understand. I want to see you sooner, not later, Theremon.”

“What?”

“This evening. Let’s say half past nine. Or ten, if you can’t make it.”

“I thought you had photographs to take at the Observatory.”

“The deuce with the photos, man. I need to see you.”

“Need to? Beenay, what’s happened? Is it something with Raissta?”

“It has nothing to do with Raissta in the slightest. Half past nine? At the Six Suns?”

“Six Suns, half past nine, yes,” Theremon said. “It’s a date.”

Beenay broke the contact and sat for a long moment staring at the rolled paper cylinder before him, somberly shaking his head. He felt fractionally calmer now, but only fractionally. Confiding in Theremon would make it easier to bear the burden of all this. He trusted Theremon completely. Newsmen were generally not noted for their trustworthiness, Beenay knew, but Theremon was a friend first, a journalist after that. He had never betrayed Beenay’s confidence, not once.

Even so, Beenay didn’t have any idea of his next move. Maybe Theremon would be able to come up with something. Maybe.

He left the Observatory by the back stairs, sneaking out by the fire escape like a thief. He didn’t dare risk the possibility of running into Athor by going out the main way. It was appalling to him to consider the possibility of seeing Athor now, having to confront him face to face, man to man.

He found the motor scooter ride home a terrifying one. At every moment he was afraid that the laws of gravity would cease to hold true, that he would go soaring off into the heavens. But at last Beenay reached the little apartment that he shared with Raissta 717.

She gasped when she saw him.

“Beenay! You’re white as a—”

“Ghost, yes.” He reached for her and pulled her close against him. “Hold me,” he said. “Hold me.”

“What is it? What happened?”

“I’ll tell you later,” he said. “Just hold me.”

8

Theremon was at the Six Suns Club a little after nine. It was probably a good idea to get a head start on Beenay, a quick drink or two first, just to lubricate his brain a little. The astronomer had sounded awful—as though he was keeping hysteria at bay only by some tremendous effort. Theremon couldn’t imagine what terrible thing could have happened to him, there in the seclusion and stillness of the Observatory, to make such a wreck out of him in so short a time. But plainly Beenay was in big trouble, and plainly he was going to need the highest-quality help Theremon could provide.

“Let me have a Tano Special,” Theremon told the waiter. “No, wait—make it a double. A Tano Sitha, okay?”

“Double white light,” the waiter said. “Coming up.”

The evening was mild. Theremon, who was well known here and received special treatment, had been given his regular warm-weather table on the terrace overlooking the city. The lights of downtown sparkled gaily. Onos had set an hour or two ago, and only Trey and Patru were in the sky, burning brightly in the east, casting harsh twin shadows as they made their descent toward morning.

Looking at them, Theremon wondered which suns would be in the sky tomorrow. It was different all the time, a brilliant ever changing display. Onos, certainly—you could always be sure of seeing Onos at least part of the time every day of the year, even he knew that—and then what? Dovim, Tano, and Sitha, to make it a four-sun day? He wasn’t sure. Maybe it was supposed to be just Tano and Sitha, with Onos visible only for a few hours at midday. That would be gloomy. But then, after a second sip, he reminded himself that this wasn’t the season for short Onos-rises. So it would be a three-sun day, most likely, unless it was going to be just Onos and Dovim tomorrow.

It was so hard to keep it all straight—

Well, he could ask to see an almanac, if he really cared. But he didn’t. Some people always seemed to know what tomorrow’s suns would be like—Beenay was one, naturally—but Theremon took a more happy-go-lucky approach to it all. So long as some sun was going to be up there the next day, Theremon didn’t especially care which one it was. And there always was one—two or three, actually, or sometimes four. You could count on that. Even five, once in a while.

His drink arrived. He took a deep gulp and exhaled in pleasure. What a delightful thing a Tano Special was! The good strong white rum of the Velkareen Islands, mixed with a shot of the even stronger product, clear and tangy, that they distilled on the coast of Bagilar, and just a dab of sgarrino juice to take the edge off—ah, magnificent! Theremon wasn’t a particularly heavy drinker, certainly not the way newspapermen were legendarily supposed to be, but he counted it a shabby day when he couldn’t find time for one or two Tano Specials in those quiet dusky hours after Onos had set.

“You look like you’re enjoying that, Theremon,” a familiar voice said behind him.

“Beenay! You’re early!”

“Ten minutes. What are you drinking?”

“The usual. A Tano Special.”

“Good. I think I’ll have one too.”

“You?” Theremon stared at his friend. Fruit juice was about Beenay’s speed, so far as he knew. He couldn’t recall ever having seen the astronomer drink anything stronger.

But Beenay looked strange this evening—haggard, weary, worn. His eyes had an almost feverish glow to them.

“Waiter!” Theremon called.

It was alarming to see Beenay gulp his drink. He gasped after the first slug, as though the impact was a lot greater than he’d been expecting, but then he went back to it quickly for a second deep pull, and a third.

“Easy,” Theremon urged. “Your head’ll be swimming in five minutes.”

“It’s swimming already.”

“You had a drink before you came here?”

“No, not a drink,” Beenay said. “A shock. An upset.” He put his drink down and peered balefully at the city lights. After a moment he picked it up again, almost absent-mindedly, and drained what was left.—“I shouldn’t have another one so soon, should I, Theremon?”

“I doubt it very much.” Theremon reached out and let his hand rest lightly on the astronomer’s wrist. “What’s going on, fellow? Tell me about it.”

“It’s—hard to explain.”

“Come on. I’ve been around the track a little, you know. You and Raissta—”

“No! I told you before, this has nothing to do with her. Nothing.”

“All right. I believe you.”

Beenay said, “Maybe I should have that second drink.”

“In a little while. Come on, Beenay. What is it?”

Beenay sighed. “You know what the Theory of Universal Gravitation is, don’t you, Theremon?”

“Of course I do. I mean, I couldn’t tell you what it means, exactly—there are only twelve people on Kalgash who truly understand it, isn’t that so?—but I can certainly tell you what it is—more or less.”

“So you believe that garbage too,” Beenay said, with a harsh laugh. “About the Theory of Gravitation being so complicated that only twelve people can understand its math.”

“That’s what I’ve always heard.”

“What you’ve always heard is ignorant folk wisdom,” said Beenay. “I could give you all the essential math in a sentence, and you’d probably understand what I was saying, too.”

“You could? I would?”

“No question of it. Look, Theremon: the Law of Universal Gravitation—the Theory of Universal Gravitation, I mean—states that there exists a cohesive force among all bodies of the universe, such that the amount of this force between any two given bodies is proportional to the product of their masses divided by the square of the distance between them. It’s that simple.”

“That’s all there is to it?”

“That’s enough! It took four hundred years to develop it.”

“Why that long? It seems simple enough, the way you put it.”

“Because great laws aren’t divined by flashes of inspiration, no matter what you newspaper people like to believe. It usually takes the combined work of a worldful of scientists over a period of centuries. Ever since Genovi 41 discovered that Kalgash rotates around Onos, rather than vice versa—and that was about four centuries ago—astronomers have been working on the problem of why all six of the suns appear and disappear in the sky as they do. The complex motions of the six were recorded and analyzed and unwoven. Theory after theory was advanced and checked and counterchecked and modified and abandoned and revived and converted to something else. It was a deuce of a job.”

Theremon nodded thoughtfully and finished off his drink. He signaled the waiter for two more. Beenay seemed calm enough so long as he was talking about science, he thought.

“It was some thirty years ago,” the astronomer continued, “that Athor 77 put the touch of perfection on the whole thing by demonstrating that the Theory of Universal Gravitation accounts exactly for the orbital motions of the six suns. It was an amazing achievement. It was one of the greatest feats of sheer logic anyone has ever accomplished.”

“I know how you revere that man,” Theremon said. “But what does all this have to do with—”

“I’m getting to the point.” Beenay rose and walked to the edge of the terrace, carrying his second drink with him. He stood there in silence for a time, looking out at distant Trey and Patru. It seemed to Theremon that Beenay was growing agitated again. But the newspaperman said nothing. After a time Beenay took a long gulp of his drink. Standing with his back still turned, he said finally, “The problem is this. A few months ago I began working on a recalculation of the motions of Kalgash around Onos, using the big new university computer. I provided the computer with the last six weeks’ actual observations of Kalgash’s orbit and told it to predict the orbital movements for the rest of the year. I didn’t expect any surprises. Mainly I just wanted an excuse to fool around with the computer, I guess. Naturally, I used the gravitational laws in setting up my calculations.” He swung around suddenly. His face had a bleak, haunted look. “Theremon, it didn’t come out right.”

“I don’t understand.”

“The orbit the computer produced didn’t match up with the hypothetical orbit I was expecting to get. I don’t mean that I was simply working on the basis of a pure Kalgash-Onos system, you realize. I took into account all perturbations that the other suns would cause. And what I got—what the computer was claiming to be the true orbit of Kalgash—was something very different from the orbit that is indicated by Athor’s Theory of Gravitation.”

“But you said you used Athor’s gravitational laws in setting things up,” said Theremon, puzzled.

“I did.”

“Then how—” Suddenly Theremon’s eyes brightened. “Good lord, man! What a story! Are you telling me that the brand-new supercomputer at Saro University, installed at a cost of I don’t want to think how many millions of credits, is inaccurate? That there’s been a gigantic scandalous waste of the taxpayers’ money? That—”

“There’s nothing wrong with the computer, Theremon. Believe me.”

“Can you be sure of that?”

“Positive.”

“Then—what—”

“I might have given the computer erroneous figures, maybe. It’s a terrific computer, but it can’t get the right answer from the wrong data.”

“So that’s why you’re so upset, Beenay! Listen, man, it’s only human to make an error once in a while. You mustn’t be so harsh on yourself. You—”

“I needed to be completely certain that I had fed the right numbers into the computer, first of all, and also that I had given it the right theoretical postulates to use in processing those numbers,” said Beenay, clutching his glass so tightly that his hand shook. The glass was empty now, Theremon noticed. “As you say, it’s only human to make an error once in a while. So I called in a couple of hotshot young graduate students and let them work on the problem. They had their results for me today. That was the meeting I had that was so important, when I said I couldn’t see you. Theremon, they confirmed my findings. They got the same deviation in the orbit that I did.”

“But if the computer was right, then—then—” Theremon shook his head. “Then what? The Theory of Universal Gravitation is wrong? Is that what you’re saying?”

“Yes.”

The word appeared to have come from Beenay at a terrible price. He seemed stunned, dazed, devastated.

Theremon studied him. No doubt this was confusing for Beenay, and probably very embarrassing. But the journalist still couldn’t understand why the impact of all this on him was so powerful.

Then abruptly he understood everything.

“It’s Athor! You’re afraid of hurting Athor, aren’t you?”

“That’s it exactly,” said Beenay, giving Theremon a look of almost pathetic gratitude for having seen the true situation. He threw himself down in his chair, shoulders hunched, head lowered. In a muffled voice he said, “It would kill the old man to know that someone’s poked a hole in his wonderful theory. That I, of all people, had poked a hole in it. He’s been like a second father to me, Theremon. Everything I’ve accomplished in the past ten years has been done under his guidance, with his encouragement, with—with, well, his love, in a manner of speaking. And now I repay it like this. I wouldn’t just be destroying his life’s work—I’d be stabbing him, Theremon, him.”

“Have you considered simply suppressing your findings?”

Beenay looked astonished. “You know I couldn’t do that!”

“Yes. Yes, I do know. But I had to find out whether you were thinking of it.”

“Whether I was thinking of the unthinkable? No, of course not. It never entered my mind. But what am I going to do, Theremon?—I suppose I could just throw all the papers away and pretend I never looked into the whole subject. But that would be monstrous. So what it comes down to is, I have a choice between violating my own scientific conscience and ruining Athor. Ruining the man I look upon not simply as the head of my profession but as my own philosophical mentor.”

“He can’t have been much of a mentor, then.”

The astronomer’s eyes widened in astonishment and fury. “What are you saying, Theremon!”

“Easy. Easy.” Theremon spread his hands wide in a conciliatory gesture. “It seems to me you’re being awfully condescending to him, Beenay. If Athor’s really the great man you think he is, he’s not going to put his own reputation above scientific truth. Do you see what I mean? Athor’s theory is not cast-iron. No theory is and there is always room for improvement. Isn’t that so? Science is constructed out of approximations that gradually approach the truth, you told me a long time back, and I’ve never forgotten it. Well, that means all theories are subject to constant testing and modification, doesn’t it? And if it eventually turns out that they’re not quite close enough to the truth, they need to be replaced by something that’s closer. Right, Beenay? Right?”

Beenay was trembling now. He looked very pale.

“Could you get me another drink, Theremon?”

“No. Listen to me: there’s more. You say that you’re so worried about Athor—he’s old; I suppose he’s pretty frail—that you don’t have the heart to tell him you’ve found a flaw in his theory. All right. That’s a decent and loving position to take. But think about this, will you? If calculating the orbit of Kalgash is all that important, somebody else is likely to stumble across the same flaw in Athor’s theory sooner or later, and that other person isn’t likely to be as tactful in letting Athor know about it as you’d be. He might even be a professional rival of Athor’s, an outright enemy of his—every scientist has enemies, you’ve told me so plenty of times. Wouldn’t it be better for you to go to Athor and tell him, gently, carefully, of what you’ve discovered, than for him to find out about it one morning in the Chronicle?”

“Yes,” Beenay whispered. “You’re completely right.”

“You’ll go to him, then?”

“Yes. Yes. I have to, I suppose.” Beenay bit his lip. “I feel miserable about this, Theremon. I feel like a murderer.”

“I know you do. But it isn’t Athor you’ll be murdering, it’s a defective theory. Defective theories must never be allowed to persist. You owe it to Athor as well as yourself to let the truth emerge.” Theremon hesitated. A sudden startling new idea had occurred to him. “Of course, there’s one other possibility. I’m only a layman, you know, and you’ll probably laugh.—Is there any chance that the Theory of Gravitation might be correct despite everything, and that the computer’s figures for Kalgash’s orbit are right also, and that some other factor entirely, something altogether unknown, might be responsible for the discrepancy in your result?”

“That could be, I suppose,” said Beenay in a flat, dispirited tone. “But once you begin dragging in mysterious unknown factors, you begin to move into the realm of fantasy.—I’ll give you an example. Let’s say there’s an invisible seventh sun out there—it’s got mass, it exerts gravitational force, but we simply can’t see it. Since we don’t know it’s there, we haven’t plugged it into our gravitational calculations, and so the figures come out cockeyed. Is that what you mean?”

“Well, why not?”

“Why not five invisible suns, then? Why not fifty? Why not an invisible giant who pushes planets around according to his whims? Why not a huge dragon whose breath deflects Kalgash from its proper path? We can’t disprove it, can we? When you start in with why nots, Theremon, anything becomes possible, and then nothing makes any sense. At least not to me. I can only deal with what I know is real. You may be right that there’s an unknown factor, and that therefore the gravitational laws aren’t invalid. I certainly hope so. But I can’t do serious work on that basis. All I can do is go to Athor, which I will, I promise you that, and tell him what the computer has told me. I don’t dare suggest to him or anybody that I blame the whole mess on a hitherto undiscovered ‘unknown factor.’ Otherwise I’d sound just as crazy as the Apostles of Flame, who claim to know all sorts of mystic revelations.—Theremon, I really want that other drink now.”

“Yes. All right. And speaking of the Apostles of Flame—”

“You want a statement from me, I remember.” Beenay passed a hand wearily in front of his face. “Yes. Yes. I won’t let you down. You’ve been a tremendous help to me this evening.—What is it exactly that the Apostles have said now? I forget.”

“It was Mondior 71,” said Theremon. “The Grand High Mumbo-Jumbo himself. What he said was—let me think—that the time is very near when the gods intend to purge the world of sin, that he can calculate the exact day, even the exact hour, when doom will arrive.”

Beenay groaned. “So what’s new about that? Isn’t that what they’ve been saying for years?”

“Yes, but they’re starting to hand out more of the gory details now. It’s the notion of the Apostles, you know, that this won’t be the first time the world has been destroyed. They teach that the gods have deliberately made mankind imperfect, as a test, and that they have given us a single year—one of their divine years, not one of our little ones—in which to shape up. That’s called a Year of Godliness, and it’s exactly two thousand and forty-nine of our years long. Again and again, when the Year of Godliness has ended, the gods have discovered that we’re still wicked and sinful, and so they have destroyed the world by sending down heavenly flames from holy places in the sky that are known as Stars. So say the Apostles, anyway.”

“Stars?” Beenay said. “Does he mean the suns?”

“No, Stars. Mondior says that the Stars are specifically different from the six suns.—Haven’t you ever paid any attention to this stuff, Beenay?”

“No. Why in the world should I?”

“Well, in any event, when the Year of Godliness ends and nothing on Kalgash has improved, morally speaking, these Stars drop some sort of holy fire on us and burn us up. Mondior says this has happened any number of times. But each time it does, the gods are merciful, or at least a faction among them is: every time the world is destroyed, the kinder gods prevail over the sterner ones and humanity is given one more chance. And so the godliest of the survivors are rescued from the holocaust and a new deadline is set: mankind gets another two thousand and forty-nine years to cast off its evil ways. The time is almost up again, says Mondior. It’s just under two thousand and forty-eight years since the last cataclysm. In something like fourteen months the suns will all disappear and these hideous Stars of his will shoot flame down out of a black sky to wipe out the wicked. Next year on Theptar nineteenth, to be specific.”

“Fourteen months,” Beenay said in a musing way. “The nineteenth of Theptar. He’s very precise about it, isn’t he? I suppose he knows the exact time of day it’ll happen, too.”

“So he says, yes. That’s why I’d like a statement from somebody connected with the Observatory, preferably you. Mondior’s latest announcement is that the exact time of the catastrophe can be calculated scientifically—that it isn’t simply something that’s set forth as dogma in the Book of Revelations, but that it’s subject to the same sort of computation that astronomers employ when—when—”

Theremon faltered and halted.

“When we calculate the orbital motions of the suns and the world?” Beenay asked acidly.

“Well, yes,” Theremon said, looking abashed.

“Then maybe there’s hope for the world after all, if the Apostles can’t do any better job of it than we do.”

“I need a statement, Beenay.”

“Yes. I realize that.” The next round of drinks had arrived. Beenay wrapped his hand around his glass. “Try this,” he said after a moment. “ ‘The main task of science is to separate truth from untruth, in the hope of revealing the way the universe really works. Putting truth to work in the service of untruth is not what we at the university think of as the scientific way. We are capable now of predicting the movements of the suns in the heavens, yes—but even if we use our best computer, we are no closer than we ever were to being able to foretell the will of the gods. Nor will we ever be, I suspect.’—How’s that?”

“Perfect,” Theremon said. “Let’s see if I’ve got it. ‘The main task of science is to separate truth from untruth, in the hope of—of—’ What came next, Beenay?”

Beenay repeated the whole thing word for word, as though he had memorized it hours before.

Then he drained his third drink at a single astonishing long gulp.

And then he stood up, smiled for the first time all evening, and fell flat on his face.

9

Athor 77’s eyes narrowed, and he scrutinized the little sheaf of printouts lying before him on his desk as though they were maps of continents that no one had ever known existed.

He was very calm. He was amazed at how calm he was.

“Very interesting, Beenay,” he said slowly. “Very, very interesting.”

“Of course, sir, there’s always the possibility that not only have I made some crucial error in fundamental assumptions, but that Yimot and Faro also—”

“All three of you getting your basic postulates wrong? No, Beenay. I think not.”

“I just wanted to indicate that the possibility exists.”

“Please,” Athor said. “Let me think.”

It was midmorning. Onos in full glory blazed in the sky that was visible through the tall window of the Observatory director’s office. Dovim was barely apparent, a small hard red dot of light, making a high northerly transit.

Athor fingered the papers, moving them about again and again on his desk. And moved them yet again. How strange to be taking this so easily, he thought. Beenay was the one who seemed all wrought up over it; he himself had scarcely reacted at all.

Perhaps I’m in shock, Athor speculated.

“Over here, sir, I have the orbit of Kalgash according to the generally accepted almanac computation. And here, on the printout, we have the orbital prediction that the new computer—”

“Please, Beenay. I said I wanted to think.”

Beenay nodded jerkily. Athor smiled at him, not an easy thing for Athor to do. The formidable head of the Observatory, a tall, thin, commanding-looking man with an impressive shock of thick white hair, had allowed himself so long ago to slip into the role of Austere Giant of Science that it was difficult for him to unbend and permit himself to show ordinary human responses. At least, it was difficult for him while he was here at the Observatory, where everyone looked upon him as a sort of demigod. At home, with his wife, with his children, especially with his noisy flock of grandchildren, it was a different matter.

So Universal Gravitation wasn’t quite right, was it?

No! No, that was impossible! Every atom of common sense in him protested at the thought. The concept of Universal Gravitation was fundamental to any comprehension of the structure of the universe, Athor was certain. Athor knew. It was too clean, too logical, too beautiful, to be wrong.

Take Universal Gravitation away, and the entire logic of the cosmos dissolved into chaos.

Inconceivable. Unimaginable.

But these figures—this damnable printout of Beenay’s—

“I can see you’re angry, sir.” Beenay, chattering again! “And I want to tell you, I can quite understand it—the way this must hit you—anyone would be angry, having his life’s work jeopardized this way—”

“Beenay—”

“Just let me say, sir, that I’d give anything not to have had to bring you this today. I know you’re furious with me for coming in here with this, but I can only say that I thought long and hard before I did. What I really wanted to do was burn everything and forget I ever got started on any of this. I’m appalled that I found what I did, and appalled that I was the one who—”

“Beenay,” Athor said again, in his most ominous voice.

“Sir?”

“I am furious with you, yes. But not for the reason you think.”

“Sir?”

“Number one, I’m annoyed at the way you’ve been babbling at me, when all I want to do is sit here and quietly work through the implications of these papers you’ve just tossed at me. Number two, and much more important, I’m absolutely outraged that you’d have hesitated for so much as a moment to bring me your findings. Why did you wait so long?”

“It was only yesterday that I finished double-checking.”

“Yesterday! Then you should have been in here yesterday! Do you really mean to say, Beenay, that you seriously considered suppressing all this? That you would simply have tossed your results away and said nothing?”

“No, sir,” said Beenay miserably. “I never actually thought about doing that.”

“Well, that’s a blessing. Tell me, man, do you think I’m so enamored of my own beautiful theory that I’d want one of my most gifted associates to shield me from the unpleasant news that the theory’s got a flaw in it?”

“No, sir. Of course not.”

“Then why didn’t you come running in here with the news the moment you were sure you were right?”

“Because—because, sir—” Beenay looked as though he wanted to vanish into the carpet. “Because I knew how upset you’d be. Because I thought you might—you might be so upset that your health would be affected. So I held back, I talked to a couple of friends, I thought through my own position on all of this, and I came to see that I really had no choice, I had to tell you that the Theory of Univer—”

“So you really do believe I love my own theory more than I do the truth, eh?”

“Oh, no, no, sir!”

Again Athor smiled, and this time it was no effort at all. “But I do, you know. I’m as human as anybody else, believe it or not. The Theory of Universal Gravitation brought me every scientific honor this planet has to offer. It’s my passport to immortality, Beenay. You know that. And to have to deal with the possibility that the theory’s wrong—oh, it’s a powerful shock, Beenay, it goes right through me from front to back. Make no mistake about that.—Of course, I still believe that my theory’s correct.”

“Sir?” said Beenay, all too obviously aghast. “But I’ve checked and checked and checked again, and—”

“Oh, your findings are correct too, I’m sure of that. For you and Faro and Yimot all to have done it wrong—no, no, I’ve already said I don’t see much chance of that. But what you’ve got here doesn’t necessarily overthrow Universal Gravitation.”

Beenay blinked a few times. “It doesn’t?”

“Certainly not,” Athor said, warming to the situation. He felt almost cheerful now. The deathly unreal calm of the first few moments had given way to the very different tranquillity that one feels when one is in pursuit of truth. “What does the Theory of Universal Gravitation say, after all? That every body in the universe exerts a force on all other bodies, proportional to mass and distance. And what did you attempt to do in using Universal Gravitation to compute the orbit of Kalgash? Why, to factor in the gravitational impact that all the various astronomical bodies exert on our world as it travels around Onos. Is that not so?”

“Yes, sir.”

“Well, then, there’s no need to throw the Theory of Universal Gravitation out, at least not at this point. What we need to do, my friend, is simply to rethink our comprehension of the universe, and determine whether we’re ignoring something that should be figured into our calculations—some mysterious factor, that is, which all unbeknownst to us is exerting gravitational force on Kalgash and isn’t being taken into account.”

Beenay’s eyebrows rose alarmingly. He gaped at Athor in what could only have been a look of total astonishment.

Then he began to laugh. He smothered it at first by clamping his jaws, but the laughter insisted on escaping anyway, causing him to hunch his shoulders and emit strangled lurching coughs; and then he had to clap both his hands over his mouth to hold back the torrent of merriment.

Athor watched, flabbergasted.

“An unknown factor!” Beenay blurted, after a moment. “A dragon in the sky! An invisible giant!”

“Dragons? Giants? What are you talking about, boy?”

“Yesterday evening—Theremon 762—oh, sir, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry—” Beenay struggled to regain his self-control. Muscles writhed in his face; he blinked violently and caught his breath; he turned away for an instant, and when he turned back he was almost himself again. Shamefacedly he said, “I had a couple of drinks with Theremon 762 yesterday evening—the newspaper columnist, you know—and told him something about what I’d found, and how uneasy I was about bringing my findings to you.”

“You went to a newspaperman?”

“A very trustworthy one. A close friend.”

“They’re all scoundrels, Beenay. Believe me.”

“Not this one, sir. I know him, and I know he’d never do anything to hurt me or offend me. In fact Theremon gave me some excellent advice, by which I mean he said I absolutely had to come here, which is why I did. But also—trying to offer me some hope, you see, some consolation—he said the same thing you did, that maybe there was an ‘unknown factor’—his exact phrase, an unknown factor—that was confusing our understanding of Kalgash’s orbit. And I laughed and told him that it was useless to drag unknown factors into the situation, that it was too easy a solution. I suggested—sarcastically, of course—that if we allowed any such hypothesis, then we might as well tell ourselves that it was an invisible giant that was pushing Kalgash out of orbit, or the breath of a giant dragon. And now here you are, sir, taking the same line of reasoning—not a layman like Theremon, but the greatest astronomer in the world!—Do you see how foolish I feel, sir?”

“I think I do,” said Athor. All this was becoming a little trying. He ran his hand through his imposing white mane and gave Beenay a look of mingled irritation and compassion. “You were right to tell your friend that inventing fantasies to solve a problem isn’t very useful. But the random suggestions of laymen aren’t always without merit. For all we know, there is some unknown factor at work on Kalgash’s orbit. We need at least to consider that possibility before we toss the theory overboard. I think what we need to do here is to make use of Thargola’s Sword. You know what that is, Beenay?”

“Of course, sir. The principle of parsimony. First put forth by the medieval philosopher Thargola 14, who said, ‘We must drive a sword through any hypothesis that is not strictly necessary,’ or words to that effect.”

“Very good, Beenay. Though the way I was taught it, it’s ‘If we are offered several hypotheses, we should begin our considerations by striking the most complex of them with our sword.’ Here we have the hypothesis that the Theory of Universal Gravitation is in error, versus the hypothesis that you’ve left out some unknown and perhaps unknowable factor in making your calculations of the orbit of Kalgash. If we accept the first hypothesis, then everything we think we know about the structure of the universe tumbles into chaos. If we accept the second one, all we need to do is locate the unknown factor, and the fundamental order of things is preserved. It’s a lot simpler to try to find something we may have overlooked than it would be to come up with a new general law governing the movements of heavenly bodies. So the hypothesis that the Theory of Gravitation is wrong falls before Thargola’s Sword and we begin our investigations by working with the simpler explanation of the problem. Eh, Beenay? What do you say?”

Beenay looked radiant.

“Then I haven’t overthrown Universal Gravitation after all!”

“Not yet, anyway. You’ve probably won a place in scientific history for yourself, but we don’t know yet whether it’s as a debunker or as an originator. Let’s pray it’s the latter. And now we need to do some very hard thinking, young man.” Athor 77 closed his eyes and rubbed his forehead, which was beginning to ache. It had been a long time since he’d done any real science, he realized. He’d occupied himself almost entirely with administrative matters at the Observatory for the past eight or ten years. But the mind that had produced the Theory of Universal Gravitation might yet have a thought or two left in it, he told himself.—“First, I want to take a closer look at these calculations of yours,” he said. “And then, I suppose, a closer look at my own theory.”

10

The headquarters of the Apostles of Flame was a slender but magnificent tower of gleaming golden stone, rising like a shining javelin above the Seppitan River, in the exclusive Birigam quarter of Saro City. That soaring tower, Theremon thought, must be one of the most valuable pieces of real estate in the entire capital.

He had never stopped to consider it before, but the Apostles had to be an exceedingly wealthy group. They owned their own radio and television stations, they published magazines and newspapers, they had this tremendous tower. And probably they controlled all sorts of other assets too that were less visibly theirs. He wondered how that was possible. A bunch of fanatic puritan monks? Where would they have managed to get their hands on so many hundreds of millions of credits?

But, he realized, such well-known industrialists as Bottiker 888 and Vivin 99 were outspoken adherents of the teachings of Mondior and his Apostles. It wouldn’t surprise him to know that men like Bottiker and Vivin, and others like them, were heavy contributors to the Apostles’ treasury.

And if the organization was even a tenth as old as it claimed to be—ten thousand years, was what they said!—and if it had invested its money wisely over the centuries, there was no telling what the Apostles could have achieved through the miracle of compound interest, Theremon thought. They might be worth billions. They might secretly own half of Saro City.

It was worth looking into, he told himself.

He entered the vast, echoing entrance hall of the great tower and peered about in awe. Though he had never been here before, he had heard it was an extraordinarily lavish building both inside and out. But nothing he had heard had prepared him for the reality of the cultist’s building.

A polished marble floor, with inlays in half a dozen brilliant colors, stretched as far as he could see. The walls were covered with glittering golden mosaics in abstract patterns, rising to arched vaults high overhead. Chandeliers of woven gold and silver threw a shimmering shower of brightness over everything.

At the opposite end from the entrance Theremon saw what seemed to be a model of the whole universe, fashioned, apparently, entirely of precious metals and gems: immense suspended globes, which seemed to represent the six suns, hung from the ceiling by invisible wires. Each of them cast an eerie light: a golden beam from the largest of them, which must be Onos, and a dim red glow from the Dovim globe, and cold hard blue-white from the Tano-Sitha pair, and a gentler white light from Patru and Trey. A seventh globe that must be Kalgash moved slowly among them like a drifting balloon, its own colors changing as the shifting pattern of the suns’ light played over its surface.

As Theremon stood gaping in astonishment, a voice coming from nowhere in particular said, “May we have your name?”

“I’m Theremon 762. I have an appointment with Mondior.”

“Yes. Please enter the chamber on your immediate left, Theremon 762.”

He saw no chamber on his immediate left. But then a segment of the mosaic-covered wall slid noiselessly open, revealing a small oval room, more an antechamber than a chamber. Green velvet hangings covered the walls and a single bar of amber light provided illumination.

He shrugged and stepped in. At once the door closed behind him and he felt a distinct sensation of motion. This wasn’t a room, it was a lift! Yes, he was rising, he was certain of it. Up and up and up he went, in a very unhurried way. It took half an eternity before the lift chamber came to a halt and the door slid open once again.

A black-robed figure was waiting for him.

“Would you come this way, please?”

A narrow hallway led a short distance into a kind of waiting room, where a large portrait of Mondior 71 occupied most of one entire wall. As Theremon entered, the portrait seemed to light up, coming strangely to life and glowing, so that Mondior’s dark, intense eyes looked straight at him and the High Apostle’s stern face took on a luminous inner radiance that made him seem almost beautiful, in a fierce sort of way.

Theremon met the portrait’s gaze coolly enough. But even the tough-minded newspaperman found himself ever so slightly unnerved to think that very shortly he would be interviewing this very person. Mondior on radio or television was one thing, just some crazed preacher with an absurd message to peddle. But Mondior in the flesh—awesome, hypnotic, mysterious, if this portrait was any indication—might be something else again. Theremon warned himself to be on his guard.

The black-robed monk said, “If you’ll step inside, please—”

The wall just to the left of the portrait opened. An office became visible within, as sparsely decorated as a cell, nothing in it but a bare desk made of a single slab of polished stone and a low backless chair, cut from a chunk of some unusual redstreaked gray wood, placed in front of it. Behind the desk sat a man of obvious force and authority, wearing the black Apostles’ robe with red trim along the hood.

He was very impressive. But he wasn’t Mondior 71.

Mondior, judging by his photographs and the way he seemed on television, had to be a man of sixty-five or seventy, with a kind of intense masculine force about him. His hair was thick and wavy, black with broad streaks of white, and he had a full, fleshy face, a wide mouth, a strong nose, heavy jet-black eyebrows, dark, compelling eyes. But this one was young, surely not yet forty, and though he seemed powerful and highly masculine too, it was in an entirely different way: he was very thin, with a sharp, narrow face and tight, pursed lips. His hair, curling down over his forehead under his hood, was a strange brick-red color, and his eyes were a cold, unrelenting blue.

No doubt this man was some high functionary in the organization. But Theremon’s appointment was with Mondior.

He had decided just this morning, after writing his story on the Apostles’ latest fulmination, that he needed to know more about this mysterious cult. Everything they had ever said struck him as nonsense, of course, but it was beginning to seem like interesting nonsense, worth writing about in some detail. How better to learn more about them than to go straight to the top man? Assuming that was possible, that is. But to his surprise they had told him, when he called, that he could have an audience with Mondior 71 that very day. It had seemed too easy.

Now he began to realize that it bad been too easy.

“I am Folimun 66,” the sharp-faced man said in a light, flexible voice with none of Mondior’s compelling thunder. Yet it was, Theremon suspected, the voice of someone who was accustomed to being obeyed. “I am the public-relations adjutant for the home district of our organization. It will be my pleasure to answer any questions you may have.”

“My appointment was with Mondior himself,” Theremon said.

Folimun 66’s chilly eyes betrayed no sign of surprise. “You may think of me as the voice of Mondior.”

“I understood it would be a personal audience.”

“It is. Anything said to me is shared with Mondior; anything that comes from me is the word of Mondior. This should be understood.”

“Nevertheless, I was given assurances that I’d be allowed to talk with Mondior. I have no doubt that what you tell me would be authoritative, but it isn’t just information that I’m looking for. I’d like to form some opinion of what sort of man Mondior is, what his views are on other things besides the prophesied destruction of the world, what he thinks about—”

“I can only repeat what I have already said,” Folimun declared, cutting in smoothly. “You may think of me as the voice of Mondior. His Serenity will not be able to see you in person today.”

“Then I would prefer to return on another day, when His Serenity will be—”

“Permit me to inform you that Mondior does not make himself available for personal interviews, not ever. Not ever. His Serenity’s work is much too urgent, now that only a matter of months stands between us and the Time of Flame.” Folimun smiled suddenly, an unexpectedly warm and human smile, perhaps intended to take some of the sting out of the refusal and out of that melodramatic-sounding phrase, “the Time of Flame.” Almost gently he said, “I would guess that there’s been a misunderstanding, that you didn’t realize that your appointment would be with a spokesman for Mondior rather than with the High Apostle himself. But that’s the way it must be. If you don’t wish to speak with me, well, I regret that you’ve wasted your trip today. But I’m the most useful source of information you’re going to be able to find here, now or at any other time.”

Again the smile. It was the smile of a man who was coolly and unapologetically closing a door in Theremon’s face.

“Very well,” Theremon said after a moment or two of consideration. “I see I don’t have much choice. I get you or I get nobody. All right: let’s talk. How much time do I have?”

“As much as you need, though this first meeting will have to be a fairly brief one. And also”—a grin, a surprising one, almost mischievous—“you must bear in mind that we have only fourteen months altogether. And I’ve got a few other things to do during that time.”

“So I imagine. Fourteen months, you say? And then what?”

“You haven’t read the Book of Revelations, then, I assume.”

“Not recently, actually.”

“Permit me, then.” Folimun produced a thin red-bound volume from some crevice of his apparently empty desk and slid it toward Theremon. “This is for you. You’ll find much nourishment in it, I hope. Meanwhile I can summarize the theme that appears to be of the greatest interest to you. Very shortly—exactly four hundred and eighteen days from now, to be extremely precise, on the nineteenth of Theptar next—a great transformation will come over our comfortable, familiar world. The six suns will enter the Cave of Darkness and disappear, the Stars will make themselves manifest to us, and all Kalgash will be set ablaze.”

He made it sound very casual. As though he might be talking about the coming of a rainstorm tomorrow afternoon, or the expected blossoming of some rare plant next week in the Municipal Botanical Garden. All Kalgash set ablaze. The six suns entering the Cave of Darkness. The Stars.

“The Stars,” Theremon said aloud. “And what, in fact, may they be?”

“They are the instruments of the gods.”

“Can you be more specific, do you think?”

“The nature of the Stars will be made more than amply clear to us,” said Folimun 66, “in a matter of four hundred and eighteen days.”

“When the current Year of Godliness comes to its end,” said Theremon. “On Theptar nineteenth of next year.”

Folimun looked pleasantly surprised. “So you have been studying our teachings.”

“To some extent. I’ve listened to Mondior’s recent speeches, at any rate. I know about the two-thousand-and-forty-nine-year cycle.—And the event you call the Time of Flame? I suppose you can’t provide me with any sort of advance description of that, either.”

“You’ll find something along those lines in the fifth chapter of the Book of Revelations. No, you needn’t search for it now: I can quote it for you. ‘From the Stars there then reached down the Heavenly Flames, that was the bearer of the will of the gods; and where the flames touched, the cities of Kalgash were consumed even to utter destruction, so that of man and the works of man nothing whatever remained.’ ”

Theremon nodded. “A sudden terrible cataclysm. Why?”

“The will of the gods. They have warned us against our wickedness and have given us a span of years in which to redeem ourselves. That span is what we call the Year of Godliness, a ‘year’ two thousand and forty-nine human years long, about which you already appear to know. The current Year of Godliness is nearly at its end.”

“And then we’ll all be wiped out, you think?”

“Not all of us. But most will; and our civilization will be destroyed. Those few who survive will face the immense task of rebuilding. This is, as you seem already to be aware, a melancholy repetitive cycle in human events. What is soon due to occur will not be the first time that mankind has failed the test of the gods. We have been struck down more than once before; and now we are on the verge of being struck down yet again.”

The curious thing, Theremon thought, was that Folimun didn’t seem at all crazy.

Except for his odd robe, he could have been any sort of youngish businessman sitting in his handsome office—a loan applications officer, for instance, or an investment banker. He was obviously intelligent. He spoke clearly and well, in a crisp, direct tone. He neither ranted nor raved. But the things he was saying, in his crisp, direct way, were the wildest sort of nonsensical babble. The contrast between what Folimun said and the way he said it was hard to take.

Now he sat quietly, looking relaxed, waiting for the newspaperman to ask the next question.

“I’ll be frank,” Theremon said after a little while. “Like many people, I have difficulty accepting something this big which is handed to me simply as a revelation. I need solid proofs. But you don’t show us any. Take it on faith, you say. There’s no tangible evidence to demonstrate, of course, that’s what you tell us, but we’d all better just believe what you’re offering us, because you’ve heard all this from the gods, and you know the gods aren’t lying to you. Can you show me why I should believe you, though? Faith alone isn’t enough for people like me.”

“Why do you think there is no evidence?” Folimun asked.

“Is there? Other than the Book of Revelations itself? Circular evidence isn’t evidence to me.”

“We are a very ancient organization, you know.”

“Ten thousand years old, so the story goes.”

A brief flickering smile crossed Folimun’s thin lips. “An arbitrary figure, perhaps exaggerated somewhat for popular effect. All that we claim among ourselves is that we go back to prehistoric times.”

“So your group is at least two thousand years old, then.”

“A little more than that, at the minimum. We can trace ourselves back to a time before the last cataclysm—so we are certainly more than two thousand and forty-nine years old. Probably much more, but we have no proof of that, at least not proof of the sort which you’d be likely to accept. We think the Apostles may go back several cycles of destruction, which is to say possibly as much as six thousand years. All that really matters is that we are precataclysmic in origin. We have been quietly active as an organization for more than one Year of Godliness. And so we are in possession of information giving highly specific details of the catastrophe that lies in store for us. We know what will happen because we are aware of what has happened many times before.”

“But you won’t show anyone the information you claim to have. The evidence, the proofs.”

“The Book of Revelations is what we offer the world.”

Round and round and round. This was leading nowhere. Theremon began to feel restless. It was all a big bluff, obviously. All a cynical fake, probably designed to pull in fat contributions from the gullible likes of Bottiker and Vivin and other wealthy folk desperate to buy their way into escaping the threat of doom. Despite Folimun’s obvious appearance of sincerity and intelligence, he had to be either a willing co-conspirator in this gigantic enterprise of fraudulent fantasy, or else merely one of Mondior’s many dupes.

“All right,” the newspaperman said. “Let’s assume for the time being that there will be some sort of worldwide catastrophe next year, of which your group has advance detailed knowledge. What is it, exactly, that you want the rest of us to do? Go flocking into your chapels and beg the gods to have mercy on us?”

“It’s much too late for that.”

“There’s no hope at all, then? In that case, why are you bothering even to warn us?”

Folimun smiled again, without irony this time. “For two reasons. One, yes, we do want people to come to our chapels, not so that they can try to influence the gods, but so that they can listen to our teachings in so far as they concern matters of morality and everyday decency. We think we have a message that is of value to the world in those areas. But second, and more urgent: we want to convince people of the reality of what is coming, so that they will take measures to protect themselves against it. The worst of the catastrophe can be headed off. Steps can be taken to avert the complete destruction of our civilization. The Flames are inevitable, yes, human nature being what it is—the gods have spoken, the time of their vengeance is already on the way—but within the general madness and horror there will be some who survive. I assure you that we Apostles most definitely will. We will be here, as we have been before, to lead humanity into the new cycle of rebirth. And we offer our hand—in love, in charity, to anyone else who will accept it. Who will join with us in guarding themselves against the turmoil that is coming. Does that sound like madness to you, Theremon? Does that sound as though we’re dangerous crackpots?”

“If I could only accept your basic assumption—”

“That the Flames will come next year? You will. You will. What remains to be seen is whether you accept it long enough in advance to become one of the survivors, one of the guardians of our heritage, or discover only in the moment of destruction, in the moment of your own agony, that we were speaking the truth all along.”

“I wonder which it’ll be,” said Theremon.

“Permit me to hope that you’ll be on our side on the day that this Year of Godliness comes to its close,” Folimun said. Abruptly he rose and offered Theremon his hand. “I have to go now. His Serenity the High Apostle expects me in a few minutes. But we’ll have further conversations, of that I’m sure. A day’s notice, or less, perhaps—I’ll try to make myself available to you. I look forward to speaking with you again. Odd as this may sound, I feel that you and I are destined to work very closely together. We have much in common, you know.”

“Do we?”

“In the matter of faith, no. In the matter of the desire to survive—and to help others to survive—yes, I think so, very definitely. A time will come when you and I will seek each other out, I suspect, and join forces to fight against the Darkness that is coming. I’m certain of it, in fact.”

Sure, Theremon thought. I’d better go get fitted for my black robe right away.

But there was no sense in offending Folimun with any sort of rudeness. This cult of Apostles was growing, apparently, day by day. There was a big story here; and Folimun was probably the one he was going to have to depend on for most of it.

Theremon slipped the copy of the Book of Revelations into his briefcase and stood up.

“I’ll call you in a few weeks,” he said. “After I’ve had a chance to peruse this with some care. There’ll be other things I’ll want to ask you then.—And how far in advance do I need to call for an audience with Mondior 71?”

Folimun couldn’t be snared so simply. “As I’ve already explained, His Serenity’s work from here until the Time of Flame is so critical that he’ll be unable to make himself available for such things as personal interviews. I’m truly sorry. There’s no way I can alter that.” Folimun put out his hand. “It’s been a pleasure.”

“And for me,” said Theremon.

Folimun laughed. “Has it, really? To spend half an hour talking with a madman? A crackpot? A fanatic? A cultist?”

“I don’t remember using those words.”

“It wouldn’t amaze me to be told that you’d thought them, though.” The Apostle gave Theremon another of his curiously disarming smiles. “You’d be half right, anyway. I am a fanatic. And a cultist, I suppose. But not a madman. Not a crackpot. I only wish I were. And you will too.”

He waved Theremon out. The monk who had guided him in was waiting outside the door to take him to the lift-chamber.

A strange half hour, the newspaperman thought. And not very fruitful, really. In some ways he knew even less about the Apostles than he had before he had come here.

That they were cranks and superstition-mongers was still obvious to Theremon. Plainly they didn’t have a shred of anything like real evidence that some gigantic cataclysm was in store for the world soon. Whether they were mere self-deluding fools, though, or outright frauds looking to line their own pockets, was something that he could not yet clearly decide.

It was all pretty confusing. There was an element of fanaticism, of puritanism, about their movement that was not at all to his liking. And yet, and yet … this Folimun, this spokesman of theirs, had seemed an unexpectedly attractive person. He was intelligent, articulate—even, in his way, rational. The fact that he appeared to have a sense of humor of sorts was a surprise, and a point in his favor. Theremon had never heard of a maniac who was capable of even the slightest self-mockery—or a fanatic, either.—Unless it was all part of Folimun’s public-relations act: unless Folimun had been deliberately projecting the kind of persona that someone like Theremon would be likely to find appealing.

Be careful, he told himself. Folimun wants to use you.

But that was all right. His position with the newspaper was an influential one. Everyone wanted to use him.

Well, Theremon thought, we’ll see who uses whom.

His footsteps echoed sharply as he walked at a brisk pace through the immense entrance hall of the Apostles’ headquarters and out into the brilliance of a three-sun afternoon.

Back to the Chronicle office now. A couple of pious hours devoted to a close study of the Book of Revelations; and then it was time to begin thinking about tomorrow’s column.

11

The summer rainy season was in full spate the afternoon Sheerin 501 returned to Saro City. The plump psychologist stepped out of the plane into a stupendous downpour that had turned the airfield into something close to a lake. Gray torrents of rain rode almost horizontally on fierce gusts of wind.

Gray—gray—everything gray—

The suns had to be up there somewhere in all that murk. That faint glimmer in the west was probably Onos, and there were hints of the chilly light of Tano and Sitha off the other way. But the cloud cover was so thick that the day was disagreeably dark. Uncomfortably dark for Sheerin, who still—despite what he had told his hosts in Jonglor—was troubled by the aftereffects of his fifteen-minute ride through the Tunnel of Mystery.

He would have gone on a ten-day fast sooner than he’d admit it to Kelaritan and Cubello and the rest of those people. But he had come perilously close to the danger point in there.

For three or four days thereafter Sheerin had experienced a touch, only a touch, of the kind of claustrophobia that had sent so many citizens of Jonglor to the mental hospital. He would be in his hotel room, working on his report, when suddenly he would feel Darkness closing in on him, and he would find it necessary to get up and go out on his terrace, or even to leave the building entirely for a long stroll in the hotel garden. Necessary? Well, maybe not. But preferable. Certainly preferable. And he always felt better for doing it.

Or he would be asleep and the Darkness would come to him then. Naturally the godlight would be on in his room when he slept—he always slept with one on, he knew nobody who didn’t—and since the Tunnel ride he had taken to using an auxiliary godlight too, in case the battery of the first one should fail, though the indicator clearly said it had six months’ power left. Even so, Sheerin’s sleeping mind would become convinced that his room had been plunged into the depths of lightlessness, utterly black, the true and complete Darkness. And he would awaken, trembling, sweating, convinced he was in Darkness even though the friendly glow of the two godlights was right there on either side of him to tell him that he was not.

So now, to step from his plane into this somber twilight landscape—well, he was glad to be home, but he would have preferred a sunnier arrival. He had to fight off mild distress, or perhaps not so mild, as he entered the flexiglass foul-weather passageway that led from his plane to the terminal. He wished they hadn’t put the passageway up. Better not to be enclosed right now, Sheerin thought, even if it did mean getting wet. Better to be out there under the open sky, under the comforting light (however faint just now, however hidden by clouds) of the friendly suns.

But the queasiness passed. By the time he had claimed his baggage, the cheering reality of being back home again in Saro City had triumphed over the lingering effects of his brush with Darkness.

Liliath 221 was waiting for him outside the baggage pickup area with her car. That made him feel better too. She was a slender, pleasant-looking woman in her late forties, a fellow member of the Psychology Department, though her work was experimental, animals in mazes, no overlap at all with his. They had known each other ten or fifteen years. Sheerin would probably have asked her to marry him long ago if he had been the marrying type. But he wasn’t; nor, for all the indication she had ever given him, was she. Still, the relationship they did have seemed to suit them both.

“Of all the miserable days to pick for coming home—” he said, as he slipped in beside her and reached across to give her a quick friendly kiss.

“It’s been like this for three days. And they say we’re in for three more of it, until next Onos Day. We’ll all be drowned by then, I suppose.—You look as if you’ve lost some weight up there in Jonglor, Sheerin!”

“Have I? Well, you know, northern food—not really to my taste—”

He hadn’t expected that it would be so apparent. A man of his girth ought to be able to drop ten or fifteen pounds without its being noticeable at all. But Liliath had always had sharp eyes. And perhaps he had dropped more than ten or fifteen pounds. Ever since the Tunnel, he had simply pecked at his food. Him! It was hard for him to believe how little he had eaten.

“You look good,” she said. “Healthy. Vigorous.”

“Do I?”

“Not that I think you need to be skinny, not at this late date. But it can’t hurt to take a little off. So you enjoyed yourself in Jonglor?”

“Well—”

“Get to see the Exposition?”

“Yes. Fabulous.” He couldn’t muster much enthusiasm. “My God, this rain, Liliath!”

“It wasn’t raining in Jonglor?”

“Clear and dry all the time. The way it was when I left Saro.”

“Well, seasons change, Sheerin. You can’t hope to have the same weather for six months at a stretch, you know. With a different set of suns in the ascendant every day, we can’t expect the patterns of climate to hold still very long.”

“I can’t tell whether you sound more like a meteorologist or an astrologer,” Sheerin said.

“Neither. I sound like a psychologist.—Aren’t you going to tell me anything about your trip, Sheerin?”

He hesitated. “The Exposition was very fine. I’m sorry you missed it. But most of the time I was hard at work. They’ve got a real mess on their hands up north, this Tunnel of Mystery thing.”

“Is it really true that people have been dying in it?”

“A few. But mainly they’ve been coming out traumatized, disoriented. Claustrophobic. I spoke with some of the victims. They’ll be months recovering. For some it’ll be permanent disability. And even so the Tunnel stayed open for weeks.”

“After the problems began?”

“Nobody seemed to care. Least of all the people who run the Exposition. They were just interested in selling tickets. And the fairgoers were curious about Darkness. Curious about Darkness, can you imagine that, Liliath? They lined up eagerly to put their minds in jeopardy! Of course, they were all convinced that nothing bad was going to happen to them. And nothing bad did, to a lot of them. But not all.—I took a ride in the Tunnel myself.”

“You did?” she said, sounding astonished. “What was it like?”

“A nasty business. I’d pay a good deal not to have to do it again.”

“But obviously you came out all right.”

“Obviously,” he said carefully. “I might come out all right if I swallowed half a dozen live fish, too. But it’s not something I’d be likely to want to repeat. I told them to shut their damned Tunnel down. That was my professional opinion, and I think they’re going to abide by it. We simply weren’t designed to withstand that much Darkness, Liliath. A minute, two minutes, maybe—then we start to snap. It’s an innate thing, I’m convinced of it, millions of years of evolution shaping us to be what we are. Darkness is the most unnatural thing in the world. And the idea of selling it to people as entertainment—” He shuddered. “Well, I’ve had my trip to Jonglor, and now I’m back. What’s been going on at the university?”

“Nothing much,” Liliath replied. “The usual stupid little squabbles, the usual faculty meetings, lofty declarations of outrage over this and that burning social issue—you know.” She fell silent for a moment, both hands clinging to the steering stick as she guided the car through deep pools of water that flooded the highway. “There’s apparently some sort of fuss over at the Observatory, by the way. Your friend Beenay 25 came around looking for you. He didn’t tell me very much, but it seems they’re having a big reevaluation of one of their key theories. Everybody’s in an uproar. Old Athor himself is leading the research, can you imagine it? I thought his mind had ossified a century ago.—Beenay had some newspaperman with him, somebody who writes a popular column. Theremon, I think that was his name. Theremon 762. I didn’t care for him much.”

“He’s very well known. Something of a firebrand, I think, though I’m not exactly sure what kind of causes he fulminates about. He and Beenay spend a lot of time together.”

Sheerin made a mental note to call the young astronomer after he had unpacked. For close to a year now Beenay had been living with Sheerin’s sister’s girl, Raissta 717, and Sheerin had struck up a close friendship with him, as close as was possible considering the difference of twenty-odd years in their ages. Sheerin had an amateur’s interest in astronomy: that was one of the bonds that drew them together.

Athor back doing theoretical work! Imagine that! What could it all be about? Had some upstart published a paper attacking the Law of Universal Gravitation? No, Sheerin thought—nobody would dare.

“And you?” Sheerin asked. “You haven’t said a word about what you did all the time I was away.”

“What do you think I did, Sheerin? Go power-soaring in the mountains? Attend meetings of the Apostles of Flame? Take a course in political science? I read books. I taught my classes. I ran my experiments. I waited for you to come home. I planned the dinner I’d cook when you did come home.—You’re sure you aren’t on a diet, now?”

“Of course not.” He let his hand rest fondly on hers for a moment. “I thought about you all the time, Liliath.”

“I’m sure you did.”

“And I can hardly wait for dinnertime.”

“At least that much sounds plausible.”

The rain suddenly grew even more dense. A great swolloping mass of it struck the windshield and it was all Liliath could do to keep the car on the road, though she managed it. They were going past the Pantheon, the magnificent Cathedral of All the Gods. It didn’t seem quite so magnificent now, with rivers of rain sluicing down its brick facade.

The sky darkened another degree or two in the worsening storm. Sheerin cringed away from the blackness outside and looked toward the brightly lit controls of the car’s dashboard for comfort.

He didn’t want to be in the enclosed space of the car any more. He wanted to be outside in the open fields, storm or no storm. But that was crazy. He’d be soaked in an instant out there. He might even drown, the puddles were so deep.

Think happy thoughts, he told himself. Think warm bright thoughts. Think about sunshine, the golden sunshine of Onos, the warm light of Patru and Trey, even the chilly light of Sitha and Tano, the faint red light of Dovim. Think about this evening’s dinner. Liliath has made a feast for you to welcome you back. She’s such a good cook, Liliath is.

He realized that he still wasn’t hungry at all. Not on a miserable gray day like this—so dark—so dark—

But Liliath was very sensitive about her cooking. Especially when she cooked for him. He’d eat everything she put before him, he resolved, even if he had to force himself. A funny notion, he thought: he, Sheerin, the great gourmand, thinking about forcing himself to eat!

Liliath glanced toward him at the sound of his laughter.

“What’s so funny?”

“I—ah—that Athor should be back doing research again,” he said hastily. “After having been content so long with being the Lord High Emperor of Astronomy and doing purely administrative stuff. I’ll have to call Beenay right away. What in the world can be going on over at the Observatory?”

12

This was Siferra 89’s third day back at Saro University, and it hadn’t stopped raining yet. Quite a refreshing contrast to the bone-dry desert environment of the Sagikan Peninsula. She hadn’t seen rain in so long that she found herself wonderstruck at the whole idea that water could fall from the skies.

In Sagikan, every drop of water was enormously precious. You calculated its use with the greatest precision and recycled whatever was recyclable. Now here it was, pouring down out of the heavens as though from a gigantic reservoir that could never run dry. Siferra felt a powerful urge to strip her clothes off and sprint across the great green lawns of the campus, letting the rainfall flow down her body in an unending delicious stream to wash her clean at last of the infernal desert dust.

That was all they’d need to see. That cool, aloof, unromantic professor of archaeology, Siferra 89, running naked in the rain! It would be worth doing if only to enjoy the sight of their astounded faces peering out of every window of the university as she went flying past.

Not very likely, though, Siferra thought.

Not my style at all.

And there was too much to do, really. She hadn’t wasted any time getting down to work. Most of the artifacts she had excavated at the Beklimot site were following along by cargo ship and wouldn’t be here for many weeks. But there were charts to arrange, sketches to finish, Balik’s stratigraphic photographs to analyze, the soil samples to prepare for the radiography lab, a million and one things to do.—And then, too, there were the Thombo tablets to discuss with Mudrin 505 of the Department of Paleography.

The Thombo tablets! The find of finds, the premier discovery of the entire year and a half! Or so she felt. Of course, it all depended on whether anyone could make any sense out of them. At any rate, she would waste no time getting Mudrin working on them. At the least, the tablets were fascinating things; but they might be much more than that. There was the possibility that they might revolutionize the entire study of the prehistoric world. That was why she hadn’t entrusted them to the freight shippers, but had carried them back from Sagikan in her own hands.

A knock at the dour.

“Siferra? Siferra, are you there?”

“Come on in, Balik.”

The broad-shouldered stratigrapher was soaking wet. “This foul abominable rain,” he muttered, shaking himself off. “You wouldn’t believe how drenched I got just crossing the quad from Uland Library to here!”

“I love the rain,” Siferra said. “I hope it never stops. After all those months baking out in the desert—the sand in your eyes all the time, the dust in your throat, the heat, the dryness—no, let it rain, Balik!”

“But I see you’re keeping yourself indoors. It’s a whole lot easier to appreciate rain when you’re looking at it from a nice dry office.—Playing with your tablets again, are you?”

He indicated the six ragged, battered slabs of hard red clay that Siferra had arranged atop her desk in two groups of three, the square ones in one row and the oblong ones below them.

“Aren’t they beautiful?” Siferra said exultantly. “I can’t leave them alone. I keep staring at them as if they’ll suddenly become intelligible if only I look at them long enough.”

Balik leaned forward and shook his head. “Chickenscratches. That’s all it looks like to me.”

“Come on! I’ve already identified distinct word-patterns,” Siferra said. “And I’m no paleographer. Here—look—you see this group of six characters here? It repeats over here. And these three, with the wedges setting them off—”

“Has Mudrin seen them yet?”

“Not yet. I’ve asked him to stop by a little later.”

“You know that word has gotten out about what we’ve found, don’t you? The successive Thombo town-sites?”

Siferra looked at him in amazement. “What? Who—?”

“One of the students,” Balik said. “I don’t know who it was—Veloran, is my guess, though Eilis thinks it was Sten. I suppose it was unavoidable, don’t you?”

“I warned them not to say anything to—”

“Yes, but they’re kids, Siferra, only kids, nineteen years old and on their first important dig! And the expedition stumbles on something utterly astounding—seven previously unknown prehistoric cities one on top of the next, going back the gods only know how many thousands of years—”

“Nine cities, Balik.”

“Seven, nine, it’s colossal either way. And I think it’s seven.” Balik smiled.

“I know you do. You’re wrong.—But who’s been talking about it? In the department, I mean.”

“Hilliko. And Brangin. I heard them this morning, in the faculty lounge. They’re extremely skeptical, I have to tell you. Passionately skeptical. Neither one of them thinks it’s even remotely possible for there to be even one settlement older than Beklimot at that site, let alone nine, or seven, or however many there are.”

“They haven’t seen the photographs. They haven’t seen the charts. They haven’t seen the tablets. They haven’t seen anything. And already they have an opinion.” Siferra’s eyes blazed with rage. “What do they know? Have they ever so much as set foot on the Sagikan Peninsula? Have they been to Beklimot even as tourists? And they dare to have an opinion on a dig that hasn’t been published, that hasn’t even been informally discussed within the department—!”

“Siferra—”

“I’d like to flay them both! And Veloran and Sten also. They knew they weren’t supposed to shoot their mouths off! Where do those two come off breaking priority, even verbally? I’ll show them. I’ll get them both in here and find out which one of them’s responsible for leaking the story to Hilliko and Brangin, and if that one thinks he’s ever going to get a doctorate in this university, or she, whichever one it was—”

“Please, Siferra,” Balik said soothingly. “You’re getting all worked up over nothing.”

“Nothing! My priority blown, and—”

“Nobody’s blown anything for you. It all remains just a rumor until you make your own preliminary statement. As for Veloran and Sten, we don’t really know that either of them is the one that let the story get out, and if one of them did, well, remember that you were young once too.”

“Yes,” Siferra said. “Three geological epochs ago.”

“Don’t be silly. You’re younger than I am, and I’m hardly ancient, you know.”

Siferra nodded indifferently. She looked toward the window. Suddenly the rain didn’t seem so pleasing. Everything was dark outside, disturbingly dark.

“Still, to hear that our findings are already controversial, and not even published yet—”

“They have to be controversial, Siferra. Everybody’s wagons are going to be upset by what we found in that hill—not just in our department, but History, Philosophy, even Theology, they’ll all be affected. And you can bet they’ll fight to defend their established notions of the way civilization developed. Wouldn’t you, if somebody came along with a radical new idea that threatened everything you believe?—Be realistic, Siferra. We’ve known from the start that there’d be a storm over this.”

“I suppose. I wasn’t ready for it to begin so soon. I’ve hardly begun unpacking.”

“That’s the real problem. You’ve plunged back into the thick of things so fast, without taking any time to decompress.—Look, I’ve got an idea. We’re entitled to a little time off before we get back to full-time academic loads. Why don’t you and I run away from the rain and take a little holiday together? Up to Jonglor, say, to see the Exposition? I was talking to Sheerin yesterday—he was just there, you know, and he says—”

She stared at Balik in disbelief. “What?”

“A holiday, I said. You and me.”

“You’re making a pass at me, Balik?”

“You could call it that, I suppose. But is that so incredible? We aren’t exactly strangers. We’ve known each other since we were graduate students. We’ve just come back from a year and a half spent in the desert together.”

“Together? We were at the same dig, yes. You had your tent, I had mine. There’s never been anything between us. And now, out of the blue—”

Balik’s stolid features showed dismay and annoyance. “It’s not as though I asked you to marry me, Siferra. I just suggested a quick little trip to the Jonglor Exposition, five or six days, some sunshine, a decent resort hotel instead of a tent pegged out in the middle of the desert, a few quiet dinners, some good wine—” He turned his palms outward in a gesture of irritation. “You’re making me feel like a silly schoolboy, Siferra.”

“You’re acting like one,” she said. “Our relationship has always been purely professional, Balik. Let’s keep it that way, shall we?”

He began to reply, evidently thought better of it, clamped his lips tight shut.

They looked at each other uncomfortably for a long moment.

Siferra’s head was pounding. All this was unexpected and disagreeable—the news that the other members of the department were already taking positions on the Thombo finds, and Balik’s clumsy attempt at seducing her as well. Seducing? Well, at establishing some sort of romantic rapport with her, anyway. How utterly astonished he looked at being rejected, too.

She wondered if she had ever accidentally seemed to be leading him on in some way, to give him a hint of feelings that had never existed.

No. No. She couldn’t believe that she had. She had no interest in going to north-country resorts and sipping wine in romantically lit restaurants with Balik or anyone else. She had her work. That was enough. For twenty-odd years, ever since her teens, men had been offering themselves to her, telling her how beautiful, how wonderful, how fascinating she was. It was flattering, she supposed. Better that they think her beautiful and fascinating than ugly and boring. But she wasn’t interested. Never had been. Didn’t want to be. How tiresome of Balik to have created this awkwardness between them now, when they still had all the labor of organizing the Beklimot material ahead of them—the two of them, working side by side—

There was another knock at the door. She was immensely grateful for the interruption.

“Who’s there?”

“Mudrin 505,” a quavering voice replied.

“Come in. Please.”

“I’ll leave now,” Balik said.

“No. He’s here to see the tablets. They’re your tablets as much as mine, aren’t they?”

“Siferra, I’m sorry if—”

“Forget it. Forget it!”

Mudrin came doddering in. He was a frail, desiccated-looking man in his late seventies, well past retirement age, but still retained as a member of the faculty in a nonteaching post so that he could continue his paleographic studies. His mild graygreen eyes, watery from a lifetime of poring over old faded manuscripts, peered out from behind thick spectacles. Yet Siferra knew that their watery appearance was deceptive: those were the sharpest eyes she had ever known, at least where ancient inscriptions were concerned.

“So these are the famous tablets,” Mudrin said. “You know I’ve thought about nothing else since you told me.” But he made no immediate move to examine them.—“Can you give me a little information about the context, the matrix?”

“Here’s Balik’s master photo,” Siferra said, handing him the huge glossy enlargement. “The Hill of Thombo, the old midden-heap south of Beklimot Major. When the sandstorm slit it open, this was the view we had. And then we ran our trench down here—and down to here, next—we laid the whole thing open. Can you make out this dark line here?”

“Charcoal?” Mudrin asked.

“Exactly. A fire line here, the whole town burned. Now we skip down to here and we see a second batch of foundations, and a second fire line. And if you look here—and here—”

Mudrin studied the photograph a long while. “What do you have here? Eight successive settlement sites?”

“Seven,” Balik blurted.

“Nine, I think,” said Siferra curtly. “But I agree it gets pretty difficult to tell, down toward the base of the hill. We’ll need chemical analysis to clear it up, and radiographic testing. But obviously there was a whole series of conflagrations here. And the Thombo people went on building and rebuilding, time after time.”

“But this site must be incredibly ancient, if that’s the case!” Mudrin said.

“My guess is that the occupation period was a span of at least five thousand years. Perhaps much more. Perhaps ten or fifteen. We won’t know until we’ve fully uncovered the lowest level, and that’ll have to wait for the next expedition. Or the one after that.”

“Five thousand years, you say? Can it be?”

“To build and rebuild and rebuild again? Five thousand at a minimum.”

“But no site we’ve ever excavated anywhere in the world is remotely as old as that,” Mudrin said, looking startled. “Beklimot itself is less than two thousand years old, isn’t that so? And we regard it as the oldest known human settlement on Kalgash.”

“The oldest known settlement,” Siferra said. “But what’s to say that there aren’t older ones? Much older ones? Mudrin, this photo gives you your own answer. Here’s a site that has to be older than Beklimot—there are Beklimot-style artifacts in its highest level, and it goes down a long way from there. Beklimot must be a very recent settlement as human history goes. The Thombo settlement, which was ancient before Beklimot ever existed, must have burned and burned and burned again, and was rebuilt every time, down through what must have been hundreds of generations.”

“A very unlucky place, then,” Mudrin observed. “Hardly beloved of the gods, was it?”

“Eventually that must have occurred to them,” Balik said.

Siferra nodded. “Yes. Finally they must have decided there was a curse on the place. So instead of rebuilding it after the last fire in the series they moved a short distance away and built Beklimot. But before that they must have occupied Thombo a long, long time. We were able to recognize the architectural styles of the two topmost settlements—see, it’s cyclopean middle-Beklimot here, and proto-Beklimot crosshatch beneath. But the third town down, what there is left of it, is like nothing I can identify. The fourth is even stranger, and very crude. The fifth makes the fourth look sophisticated by comparison. Below that, everything’s such a primitive jumble that it’s not easy to tell which town is which. But each one is separated by a burn line from the one above it, or so we think. And the tablets—”

“Yes, the tablets,” Mudrin said, trembling with excitement.

“We found this set, the square ones, in the third level. The oblong ones came from the fifth one. I can’t even begin to make any sense out of them, of course, but I’m no paleographer.”

“How wonderful it would be,” Balik began, “if these tablets contained some kind of account of the destruction and rebuilding of the Thombo towns, and—”

Siferra shot him a poisonous glance. “How wonderful it would be, Balik, if you wouldn’t spin cozy little wish-fulfillment fantasies like that!”

“I’m sorry, Siferra,” he said icily. “Forgive me for breathing.”

Mudrin took no need of their bickering. He was at Siferra’s desk, head bent low over the square tablets for a long while, then over the oblong ones.

Finally the paleographer said, “Astonishing! Absolutely astonishing!”

“Can you read them?” Siferra asked.

The old man chuckled. “Read them? Of course not. Do you want miracles? But I see word-groups here.”

“Yes. So did I,” Siferra said.

“And I can almost recognize letters. Not on the older tablets—they’re done in a completely unfamiliar script, very likely a syllabic one, too many different characters for it to be alphabetic. But the square tablets seem to be written in a very primitive form of the Beklimot script. See, this is a quhas here, I’d almost be willing to wager on it, and this appears to be a somewhat distorted form of the letter tifjak—it is a tifjak, wouldn’t you say?—I need to work on these, Siferra. With my own lighting equipment, my cameras, my scanning screens. May I take them with me?”

“Take them?” she said, as if he had asked to borrow some of her fingers.

“It’s the only way I can begin to decipher them.”

“Do you think you can decipher them?” Balik asked.

“I offer no guarantees. But if this character is a tifjak and this a quhas, then I should be able to find other letters ancestral to the Beklimot ones, and at least produce a transliteration. Whether we can understand the language once we read the script, that’s hard to say. And I doubt I can get very far with the oblong tablets unless you’ve uncovered a bilingual that will give me some way of approaching this even older script. But let me try, Siferra. Let me try.”

“Yes. Here.”

Lovingly she gathered up the tablets and put them back in the container in which she had carried them all the way from Sagikan. It pained her to let them go out of her possession. But Mudrin was right. He couldn’t do anything with them at a quick glance; he had to subject them to laboratory analysis.

She watched ruefully until the paleographer had gone doddering from the room, his precious bundle clasped close against his hollow chesit. Now she and Balik were alone again.

“Siferra—about what I said before—”

“I told you to forget it. I already have. Do you mind if I get about my work now, Balik?”

13

“Well, how did he take it?” Theremon asked. “Better than you expected he would, is my guess.”

“He was completely marvelous,” said Beenay. They were on the terrace at the Six Suns Club. The rains had ended for the time being, and the evening was a splendid one, with the strange clarity of the atmosphere that always came after a prolonged period of rain: Tano and Sitha in the west, casting their hard white ghostly light with more than usual intensity, and red Dovim in the opposing sector of the dusky sky, burning like a tiny gem. “He hardly even seemed upset, except when I indicated that I’d almost been tempted to suppress the whole thing for the sake of protecting his feelings. Then he flew off the handle. He really chewed me out—as I deserved. But the funniest thing was— Waiter! Waiter! A Tano Special for me, please! And one for my friend. Make them doubles!”

“You’re really turning into a drinker, aren’t you?” Theremon remarked.

Beenay shrugged. “Only when I’m here. There’s something about this terrace, the view of the city, the whole atmosphere—”

“That’s how it begins. You get to like it little by little, you develop jolly associations between one particular place and drinking, then after a while you experiment with having a drink or two somewhere else, and then a drink or three—”

“Theremon! You sound like an Apostle of Flame! They think drinking’s evil too, don’t they?”

“They think everything’s evil. But drinking certainly is. That’s what’s so wonderful about it, eh, my friend?” Theremon laughed. “You were telling me about Athor.”

“Yes. The really comical thing. Do you remember that wild notion you had that some unknown factor might be pushing Kalgash away from the orbit we’d expect it to have?”

“The invisible giant, yes. The dragon huffing and puffing in the sky.”

“Well, Athor took exactly the same position!”

“He thinks there’s a dragon in the sky?”

Beenay guffawed. “Don’t be silly. But some sort of unknown factor, yes. A dark sun, maybe, or some other world that’s located at a position that’s impossible for us to see, but which nevertheless is exerting gravitational force on Kalgash—”

“Isn’t that all a little on the fantastic side?” Theremon asked.

“Of course it is. But Athor reminded me of the old philosophical chestnut of Thargola’s Sword. Which we use—metaphorically, I mean—to smite the more complex premise when we’re trying to decide between two hypotheses. It’s simpler to go looking for a dark sun than it is to have to produce an entirely new Theory of Universal Gravitation. And therefore—”

“A dark sun? But isn’t that a contradiction in terms? A sun is a source of light. If it’s dark, how can it be a sun?”

“That’s just one of the possibilities Athor tossed at us. It isn’t necessarily one that he takes seriously. What we’ve been doing, these last few days, is throwing around all kinds of astronomical notions, hoping that one of them will make enough sense so that we can begin to put together an explanation for— Look, there’s Sheerin.” Beenay waved at the rotund psychologist, who had just entered the club. “Sheerin! Sheerin! Come out here and have a drink with us, will you?”

Sheerin stepped carefully through the narrow doorway.

“So you’ve taken up some new vices, have you, Beenay?”

“Not very many. But Theremon’s exposed me to the Tano Special, and I’m afraid I’ve caught a taste for it. You know Theremon, don’t you? He writes the column in the Chronicle.”

“I don’t think we’ve actually met,” Sheerin said. He offered his hand. “I’ve certainly heard a lot about you, though. I’m Raissta 717’s uncle.”

“The psych professor,” Theremon said. “You’ve been at the Jonglor Exposition, right?”

Sheerin looked startled. “You keep up with everything, don’t you?”

“I try to.” The waiter was back. “What can we get you? Tano Special?”

“Too strong for me,” Sheerin said. “And a little too sweet.—Do you have neltigir, by any chance?”

“The Jonglorian brandy? I’m not sure. How do you want it, if I can find some?”

“Straight,” said Sheerin. “Please.” To Theremon and Beenay he said, “I developed a liking for it while I was up north. The food’s awful in Jonglor, but at least they can distill a decent brandy.”

“I hear they’ve had a lot of trouble at the Exposition,” Theremon said. “Some problem in their amusement park—a ride through Darkness that was driving people crazy, literally driving them out of their heads—”

“The Tunnel of Mystery, yes. That was the reason I was there: as a consultant called in by the city and its lawyers for an opinion.”

Theremon sat forward. “Is it true that people were dying of shock in that tunnel, and they kept it open anyway?”

“Everyone’s been asking me that,” replied Sheerin. “There were a few deaths, yes. But they didn’t seem to harm the ride’s popularity. People insisted on taking the risk anyway. And a lot of them came out very badly deranged. I took a ride in the Tunnel of Mystery myself,” he said, shuddering. “Well, they’ve shut the thing down, now. I told them it was either that or fork over millions of credits in liability suits, that it was absurd to expect people to be able to tolerate Darkness at that level of intensity. They saw the logic of that.”

“We do have some neltigir, sir,” the waiter broke in, putting a glass of somber brownish brandy on the table in front of Sheerin. “Just one bottle, so you’d better go easy.” The psychologist nodded and scooped up his drink, downing about half of it before the waiter had left the table.

“Sir, I said—”

Sheerin smiled at him. “I heard what you said. I’ll take it easier after this one.” He turned to Beenay. “I understand there was some excitement at the Observatory while I was up north. Liliath told me. But she wasn’t too clear on what was going on. Some new theory, I think she said—”

Grinning, Beenay said, “Theremon and I were just talking about that. Not a new theory, no. A challenge to an established one. I was running some calculations on Kalgash’s orbit, and—”

Sheerin listened to the story with increasing astonishment. “The Theory of Universal Gravitation’s invalid?” he cried when Beenay was halfway through. “Good lord, man! Does that mean that if I put my glass down, it’s likely to go floating up into the sky? I’d better finish off my neltigir first, then!” And he did.

Beenay laughed. “The theory’s still on the books. What we’re trying to do—what Athor is trying to do; he’s been spearheading the work, and it’s amazing to watch him go at it—is to come up with a mathematical explanation for why our figures don’t come out the way we think they ought to.”

“Massaging the data, I think it’s called,” Theremon added.

“Sounds suspicious to me,” Sheerin said. “You don’t like the result, so you rearrange your findings, is that it, Beenay? Make everything fit, by hook or by crook?”

“Well, not exactly—”

“Admit it! Admit it!” Sheerin roared with laughter. “Waiter! Another neltigir! And one more Tano Special for my unethical young friend here!—Theremon, can I get you a drink too?”

“Please.”

Sheerin said in the same broad tone as before, “This is all very disillusioning, Beenay. I thought it was only us psychologists who made the data fit the theories and called the result ‘science.’ Seems more like something the Apostles of Flame might do!”

“Sheerin! Cut it out!”

“The Apostles claim to be scientists too,” Theremon put in. Beenay and Sheerin turned to look at him. “Last week just before the rain started I had an interview with one of their big people,” he went on. “I had hoped to see Mondior, but I got a certain Folimun 66 instead, their public-relations man, very slick, very bright, very personable. He spent half an hour explaining to me that the Apostles have reliable scientific proof that next year on the nineteenth of Theptar the suns are going to go out and we’ll all be plunged into Darkness and everyone will go insane.”

“The whole world turned into one big Tunnel of Mystery, is that it?” Sheerin said jovially. “We won’t have enough mental hospitals to hold the entire population, you know. Or enough psychiatrists to treat them. Besides, the psychiatrists will be crazy too.”

“Aren’t they already?” Beenay asked.

“Good point,” said Sheerin.

“The madness isn’t the worst of it,” Theremon said. “According to Folimun, the sky will be filled with something called Stars that will shoot fire down upon us and set everything ablaze. And there we’ll be, a world full of gibbering maniacs, wandering around in cities that are burning down around our ears. Thank heaven it’s nothing but Mondior’s bad dream.”

“But what if it isn’t?” Sheerin said, suddenly sobering. His round face grew long and thoughtful. “What if there’s something to it?”

“What an appalling notion,” Beenay said. “I think it calls for another drink.”

“You haven’t finished the one you’ve got,” Sheerin reminded the young astronomer.

“Well, what of it? It still calls for another one afterward. Waiter! Waiter!”

14

Athor 77 felt fatigue sweeping through him in shimmering waves. The Observatory director had lost all track of time. Had he really been at his desk sixteen straight hours? And yesterday the same. And the day before—

That was what Nyilda claimed, anyway. He had spoken to her just a little while before. His wife’s face on the screen had been tense, drawn, unmistakably worried.

“Won’t you come home for a rest, Athor? You’ve been going at it practically around the clock.”

“Have I?”

“You aren’t a young man, you know.”

“I’m not a senile one, either, Nyilda. And this is exhilarating work. After a decade of initialing budget reports and reading other people’s research papers I’m finally doing some real work again. I love it.”

She looked even more troubled. “But you don’t need to be doing research at your age. Your reputation is secure, Athor!”

“Ah, is it?”

“Your name will be famous in the history of astronomy forever.”

“Or infamous,” he said balefully.

“Athor, I don’t understand what you—”

“Let me be, Nyilda. I’m not going to keel over at my desk, believe me. I feel rejuvenated by what I’m doing here. And it’s work that only I can do. If that sounds pigheaded, so be it, but it’s absolutely essential that I—”

She sighed. “Yes, of course. But don’t overdo it, Athor. That’s all I ask.”

Was he overdoing it? he wondered now. Yes, yes, of course he was. There wasn’t any other way. You couldn’t dabble in these matters. You had to throw yourself wholeheartedly into them. When he was working out Universal Gravitation he had worked sixteen-, eighteen-, twenty-hour days for weeks on end, sleeping only when sleep became unavoidable, snatching brief naps and awakening ready and eager for work, with his mind still bubbling with the equations he had left unfinished a little while before.

But he had been only thirty-five or so, then. He was nearly seventy now. There was no denying the inroads of age. His head ached, his throat was dry, there was a nasty pounding in his chest. Despite the warmth of his office his fingertips were chilly with weariness. His knees were throbbing. Every part of his body protested the strain he had been putting on it.

Just a little while longer today, he promised himself, and then I’ll go home.

Just a little while longer.

Postulate Eight—

“Sir?”

“What is it?” he asked.

But his voice must have turned the question into some sort of fierce snarl, for when he glanced around he saw young Yimot standing in the doorway doing a bizarre series of wild twitches and convulsions, as though he were dancing on hot embers. There was terror in the boy’s eyes. Of course Yimot always seemed intimidated by the Observatory director—everybody around here was, not just graduate students, and Athor was used to it. Athor was awesome and he knew it. But this went beyond the ordinary. Yimot was gazing at him in undisguised fear mingled with what seemed like astonishment.

Yimot struggled visibly to find his voice and said huskily, “The calculations you wanted, sir—”

“Oh. Yes. Yes. Here, give me.”

Athor’s hand was trembling violently as he reached for the printouts Yimot had brought him. Both of them stared at it, aghast. The long bony fingers were pale as death and they were quivering with a vehemence that not even Yimot, famed for his remarkable nervous reactions, could have equaled. Athor willed his hand to be still, but it would not. He might just as well have been willing Onos to spin backward across the sky.

With an effort he snatched the papers from Yimot and slapped them down on the desk.

Yimot said, “If there’s anything I can get you, sir—”

“Medication, you mean? How dare you suggest—”

“I just meant something to eat, or maybe a cold drink,” Yimot said in a barely audible whisper. He backed slowly away as if expecting Athor to growl and leap for his throat.

“Ah. Ah. I see. No, I’m fine, Yimot. Fine!”

“Yes, sir.”

The student went out. Athor closed his eyes a moment, took three or four deep breaths, struggled to calm himself. He was near the end of his task, of that he was sure. These figures that he had asked Yimot to work out for him were almost certainly the last confirmation he needed. But the question now was whether the work was going to finish him before he finished the work.

He looked at Yimot’s numbers.

Three screens sat before him on his desk. On the left-hand one was the orbit of Kalgash as calculated according to conventional reckoning under the Theory of Universal Gravitation, outlined in blazing red. On the right-hand screen, in fiery yellow, was the revised orbit that Beenay had produced, using the new university computer and the most recent observations of Kalgash’s actual position. The middle screen carried both orbits plotted one over the other. In the past five days Athor had produced seven different postulates to account for the deviation between the theoretical orbit and the observed one, and he could call up any of those seven postulates on the middle screen with a single key-stroke.

The trouble was that all seven of them were nonsense, and he knew it. Each one had a fatal flaw at its heart—an assumption that was there not because the calculations justified it, but only because the situation called for some such sort of special assumption in order to make the numbers turn out the right way. Nothing was provable, nothing was confirmable. It was as though in each case he had simply decreed, at some point in the chain of logic, that a fairy godmother would step in and adjust the gravitational interactions to account for the deviation. In truth that was precisely what Athor knew he needed to find. But it had to be a real fairy godmother.

Postulate Eight, now—

He began keying in Yimot’s calculations. Several times his trembling fingers betrayed him and he made an error; but his mind was still sharp enough to tell him instantly that he had hit the wrong key, and he backed up and repaired the damage each time. Twice, as he worked, he nearly blacked out from the intensity of his effort. But he forced himself to go on.

You are the only person in the world who can possibly do this, he told himself as he worked. And so you must.

It sounded foolish to him, and madly egocentric, and perhaps a little insane. It probably wasn’t even true. But at this stage in his exhaustion he couldn’t allow himself to consider any other premise but that of his own indispensability. All the basic concepts of this project were held in his mind, and his mind alone. He had to push himself onward until he had closed the last link in the chain. Until—

There.

The last of Yimot’s numbers went into the computer.

Athor hit the key that brought the two orbits up into view simultaneously on the middle screen, and hit the key that integrated the new number with the existing patterns.

The brilliant red ellipse that was the original theoretical orbit wavered and shifted, and suddenly it was gone. So was the yellow one of the observed orbit. Now there was only a single line on the screen, a deep, intense orange, the two orbital simulations overlapping to the last decimal place.

Athor gasped. For a long moment he studied the screen, and then he closed his eyes again and bowed his head against the edge of the desk. The orange ellipse blazed like a ring of flame against his closed eyelids.

He felt a curious sense of exultation mixed with dismay.

He had his answer, now; he had a hypothesis that he was certain would stand up to the closest scrutiny. The Theory of Universal Gravitation was valid after all: the epochal chain of reasoning on which his fame was based would not be overthrown.

But at the same time he knew now that the model of the solar system with which he was so familiar was in fact erroneous. The unknown factor for which they had sought, the invisible giant, the dragon in the sky, was real. Athor found that profoundly upsetting, even if it had rescued his famous theory. He had thought for years that he fully understood the rhythm of the heavens, and now it was clear to him that his knowledge had been incomplete, that a great strangeness existed in the midst of the known universe, that things were not as he had always believed them to be. It was hard, at his age, to swallow that.

After a time Athor looked up. Nothing had changed on the screen. He punched in a few interrogative equations, and still nothing changed. He saw one orbit, not two.

Very well, he told himself. So the universe is not quite as you thought it was. You’d better rearrange your beliefs, then. Because you certainly can’t rearrange the universe.

“Yimot!” he called. “Faro! Beenay! All of you!”

Roly-poly little Faro was the first through the door, with beanpole Yimot just behind him, and then the rest of the Astronomy Department, Beenay, Thilanda, Klet, Simbron, and some others. They clustered just inside the entrance to his office. Athor saw by the expression of shock on their faces that he must be a frightful sight indeed, no doubt wild and haggard, his white hair standing out in all directions, his face pale, his whole appearance that of an old man right on the edge of collapse.

It was important to defuse their fears right away. This was no moment for melodrama.

Quietly he said, “Yes, I’m very tired and I know it. And I probably look like some demon out of the nether realms. But I’ve got something here that looks like it works.”

“The gravitational lens idea?” Beenay said.

“The gravitational lens is a completely hopeless concept,” Athor said frostily. “The same with the burned-out sun, the fold in space, the zone of negative mass, and the other fantastical notions we’ve been playing with all week. They’re all very pretty ideas but they don’t stand up to hard scrutiny. There is one that does, though.”

He watched their eyes widen.

Turning to the screen, he began once again to set up the numbers of Postulate Eight. His weariness dropped away as he worked: he struck no wrong keys this time, he felt no aches and pains. He had moved into a realm beyond fatigue.

“In this postulate we assume,” he said, “a non-luminous planetary body similar to Kalgash, which is in orbit not around Onos but around Kalgash itself. Its mass is considerable, in fact is nearly the same as that of Kalgash itself: sufficient to exert a gravitational force on our world that causes the perturbations of our orbit which Beenay has called to our attention.”

Athor keyed in the visuals and the solar system appeared on the screen in stylized form: the six suns, Kalgash, and the postulated satellite of Kalgash.

He turned back to face the others. They were all looking at each other uneasily. Though they were half his age, or even less, they must be having as much trouble coming to an intellectual and emotional acceptance of the whole idea of another major heavenly body in the universe as he had had. Or else they simply must think he had become senile, and somehow had slipped up in his calculations.

“The numbers supporting Postulate Eight are correct,” Athor said. “I pledge you that. And the postulate has withstood every test I could apply.”

He glared at them defiantly, looking ferociously at each of them in turn, as if to remind them that he was the Athor 77 who had given the world the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and that he had not yet taken leave of his faculties.

Beenay said softly, “And the reason why we are unable to see this satellite, sir—?”

“Two reasons,” replied Athor serenely. “Like Kalgash itself, this planetary body would shine only by reflected light. If we assume that its surface is made up largely of bluish rock—not an implausible geological likelihood—then the light reflected from it would be positioned along the spectrum in such a way that the eternal blaze of the six suns, combined with the lightscattering properties of our own atmosphere, would completely mask its presence. In a sky where several suns are shining at virtually every moment, such a satellite would be invisible to us.”

Faro said, “Provided the orbit of the satellite is an extremely large one, isn’t that so, sir?”

“Right.” Athor keyed in the second visual. “Here’s a closer look. As you see, our unknown and invisible satellite travels around us on an enormous ellipse that carries it extremely far from us for many years at a time. Not so distant that we don’t display the orbital effects of its presence in the heavens—but far enough so that ordinarily there is no possibility of our getting a naked-eye view of this dim rocky mass in the sky, and very little possibility of our discovering it even with our telescopes. Since we have no way of knowing it’s there by ordinary observation, it would be only by the wildest chance that we’d have detected it astronomically.”

“But of course we can go looking for it now,” said Thilanda 191, whose specialty was astrophotography.

“And of course we will,” Athor told her. They were coming around to the idea now, he saw. Every one of them. He knew them well enough to see that there were no secret scoffers. “Though you may find the search harder than you suspect, very definitely a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. But there’ll be an immediate appropriation for the work, that I pledge you.”

Beenay said, “One question, sir.”

“Go on.”

“If the orbit’s as eccentric as your postulate supposes, and therefore this satellite of ours, this—Kalgash Two, let’s call it for the moment—Kalgash Two is extremely distant from us during certain parts of its orbital cycle, then it stands to reason that at other parts of its cycle it’s bound to move into a position that’s very much closer to us. There has to be some range of variation even in the most perfect orbit, and a satellite traveling in a large elliptical orbit is likely to have an extreme range between the farthest and the closest points of approach to the primary.”

“That would be logical, yes,” Athor said.

“But then, sir,” Beenay went on, “if we assume that Kalgash Two has been so far from us during the entire period of modern astronomical science that we’ve been unable to discover its very existence except by the indirect means of measuring its effect on our own world’s orbit, wouldn’t you agree that it’s probably coming back from its farthest distance right now? That it must currently be approaching us?”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow,” Yimot said, with a great flurry of his arms. “We don’t have any idea where it is along its orbital path right now, or how long it takes to make one complete circuit around Kalgash. It might be a ten-thousand-year orbit and Kalgash Two could still be heading away from us after an approach in prehistoric times that no one remembers.”

“True,” Beenay admitted. “We can’t really say whether it’s coming or going at the present moment. Not yet, anyway.”

“But we can try to find out,” Faro said. “Thilanda has the right idea. Even though all the numbers check out, we need to see whether Kalgash Two is actually out there. Once we find it we can begin to calculate its orbit.”

“We should be able to calculate its orbit simply from the perturbations it causes in ours,” said Klet, who was the department’s best mathematician.

“Yes,” Simbron put in—she was a cosmographer—“and we can also figure out whether it’s approaching or heading away from us. Gods! What if it’s heading this way? What an amazing event that would be! A dark planetary body cutting across the sky—passing between us and the suns! Possibly even blotting out the light of some of them for a couple of hours!”

“How strange that would be,” Beenay mused. “An eclipse, I suppose you could call it. You know: the visual effect that occurs when some object gets between a viewer and the thing he’s looking at. But could it happen? The suns are so huge—how could Kalgash Two actually conceal one of them from view?”

“If it came close enough to us it might,” Faro said. “Why, I could imagine a situation in which—”

“Yes, work out all possible scenarios, why don’t you?” Athor interjected suddenly, cutting Faro off with such brutal abruptness that everyone in the room turned to stare at him. “Play with the idea, all of you. Push it this way and that, and see what you get.”

Suddenly he couldn’t bear to sit here any longer. He had to get away.

The exhilaration he had felt since putting the last piece into place had abruptly deserted him. He felt a terrible leaden weariness, as though he were a thousand years old. Chills were running along his arms down into his fingers, and something was squirming frantically in the muscles of his back. He knew that he had pushed himself beyond all endurance now. It was time for younger workers to relieve him of this enterprise.

Rising from his chair before the screens, Athor took one uncertain reeling step toward the middle of the room, recovered himself before he could stumble, and walked slowly and with all the dignity he could muster past the Observatory staff. “I’m going home,” he said. “I could use some sleep.”

15

Beenay said, “Am I to understand that the village was destroyed by fire nine times in a row, Siferra? And they rebuilt it every time?”

“My colleague Balik thinks there may be only seven villages piled up in the Hill of Thombo,” the archaeologist replied. “And he may be right, actually. Things are pretty jumbled down toward the lowest levels. But seven villages, nine villages—no matter how many it is exactly, it doesn’t change the fundamental concept. Here: look at these charts. I’ve worked them up from my excavation notes. Of course what we did was just a preliminary dig, a quick slice through the whole hill, with the really meticulous work left for a later expedition. We discovered the hill too late in our work to do anything else. But these charts’ll give you an idea.—You aren’t going to be bored, are you? All this stuff does interest you, doesn’t it, Beenay?”

“I find it completely fascinating. Do you think I’m so totally preoccupied with astronomy that I can’t pay attention to any of the other disciplines?—Besides, archaeology and astronomy sometimes go hand in hand. We’ve learned more than a little about the movements of the suns through the heavens by studying the ancient astronomical monuments that you people have been digging up here and there around the world. Here, let me see.”

They were in Siferra’s office. She had asked Beenay to come there to discuss a problem which she said had unexpectedly arisen in the course of her research. Which puzzled him, because he didn’t immediately see how an astronomer could help an archaeologist in her work, despite what he had just said about archaeology and astronomy sometimes going hand in hand. But he was always glad to have a chance to visit with Siferra.

They had met initially five years before, when they were working together on an interdisciplinary faculty committee that was planning the expansion of the university library. Though Siferra had been out of the country most of the time since then doing field work, she and Beenay did enjoy meeting for lunch now and then when she was there. He found her challenging, highly intelligent, and abrasive in a refreshing sort of way. What she saw in him he had no idea: perhaps just an intellectually stimulating young man who wasn’t involved in the poisonous rivalries and feuds of her own field and had no apparent designs on her body.

Siferra unfolded the charts, huge sheets of thin parchment-like paper on which complex, elegant diagrams had been ruled with pencil, and she and Beenay bent forward to examine them at close range.

He had been telling the truth when he said he was fascinated by archaeology. Ever since he’d been a boy, he had enjoyed reading the narratives of the great explorers of antiquity, such men as Marpin, Shelbik, and of course Galdo 221. He found the remote past nearly as exciting to think about as the remote reaches of interstellar space.

His contract-mate Raissta wasn’t greatly pleased by his friendship with Siferra. She had rather testily implied, a couple of times, that it was Siferra herself who fascinated him, not her field of research. But Beenay thought Raissta’s jealousy was absurd. Certainly Siferra was an attractive woman—it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise—but she was relentlessly non-romantic and every man on campus knew it. Besides, she was something like ten years older than Beenay. Handsome as she was, Beenay had never thought of her with any sort of intimate intentions.

“What we have here, first, is a cross section of the entire hill,” Siferra told him. “I’ve plotted each separate level of occupation in a schematic way. The newest settlement’s at the top, naturally—huge stone walls, what we call the cyclopean style of architecture, typical of the Beklimot culture in its mature period of development. This line here in the level of the cyclopean walls represents a layer of charcoal remains—enough charcoal to indicate a widespread conflagration that must have utterly wiped the city out. And here, below the cyclopean level and the burn line, is the next oldest settlement.”

“Which is constructed in a different style.”

“Exactly. You see how I’ve drawn the stones of the walls? It’s what we call the crosshatch style, characteristic of the early Beklimot culture, or perhaps the culture that developed into Beklimot. Both these styles can be seen in the Beklimot-era ruins that surround the Hill of Thombo. The main ruins are cyclopean, and here and there we’ve found a little crosshatch stuff, just a mere outcropping or two, which we call proto-Beklimot. Now, look here, at the border between the cross-hatch settlement and the cyclopean ruins above it.”

“Another fire line?” Beenay said.

“Another fire line, yes. What we have in this hill is like a sandwich—a layer of human occupation, a layer of charcoal, another layer of human occupation, another layer of charcoal. So what I think happened is something like this. During the time of the crosshatch people there was a devastating fire that scorched a pretty good chunk of the Sagikan Peninsula and forced the abandonment of the Thombo village and other crosshatch-style villages nearby. Afterward, when the inhabitants came back and began to rebuild, they used a brand-new and more elaborate architectural style, which we call cyclopean because of the huge building-stones. But then came another fire and wiped out the cyclopean settlement. At that point the people of the area gave up trying to build cities on the Hill of Thombo and this time when they rebuilt they chose another site nearby, which we term Beklimot Major. We’ve believed for a long time that Beklimot Major was the first true human city, emerging from the smaller crosshatch-type proto-Beklimot-period settlements scattered all around it. What Thombo tells us is that there was at least one important cyclopean city in the area before Beklimot Major existed.”

“And the Beklimot Major site,” Beenay said, “shows no trace of fire damage?”

“No. So it wasn’t there when the city on top of Thombo was burned. Eventually the whole Beklimot culture collapsed and Beklimot Major itself was abandoned, but that was for other reasons having to do with climatic shifts. Fire had nothing to do with it. That was perhaps a thousand years ago. But the fire that wrecked the topmost Thombo village seems to have been much earlier than that. I’d guess about a thousand years earlier. The radiocarbon dates from the charcoal samples will give us a more precise figure when we get them from the lab.”

“And the crosshatch settlement—how old is that?”

“Orthodox archaeological belief has been that the fragmentary crosshatch structures we’ve found here and there on the Sagikan Peninsula are only a few generations older than the Beklimot Major site. After the Thombo excavation, I don’t think so. My guess is that the crosshatch settlement on that hill is two thousand years older than the cyclopean buildings on top of it.”

“Two thousand—? And you say there are other settlements below that one?”

“Look at the chart,” Siferra said. “Here’s number three—a kind of architecture we’ve never seen before, nothing at all like crosshatch work. Then another burn line. Settlement number four. And a burn line. Number five. A burn line. Then numbers six, seven, eight, and nine—or, if Balik’s reading is correct, just numbers six and seven.”

“And each one destroyed by a great fire! That seems pretty remarkable to me. A deadly cycle of destruction, striking again and again and again in the same place.”

“The remarkable thing,” said Siferra in a curiously somber tone, “is that each of these settlements appears to have flourished for approximately the same length of time before being destroyed by fire. The layers of occupation are quite extraordinarily similar in thickness. We’re still waiting for the lab reports, you understand. But I don’t think my eyeball estimate is very far off. And Balik’s figures are the same as mine. Unless we’re completely mistaken, we’re looking at a minimum of fourteen thousand years of prehistory in the Hill of Thombo. And during those fourteen thousand years the hill was periodically swept by massive fires that forced its abandonment with clockwork regularity—one fire every two thousand years, just about exactly!”

“What?”

A shiver traveled along Beenay’s spine. His mind was beginning to leap to all manner of improbable and disturbing conclusions.

“Wait,” Siferra said. “There’s more.”

She opened a drawer and took out a stack of glossy photographs.

“These are pictures of the Thombo tablets. Mudrin 505 has the originals—the paleographer, you know. He’s been trying to decipher them. They’re made of baked clay. We found these three in Level Three, and these in Level Five. They’re both written in extremely primitive scripts, and the writing on the older ones is so ancient that Mudrin can’t even make a start on them. But he’s been able very tentatively to puzzle out a couple of dozen words from the Level Three tablets, which are written in an early form of the Beklimot script. So far as he can tell at this point, they’re an account of the destruction of a city by fire—the work of angry gods who periodically find it necessary to punish mankind for wickedness.”

“Periodically?”

“That’s right. Does it begin to sound familiar?”

“The Apostles of Flame! My God, Siferra, what have you stumbled on here?”

“That’s what I’ve been asking myself since Mudrin brought me the first sketchy translations.” The archaeologist swung around to face Beenay, and for the first time Beenay saw how bleary her eyes were, how tense and drawn her face. She looked almost distraught. “Do you see now why I asked you to come here? I can’t talk about this with anyone in the department. Beenay, what am I going to do? If any of this becomes public, Mondior 71 and his whole crazy crew will proclaim it from the rooftops that I’ve discovered firm archaeological proof of their crackpot theories!”

“You think so?”

“What else?” Siferra tapped the charts. “Here’s evidence of repeated fiery destruction at two-thousand-year intervals, roughly, over a period of many thousands of years. And these tablets—the way it looks now, they might actually be some sort of prehistoric version of the Book of Revelations. Taken together, they provide, if not actual confirmation of the rantings of the Apostles, then at least a solid rational underpinning for their whole mythology.”

“But repeated fires at a single site don’t prove that there was worldwide devastation,” Beenay objected.

“It’s the periodicity that worries me,” said Siferra. “It’s too neat, and too close to what Mondior’s been saying. I’ve been looking at the Book of Revelations. The Sagikan Peninsula is a holy place to the Apostles, did you know that? The sacred site where the gods formerly made themselves visible to humanity, so they say. And therefore it stands to reason—listen to me, it stands to reason,” she said, laughing bitterly—“that the gods would preserve Sagikan as a warning to mankind of the doom that will come again and again if we don’t alter our wicked ways.”

Beenay stared at her, stunned.

He knew very little about the Apostles and their teachings, really. Such pathological fantasizing had never held any interest for him, and he had been too busy with his scientific work to pay heed to Mondior’s windy apocalyptic prophecies.

But now the memory of the conversation he had had some weeks before with Theremon 762 at the Six Suns Club burst with furious impact into bis consciousness. “… won’t be the first time the world has been destroyed … the gods have deliberately made mankind imperfect and given us a single year—one of their divine years, not one of our little ones—in which to shape up. That’s called a Year of Godliness, and it’s exactly two thousand and forty-nine of our years long.”

No. No. No. No. Idiocy! Claptrap! Hysterical folly!

There was more. “Again and again, when the Year of Godliness has ended, the gods have discovered that we’re still wicked and sinful, and so they have destroyed the world by sending down heavenly flames.… So say the Apostles, anyway.”

No! No!

“Beenay?” Siferra said. “Are you all right?”

“Just thinking,” he told her. “By Darkness, it’s true! You’d give the Apostles complete confirmation!”

“Not necessarily. It would still be possible for people who are capable of thinking clearly to reject Mondior’s ideas. The destruction of Thombo by fire—even the repeated destruction of Thombo at apparently regular intervals of approximately two thousand years—doesn’t in any way prove that the whole world was destroyed by fire. Or that some such great fire must inevitably come again. Why should the past necessarily be recapitulated in the future? But people who are capable of thinking clearly are in a minority, of course. The rest of them will be swayed by Mondior’s use of my findings and go into an immediate panic. You know, don’t you, that the Apostles claim the next great world-destroying fire is due to strike us next year?”

“Yes,” Beenay said hoarsely. “Theremon tells me that they’ve pinpointed the exact day. It’s a two-thousand-and-forty-nine-year cycle, actually, and this is the two-thousand-and-forty-eighth year, and in something like eleven or twelve more months, if you believe Mondior, the sky will turn black and fire will descend on us. I think the nineteenth of Theptar is when it’s supposed to happen.”

“Theremon? The newspaperman?”

“Yes. He’s a friend of mine, actually. He’s interested in the whole Apostles thing and he’s been interviewing one of their high priests, or whatever. Theremon told me—”

Siferra’s hand shot out and caught Beenay’s arm, her fingers digging in with astonishing force.

“You’ve got to promise me you won’t say a word about any of this to him, Beenay!”

“To Theremon? No, of course not! You haven’t published your findings yet. It wouldn’t be proper for me to say anything to anybody!—But of course he’s a very honorable man.”

Her iron grip relaxed, but only a little.

“Sometimes things get said between friends, off the record—but you know, Beenay, there’s no such thing as ‘off the record’ when you’re talking to someone like Theremon. If he sees a reason to use it, he’ll use it, no matter what he may have promised you. Or however ‘honorable’ you like to think he is.”

“Well—perhaps—”

“Trust me. And if Theremon were to find out what I’ve come up with here, you can bet your ears it’ll be all over the Chronicle half a day later. That would ruin me professionally, Beenay. It would be all I need, to become known as the scientist who provided the Apostles with proof of their absurd claims. The Apostles are totally repugnant to me, Beenay. I don’t want to offer them any sort of aid and comfort, and I certainly don’t want to seem to be publicly espousing their crackpot ideas.”

“Don’t worry,” Beenay said. “I won’t breathe a word.”

“You mustn’t. As I say, it would wreck me. I’ve come back to the university to have my research grant renewed. My Thombo findings are already stirring up controversy in the department, because they challenge the established view of Beklimot as the oldest urban center. But if Theremon somehow manages to wrap the Apostles of Flame around my neck on top of everything else—”

But Beenay was barely listening. He was sympathetic to Siferra’s problem, and certainly he would do nothing to cause difficulties for her. Theremon would hear not one word about her research from him.

His mind had moved on, though, to other things, vastly troublesome things. Phrases out of Theremon’s account of the teachings of the Apostles continued to churn in his memory.

“—In something like fourteen months the suns will all disappear—”

“—the Stars will shoot flame down out of a black sky—”

“—the exact time of the catastrophe can be calculated scientifically—”

“—a black sky—”

“—the suns will all disappear—”

“Darkness!” Beenay muttered harshly. “Can it be possible?” Siferra had gone on talking. At his outburst she halted in mid-sentence.

“You aren’t paying attention to me, Beenay!”

“I—what? Oh. Oh. Yes, of course I’m paying attention! You were saying that I mustn’t let Theremon know anything about this, because it would harm your reputation, and—and—listen, Siferra, do you think we could continue discussing this some other time? This evening, or tomorrow afternoon, or whenever? I’ve got to get over to the Observatory right away.”

“Don’t let me detain you, then,” she said coldly.

“No. I don’t mean it that way. What you’ve been telling me is of the most colossal interest to me—and importance, tremendous importance, more than I can even say at this point. But I’ve got to check something. Something with a direct bearing on everything we’ve been discussing.”

She gave him a close look. “Your face is flushed. Your eyes are wild, Beenay. You seem so strange, all of a sudden. Your mind’s a million miles away. What’s going on?”

“I’ll tell you later,” he said, halfway out the door. “Later! I promise you!”

16

At this hour the Observatory was practically deserted. No one was there but Faro and Thilanda. To Beenay’s relief, Athor 77 was nowhere to be seen. Good, Beenay thought. The old man was exhausted enough from the effort he had devoted to working out the Kalgash Two concept. He didn’t need more stress loaded upon him this evening.

And it would be just fine, having only Faro and Thilanda here. Faro had exactly the kind of quick, untrammeled mind that Beenay needed right now. And Thilanda, who had spent so many years scanning the empty spaces of the heavens with her telescope and camera, might be able to fill in some of the conceptual material Beenay would require.

Thilanda said at once, “I’ve been developing plates all day, Beenay. But it’s no go. I’d stake my life on it: there’s nothing up there in the sky except the six suns. You don’t think the great man’s finally gone around the bend, do you?”

“I think his mind is as sharp as ever.”

“But these photos—” Thilanda said. “I’ve been running a random scan of every quadrant of the universe for days now. The program’s all-inclusive. Snap, move down a couple of degrees, snap, move, snap. Methodically sweeping the entire sky. And look at what I’m getting, Beenay. A bunch of pictures of nothing at all!”

“If the unknown satellite is invisible, Thilanda, then it can’t be seen. It’s as simple as that.”

“Invisible to the naked eye, maybe. But the camera ought to be able to—”

“Listen, never mind that now. I need some help from you two, purely theoretical stuff. Related to Athor’s new theory.”

“But if the unknown satellite’s nothing but pie in the sky—” Thilanda protested.

“Invisible pie might still be real pie,” Beenay snapped. “And we won’t like it when it comes hurtling out of nowhere and hits us in the face. Will you help me or won’t you?”

“Well—”

“Good. What I want you to do is prepare computer projections of the movements of all six suns covering a period of forty-two hundred years.”

Thilanda gaped incredulously. “Four thousand two hundred, is that what you said, Beenay?”

“I know that you don’t remotely have records of stellar movements over any such span. But I said computer projections, Thilanda. You’ve got at least a hundred years of reliable records, right?”

“More than that.”

“Even better. Set them up and project them backward and forward in time. Have the computer tell you what every daily combination of the six suns was for the last twenty-one centuries, and for the twenty-one centuries to come. If you can’t do it, I’m sure Faro will be glad to help you write the program.”

“I think I can manage it,” said Thilanda in a glacial tone. “And would you mind telling me what this is all about? Are we going into the almanac business now? Even the almanac is content to settle for just the next few years of solar data. So what are you up to?”

“I’ll tell you later,” Beenay said. “That’s a promise.”

He left her fuming at her desk and walked across the Observatory to Athor’s work area, where he took a seat in front of the three computer screens on which Athor had calculated the Kalgash Two theory. For a long moment Beenay stared thoughtfully at the center screen, showing the orbit of Kalgash as perturbed by the hypothetical Kalgash Two.

Then he touched a key and the proposed orbital line of Kalgash Two became visible in bright green, a huge eccentric ellipse splayed out across Kalgash’s own more compact and nearly circular orbit. He studied it for a while; then he hit the keys that would bring the suns onto the screen, and peered broodingly at them for perhaps an hour, summoning them in all their varying configurations, now Onos in the sky with Tano and Sitha. Onos with Trey and Patru, Onos and Dovim with Trey and Patru, Dovim with Trey and Patru, Dovim with Tano and Sitha, Patru and Trey alone—

The normal patterns, yes.

But what about abnormal patterns?

Tano and Sitha alone? No, it couldn’t happen. The relationship of that double-sun system’s position in the heavens to the location of the closer suns was such that Tano and Sitha could never appear in the sky in this hemisphere unless either Onos or Dovim, or both of them, were visible at the same time. Maybe it had been possible hundreds or thousands of years ago, he thought, though he doubted it. But certainly not now.

Trey and Patru and Tano and Sitha?

“Another no. The two sets of double suns were on opposite sides of Kalgash; whenever one pair was in the sky, the other one generally was hidden by the planet’s own bulk. Now and then the four of them did manage to get together in the sky, but Onos always was visible when such two-pair conjunctions occurred. Those were the famous five-sun days—which produced the equally distinctive Dovim-only days in the opposite hemisphere. They happened only every few years.”

Trey without Patru? Tano without Sitha?

Well, technically, yes. When one of the double-sun pairs was close to the horizon, one sun would be above the horizon and one of them below it for a brief period. But that wasn’t really a significant solar event, just a momentary aberration. The double suns were still together, but transiently separated by the line of the horizon.

All six suns in the sky at once?

Impossible!

Worse than that—unthinkable!

Yet he had just thought it. Beenay shivered at the idea. If all six of them were above the horizon simultaneously, then there would have to be a region in the other hemisphere where no sunlight whatever could be seen. Darkness! Darkness! But Darkness was unknown everywhere on Kalgash, except as an abstract concept. There could never have been a time when the six suns moved together and a major part of the world was plunged into utter lightlessness. Could there have been?

Could there?

Beenay pondered the chilling possibility. Once more he heard Theremon’s deep voice explaining the theories of the Apostles to him:

“—the suns will all disappear—”

“—the Stars will shoot flame down out of a black sky—”

He shook his head. Everything he knew about the movements of the suns in the heavens rebelled against the idea of the six of them somehow bunching up on one side of Kalgash at the same time. It just couldn’t happen, short of a miracle. Beenay didn’t believe in miracles. The way the suns were arranged in the sky, there always had to be at least one or two of them shining over every part of Kalgash at any given moment.

Forget the six-suns-here, Darkness-there hypothesis.

What was left?

Dovim alone, he thought. The little red sun all alone in the sky?

Well, yes, it did happen, though not often. On those occasional five-sun days when Tano, Sitha, Trey, Patru, and Onos all were in conjunction in the same hemisphere: that left only Dovim for the other side of the world. Beenay wondered whether that might be the moment when the Darkness came.

Could it be? Dovim by itself might cast so little light, just its cool and feeble reddish-purple gleam, that people might mistake it for Darkness.

But that didn’t really make sense. Even little Dovim should be able to provide enough light to keep people from plunging into terror. Besides, Dovim-only days occurred somewhere in the world every few years. They were uncommon, but not all that extraordinary. Surely, if the effects of seeing nothing but a single small dim sun in the sky could cause vast psychological upheavals, then everybody would be worrying about the next Dovim-only event, which was due, as Beenay recalled, in just another year or so. And in fact nobody was thinking about it at all.

But if Dovim alone were in the sky, and something happened, some special thing, some truly uncommon thing, to blot out what little light it provided—

Thilanda appeared at his shoulder and said sourly, “All right, Beenay, I’ve got your solar projections all set up. Not just forty-two hundred years, either, but an infinite regression. Faro gave me a suggestion for the math and we’ve done the program so that it’ll run clear to the end of time if you want it to, or backward to the beginning of the universe.”

“Fine. Pipe it over to the computer I’m using, will you?—And will you come here, Faro?”

The pudgy little graduate student ambled over. His dark eyes were agleam with curiosity. Obviously he was bubbling with questions about what Beenay was doing; but he observed student-professor protocol and said nothing, merely waited to hear what Beenay would tell him.

“What I’ve got here on my screen,” Beenay began, “is Athor’s suggested orbit for the hypothetical Kalgash Two. I’m going to assume that the orbit’s a correct one, since Athor has told us that it accurately accounts for all the perturbations in our own orbit, and I have faith that Athor knows what he’s doing. I also have here, or at any rate I will when Thilanda has finished the data transfer, the program that you and she have just worked out for solar movements over a long span of time. What I’m going to do now is to attempt to work out a correlation between the presence of just one sun in the sky and the close approach of Kalgash Two to this planet, so that—”

“So that you can calculate the frequency of eclipses?” Faro blurted. “Is that it, sir?”

The boy’s quickness was amusing and also a little disconcerting. “As a matter of fact, it is. You have eclipses on your mind too, do you?”

“I was thinking about them when Athor told us all about Kalgash Two the first time. Simbron, you remember, mentioned that the strange satellite might hide the light of some of the suns for a little while, and you said that that would be called an eclipse, and then I started to work out some of the possibilities. But Athor cut me off before I could say anything, because he was tired and wanted to go home.”

“And you haven’t said anything about it since?”

“No one’s asked me,” Faro said.

“Well, here’s your moment. I’m going to transfer everything that’s on my computer to yours, and you and I are going to sit down in this room separately and begin pushing the numbers around. What I’m searching for is a very special case in which Kalgash Two is at its closest point of approach to Kalgash and there’s only one sun in the sky.”

Faro nodded. He headed for his computer at a speed faster than Beenay had ever seen him move before.

Beenay didn’t expect to be the first to finish the computation. Faro was notoriously quick at such things. But the point was to have each of them work on the problem independently, to provide separate validation of the result. So when Faro made a snorting sound of triumph after a little while and jumped up to say something, Beenay irritably waved at him to be silent and went on working. It took him ten embarrassing eternal minutes more.

Then the numbers began coming up on his screen.

If every assumption that he had fed into the computer was correct—Athor’s calculation of the unknown satellite’s probable mass and orbit, Thilanda’s calculation of the movements of the six suns in the heavens—then it wasn’t very likely that Darkness was going to come. The only possibility that would bring total Darkness was a Dovim-only day. But it didn’t look as if Kalgash Two stood much chance of eclipsing Dovim. Dovim-only days were such rarities that the likelihood of Dovim’s being alone in the sky at the time when Kalgash Two was anywhere near Kalgash in its long orbit was infinitesimal, Beenay knew.

Or were they?

No. Not infinitesimal.

Not at all. He took a careful look at the figures on the screen. There seemed to be a slim possibility of a convergence. The calculation wasn’t complete, but things were heading in that direction as the computer worked over each Kalgash-Kalgash Two conjunction in the forty-two-hundred-year period of the inquiry. Every time Kalgash Two came round on its orbit, it reached Kalgash’s vicinity closer and closer to a Dovim-only day. The numbers continued to appear, as the computer processed all the astronomical possibilities. Beenay watched in mounting awe and disbelief.

There it was, finally. All three bodies lined up in just the right way. Kalgash—Kalgash Two—Dovim!

Yes! It was possible for Kalgash Two to cause a total eclipse of Dovim when Dovim was the only sun visible in the sky.

But that configuration was an extreme rarity. Dovim had to be alone in its hemisphere and at maximum distance from Kalgash, while Kalgash Two had to be at its minimum distance. Kalgash Two’s apparent diameter would then be seven times that of Dovim. That was sufficient to hide Dovim’s light for well over half a day, so that no spot on the planet would escape the effects of Darkness. The computer showed that such a highly special circumstance was capable of occurring only once every—

Beenay gasped. He didn’t want to believe it.

He turned to Faro. The young graduate student’s round face was pale with shock.

Huskily Beenay said, “All right. I’m done, and I’ve got a number. But first you tell me yours.”

“Eclipse of Dovim by Kalgash Two, periodicity of two thousand and forty-nine years.”

“Yes,” Beenay said leadenly. “My number exactly. Once every two thousand and forty-nine years.”

He felt dizzy. The entire universe seemed to be reeling around him.

Once every two thousand and forty-nine years. The exact length of a Year of Godliness, according to the Apostles of Flame. The very same figure that was given in the Book of Revelations.

“—the suns will all disappear—”

“—the Stars will shoot flame down out of a black sky—”

He didn’t know what Stars were. But Siferra had discovered a hill on the Sagikan Peninsula where cities had been destroyed by flame with astonishing regularity, approximately every two thousand years. When she had had a chance to run exact carbon-14 tests, would the precise figure of the time between each conflagration on the Hill of Thombo turn out to be—two thousand and forty-nine years?

“—a black sky—”

Beenay stared helplessly across the room at Faro.

“When’s the next Dovim-only day due to occur?” he asked.

“In eleven months and four days,” Faro said grimly. “On the nineteenth of Theptar.”

“Yes,” Beenay said. “The same day when, Mondior 71 tells us, the sky is going to turn black and the fire of the gods is going to descend and destroy our civilization.”

17

“For the first time in my life,” Athor said, “I find myself praying with all my heart that my calculations are wrong. But I fear the gods have granted me no such mercy. We find ourselves inexorably swept along toward a conclusion that is terrible to contemplate.”

He looked around the room, letting his gaze rest for a moment on each of the people he had called together. Young Beenay 25, of course. Sheerin 501, from the Psychology Department. Siferra 89, the archaeologist.

By sheer force of will alone Athor fought to conceal from them the vast fatigue he felt, the sense of growing despair, the crushing impact of all that he had learned in the weeks just past. He fought to conceal all those things even from himself. Now and then lately he had found himself thinking that he had lived too long, found himself wishing that he had been allowed to go to his rest a year or two ago. But he swept such thoughts mercilessly from his mind. An iron will and unflagging strength of spirit had always been Athor’s prime characteristics. He refused now, with age making inroads on his vigor, to let those traits slip away.

To Sheerin he said, “Your field, as I understand it, is the study of Darkness?”

The plump psychologist seemed amused. “I suppose that’s one way of putting it. My doctoral thesis was on Darkness-related mental disorders. But Darkness research has been only one facet of my work. I’m interested in mass hysteria of all sorts—in the irrational responses of the human mind to overwhelming stimuli. The whole roster of human nuttiness, that’s what keeps the bread on my table.”

“Very well,” Athor said coolly. “Be that as it may. Beenay 25 says you’re the ranking authority on Darkness at the university. You’ve just seen our little astronomical demonstration on the computer screen. I assume you comprehend the essential implications of what we’ve discovered.”

The old astronomer could not find some way of preventing that from sounding patronizing. But Sheerin didn’t seem particularly offended.

Calmly he said, “I think I grasped it well enough. You’re saying that there’s a mysterious invisible planetary-sized astronomical body of such-and-such mass in orbit around Kalgash at such-and-such a distance, and what with one such-and-such and the other, its force of attraction exactly accounts for certain deviations from theory in Kalgash’s orbit that my friend Beenay here has discovered. Am I right so far?”

“Yes,” Athor said. “Quite correct.”

“Well,” Sheerin continued, “it turns out that sometimes this body would get between us and one of our suns. This is termed an eclipse. But only one sun lies in its plane of revolutions in such a way that it can ever be eclipsed, and that sun is Dovim. It has been shown that the eclipse will occur only when”—Sheerin paused, frowning,—“when Dovim is the only sun in the sky, and both it and this so-called Kalgash Two are lined up in such a way that Kalgash Two completely covers the disk of Dovim and no light at all gets through to us. Am I still doing okay?”

Athor nodded. “You’ve grasped it perfectly.”

“I was afraid of that. I was hoping I had misunderstood.”

“Now, as to the effects of the eclipse—” Athor said.

Sheerin took a deep breath. “All right. The eclipse—which happens only once every two thousand and forty-nine years, the gods be thanked!—will cause an extended period of universal Darkness on Kalgash. As the world turns, each continent will be totally dark for periods ranging from—what did you say?—nine to fourteen hours, depending on latitude.”

“Now: if you please,” Athor said, “what is your opinion, as a professional psychologist, of the effect that this will create in the minds of human beings?”

“The effect,” Sheerin said unhesitatingly, “will be madness.”

It was suddenly very quiet in the room.

At length Athor said, “Universal madness, is that what you’re predicting?”

“Very likely. Universal Darkness, universal madness. My guess is that people will be affected to varying degrees, ranging from short-range disorientation and depression to complete and permanent destruction of the reasoning powers. The greater the psychological stability one has to begin with, naturally, the less likely one is to be entirely shattered by the impact of the absence of all light. But no one, I think, will be entirely unscathed.”

“I don’t understand,” Beenay said. “What is there in Darkness to drive people mad?”

Sheerin smiled. “We simply aren’t adapted for it. Imagine, if you can, a world that has only one sun. As that world rotates on its axis, each hemisphere will receive light for half the day and will be entirely dark for the other half.”

Beenay made an involuntary gesture of horror.

“Do you see?” Sheerin cried. “You don’t even like the sound of it! But the inhabitants of that planet will be quite accustomed to a daily dose of Darkness. Very likely they’ll find the daylight hours cheerier and more to their liking, but they’ll shrug off the Darkness as an ordinary everyday event, nothing to get excited about, just something to sleep through while waiting for morning to come. Not us, though. We’ve evolved under conditions of perpetual sunlight, every hour of the day, all year round. If Onos isn’t in the sky, Tano and Sitha and Dovim are, or Patru and Trey, and so forth. Our minds, even the physiologies of our bodies, are accustomed to constant brightness. We don’t like even a brief moment without it. You sleep with a godlight on in your room, I take it?”

“Of course,” Beenay said.

“Of course? Why ‘of course’?”

“Why—? But everybody sleeps with a godlight!”

“My point exactly. Tell me this: have you ever experienced Darkness, friend Beenay?”

Beenay leaned against the wall next to the big picture window and considered. “No. Can’t say I have. But I know what it is. Just—uh—” He made vague motions with his fingers, and then brightened. “Just an absence of light. Like in caves.”

“Have you ever been in a cave?”

“In a cave! Of course I haven’t been in a cave.”

“I thought not. I tried, once, long ago when I was beginning my studies of Darkness-induced disorders. But I got out in a hurry I went in until the mouth of the cave was just visible as a blur of light, with black everywhere else.” Sheerin chuckled pleasantly. “I never thought a person of my weight could run that fast.”

Almost defiantly Beenay said, “Well, if it comes to that, I guess I wouldn’t have run, if I had been there.”

The psychologist smiled gently at the young astronomer.

“Bravely said! I admire your courage, my friend.” Turning to Athor, Sheerin said, “May I have your permission, sir, to perform a little psychological experiment?”

“Whatever you wish.”

“Thank you.” Sheerin looked toward Beenay again. “Do you mind drawing the curtain next to you, friend Beenay?”

Beenay looked surprised. “What for?”

“Just draw the curtain. Then come over here and sit down next to me.”

“Well, if you insist—”

Heavy red draperies hung by the windows. Athor couldn’t remember a time when they had ever been drawn, and this room had been his office for some forty years. Beenay, with a shrug, reached for the tasseled string and jerked. The red curtain slid across the wide window, the brass rings hissing their way along the crossbar. For a moment the dusk-red light of Dovim could still be seen. Then all was in shadows, and even the shadows became indistinct.

Beenay’s footsteps sounded hollowly in the silence as he made his way to the table, and then they stopped halfway.

“I can’t see you, Sheerin,” he whispered forlornly.

“Feel your way,” Sheerin ordered in a strained voice.

“But I can’t see you!” The young astronomer was breathing harshly. “I can’t see anything!”

“What did you expect? This is Darkness.” Sheerin waited a moment. “Come on. You must know your way around this room even with your eyes closed. Just walk over here and sit down.”

The footsteps sounded again, waveringly. There was the sound of someone fumbling with a chair. Beenay’s voice came thinly: “Here I am.”

“How do you feel?”

“I’m—ulp—all right.”

“You like it, do you?”

A long pause.

“No.”

“No, Beenay?”

“Not at all. It’s awful. It’s as if the walls are—” He paused again. “They seem to be closing in on me. I keep wanting to push them away.—But I’m not going mad at all. In fact, I think I’m getting used to it.”

“All right. Siferra? What about you?”

“I can take a little Darkness. I’ve gone crawling around in some underground passages now and then. But I can’t say I care for it much.”

“Athor?”

“I’m also still surviving. But I think you’ve proved your point, Dr. Sheerin,” said the Observatory head, sharply.

“All right. Beenay, draw the curtains back again.”

There were cautious footsteps through the dark, the rustle of Beenay’s body against the curtain as he felt for the tassel, and then the relief of hearing the curtain’s ro-o-osh as it slithered open. The red light of Dovim flooded the room, and with a cry of joy Beenay looked out the window at the smallest of the six suns.

Sheerin wiped the moistness off his forehead with the back of a hand and said shakily, “And that was just a few minutes in a dark room.”

“It can be tolerated,” said Beenay lightly.

“Yes, a dark room can. At least for a short while. But you all know about the Jonglor Centennial Exposition, don’t you? The Tunnel of Mystery scandal? Beenay, I told you the story that evening last summer at the Six Suns Club, when you were with that newspaperman Theremon.”

“Yes. I remember. The people who took that ride through Darkness in the amusement park and came out insane.”

“Just a mile-long tunnel—with no lights. You got into a little open car and jolted along through Darkness for fifteen minutes. Some who took the ride died of fright. Others came out permanently deranged.”

“And why was that? What drove them crazy?”

“Essentially the same thing that was operating on you just now when we had the curtain closed and you thought the walls of the room were crushing in on you in the dark. There’s a psychological term for mankind’s instinctive fear of the absence of light. We call it ‘claustrophobia,’ because the lack of light is always tied up with enclosed places, so that the fear of one is fear of the other. You see?”

“And those people of the Tunnel who went crazy?”

“Those people of the Tunnel who went—ah—crazy, to use your word, were those unfortunate ones who didn’t have sufficient psychological resilience to overcome the claustrophobia that engulfed them in the Darkness. It was a powerful feeling. Believe me. I took the Tunnel ride myself. You had only a couple of minutes without light just now, and I believe you were fairly upset. Now imagine fifteen minutes.”

“But didn’t they recover afterward?”

“Some did. But some will suffer for years, or perhaps for the rest of their lives, from claustrophobic fixations. Their latent fear of Darkness and enclosed places has crystallized and become, so far as we can tell, permanent. And some, as I said, died of shock. No recovery for them, eh? That’s what fifteen minutes in the dark can do.”

“To some people,” Beenay said stubbornly. His forehead wrinkled slowly into a frown. “I still don’t believe it’s going to be that bad for most of us. Certainly not for me.”

Sheerin sighed in exasperation. “Imagine Darkness—everywhere. No light, as far as you can see. The houses, the trees, the fields, the earth, the sky—black! And Stars thrown in, if you listen to the preaching of the Apostles—Stars, whatever they are. Can you conceive it?”

“Yes, I can,” declared Beenay, even more truculently.

“No! No, you can’t!” Sheerin slammed his fist down upon the table in sudden passion. “You’re fooling yourself! You can’t conceive that. Your brain wasn’t built for the concept any more than—Look, Beenay, you’re a mathematician, aren’t you? Can your brain really and truly conceive of the concept of infinity? Of eternity? You can only talk about it. Reduce it to equations and pretend that the abstract numbers are the reality, when in fact they’re just marks on paper. But when you try really to encompass the idea of infinity in your mind you start getting dizzy pretty fast, I’m certain of that. A fraction of the reality upsets you. The same with the little bit of Darkness you just tasted. And when the real thing comes, your brain is going to be presented with a phenomenon outside its limits of comprehension. You’ll go insane, Beenay. Completely and permanently. I have no doubt of that whatever!”

Once again there was a sudden terrible silence in the room.

Athor said, at last. “That’s your final conclusion, Dr. Sheerin? Widespread insanity?”

“At least seventy-five percent of the population made irrational to a disabling degree. Perhaps eighty-five percent. Perhaps even a hundred percent.”

Athor shook his head. “Monstrous. Hideous. A calamity beyond belief. Though I must tell you I feel somewhat the way Beenay does—that we will get through this somehow, that the effects will be less cataclysmic than your opinion would indicate. Old as I am, I can’t help feeling a certain optimism, a certain sense of hope—”

Siferra said suddenly, “May I speak, Dr. Athor?”

“Of course. Of course! That’s why you’re here.”

The archaeologist rose and came to the center of the room. “In some ways it surprises me that I’m here at all. When I first discussed my Sagikan Peninsula discoveries with Beenay here, I begged him to keep them absolutely confidential. I was fearful for my scientific reputation, because I saw that the data I had uncovered could very easily be construed as giving support to the most irrational, the most frightening, the most dangerous religious movement that exists within our society. I’m speaking, naturally, of the Apostles of Flame.

“But then, when Beenay came back to me a little while later with bis new findings, the discovery of the periodicity of these eclipses of Dovim, I knew I had to reveal what I know. I have here photographs and charts of my excavation at the Hill of Thombo, near the Beklimot site on the Sagikan Peninsula. Beenay, you’ve already seen them, but if you’ll be good enough to pass them to Dr. Athor and Dr. Sheerin—”

Siferra waited until they had had a chance to glance at the material. Then she resumed speaking.

“The charts will be easier to understand if you think of the Hill of Thombo as a giant layer cake of ancient settlements, each built upon its immediate predecessor—the youngest one at the top of the hill, naturally. That one is a city of what we call the Beklimot culture. Below it is one built by those same people, we think, in an earlier phase of their civilization, and then down and down and down, for a total of at least seven different periods of settlement, perhaps even more.

“Each of those settlements, gentlemen, came to an end because it was destroyed by fire. You can see, I think, the dark boundaries between the layers. Those are the burn lines—charcoal remnants. My original guess, based purely on an intuitive sense of how long it might have taken for these cities to have arisen, flourished, decayed, and crumbled, is that each of these great fires happened something like two thousand years apart, with the most recent of them taking place about two thousand years ago, just prior to the unfolding of the Beklimot culture that we regard as the beginning of the historical period.

“But charcoal is particularly well suited for radiocarbon dating, which gives us a fairly precise indication of the age of a site. Ever since my Thombo material reached Saro City, our departmental lab has been busy doing radiocarbon analysis, and now we have our figures. I can tell you what they are from memory. The youngest of the Thombo settlements was destroyed by fire two thousand and fifty years ago, with a statistical deviation of plus or minus twenty years. The charcoal from the settlement below that is forty-one hundred years old, with a deviation of plus or minus forty years. The third settlement from the top was destroyed by fire sixty-two hundred years ago, with a deviation of plus or minus eighty years. The fourth settlement down shows a radiocarbon age of eighty-three hundred years, plus or minus a hundred. The fifth—”

“Great gods!” Sheerin cried. “Are they all spaced as evenly as that?”

“Every one of them. The fires occurred at intervals of a little more than twenty centuries. Allowing for the slight inaccuracies that are inevitable in radiocarbon dating, it’s still altogether permissible to propose that in fact they took place exactly two thousand and forty-nine years apart. Which, as Beenay has demonstrated, is precisely the frequency at which eclipses of Dovim occur.—And also,” Siferra added in a bleak voice, “the length of what the Apostles of Flame call a Year of Godliness, at the end of which the world is supposed to be destroyed by fire.”

“An effect of the mass insanity, yes,” Sheerin said hollowly. “When the Darkness comes, people will want light—of any sort. Torches. Bonfires. Burn anything! Burn the furniture. Burn houses.”

“No,” Beenay muttered.

“Remember,” Sheerin said, “these people won’t be sane. They’ll be like small children—but they’ll have the bodies of adults and the remnants of the minds of adults. They’ll know how to use matches. They just won’t remember the consequences of lighting a lot of fires all over the place.”

“No,” Beenay said again, hopelessly. “No. No.” It wasn’t a statement of disbelief any longer.

Siferra said, “It could be argued originally that the fires at Thombo were a purely local event—an odd coincidence, such a rigid pattern of regular occurrence over such an immense span of time, but confined only to that one place, perhaps even a peculiar ritual cleansing practiced there. Since no other ancient sites as old as those of Sagikan have been found anywhere else on Kalgash, we couldn’t say otherwise. But Beenay’s calculations have changed everything. Now we see that every two thousand and forty-nine years the world is—apparently—plunged into Darkness. As Sheerin says, fires would be lit. And would get out of control. Whatever other settlements existed at the time of the Thombo fires, anywhere in the world, would have been destroyed just as the Thombo cities were, and for the same reason. But Thombo is all we have left from the prehistoric era. As the Apostles of Flame say of it, it is a holy place, the place where the gods have made themselves manifest to humanity.”

“And perhaps are making themselves manifest once more,” said Athor darkly. “By providing us with evidence of the fires of past epochs.”

Beenay looked at him. “So you have come to believe the Apostles’ teachings, sir?”

To Athor, Beenay’s statement seemed almost like a blunt accusation of madness. It was a moment before he could reply.

But then he said, as calmly as he could, “Believe them? No. No, not quite. But they interest me, Beenay. I’m horrified at the need even to pose this question: but what if the Apostles are right? We have clear indications now that Darkness does come at just the two-thousand-and-forty-nine-year interval that they’ve mentioned in their Book of Revelations. Sheerin here says that the world would go mad if that happened, and we have Siferra’s evidence that one small section of the world, at least, did go mad, again and again, its houses swept by fire at that two-thousand-and-forty-nine-year interval that we keep coming upon.”

“What are you suggesting, then?” Beenay asked. “That we join the Apostles?”

Again Athor had to fight off anger. “No, Beenay. Simply that we look into their beliefs and see what sort of use we can make of them!”

“Use?” cried Sheerin and Siferra, almost at the same moment.

“Yes! Use!” Athor knotted his great gaunt hands together and swung around to face them all. “Don’t you see that the survival of human civilization may depend entirely on the four of us? It comes down to just that, doesn’t it? Melodramatic as it sounds, we four are in possession of what is beginning to look like incontrovertible proof that the end of the world is sweeping down on us. Universal Darkness—bringing universal madness—a worldwide conflagration—our cities in flames, our society shattered. But there is already in existence another group that has been predicting, on the basis of who knows what evidence, the very same calamity—to the year, to the day.”

“Theptar nineteenth,” Beenay murmured.

“Theptar nineteenth, yes. The day when only Dovim will shine in the sky—and, if we are right, Kalgash Two will arrive, rising out of its invisibility to fill our sky and blot out all light. That day, the Apostles tell us, fire will engulf our cities. How do they know? A lucky guess? Mere myth-spinning?”

“Some of what they say makes no sense at all,” Beenay pointed out. “For example, they say Stars will appear in the heavens. What are Stars? Where are they going to come from?”

Athor shrugged. “I have no idea. That part of the Apostles’ teachings may very well be a fable. But they seem to have some sort of record of past eclipses, out of which they’ve built their current dire predictions. We need to know more about those records.”

“Why us?” Beenay asked.

“Because we—as scientists—can serve as leaders, figures of authority, in the struggle to save civilization that lies ahead,” said Athor. “Only if the nature of the danger is made known right here and now does society stand any chance of protecting itself against what’s going to happen. But as it is, only the gullible and ignorant pay any heed to the Apostles. Most intelligent, rational folk look upon them the same way we do—as cranks, as fools, as madmen, perhaps as swindlers. What we need to do is persuade the Apostles to share their astronomical and archaelogical data, if they have any, with us. And then we go public. We reveal our findings, and we back them up with the material we receive, if we do, from the Apostles. In essence we form an alliance with them against the chaos that both we and they think is coming. That way we can gain the attention of all strata of society, from the most credulous to the most critical.”

“So you want us to stop being scientists and enter the world of politics?” Siferra asked. “I don’t like that. This isn’t our job at all. I vote for turning our material over to the government, and letting them—”

“The government!” Beenay snorted.

“Beenay’s right,” said Sheerin. “I know what government people are like. They’ll form a committee, and issue a report—eventually—and file the report away, and then later on they’ll form another committee to dig out whatever it was that the first committee discovered, and then take a vote, and—No, we don’t have the time for all that. It’s our duty to speak out ourselves. I know at first hand what Darkness does to people’s minds. Athor and Beenay, you have mathematical proof that Darkness is coming soon. You, Siferra, you’ve seen what Darkness has done to past civilizations.”

“But do we dare seek out the Apostles?” Beenay asked. “Won’t we be endangering our own reputations for scientific responsibility if we have anything to do with them?”

“Good point,” Siferra said. “We have to keep away from them!”

Athor frowned. “Perhaps you’re right. It may have been naive of me to suggest that we could form any sort of working partnership with those people. I withdraw the suggestion.”

“Wait,” said Beenay. “I have a friend—you know him, Sheerin, he’s the newspaperman Theremon—who’s already been in touch with some high official of the Apostles. He might be able to arrange a secret meeting between Athor and that High Apostle. You could sound the Apostles out, sir, and see if they know anything worth our having—just by way of obtaining even more confirming evidence for ourselves—and we can always deny the meeting took place, if it turns out they don’t.”

“That’s a possibility,” Athor said. “Distasteful as it would be, I’d be willing to meet with them.—I assume, then, that none of you has any fundamental dispute now with my basic suggestion? You agree with me that it’s essential that we four take some action in response to what we’ve discovered?”

“I do now,” Beenay said, glancing at Sheerin. “I still intend to survive the Darkness myself. But everything that’s been said here today leads me to realize that a lot of others won’t. Nor will civilization itself—unless we do something.”

Athor nodded. “Very well. Talk to your friend Theremon. Cautiously, though. You know how I feel about the press. Journalists aren’t much more to my liking than the Apostles are. But very carefully let your Theremon understand that I’d like to meet privately with this Apostle he knows.”

“I will, sir.”

“You, Sheerin: get together all the literature you can find concerning the effects of exposure to prolonged Darkness, and let me have it.”

“No problem there, Doctor.”

“And you, Siferra—may I have a report, suitable for the understanding of laymen, on your Thombo excavation? With every scrap of evidence you are able to supply concerning this repetitive-conflagration business.”

“Some of it’s not ready yet, Dr. Athor. Material I didn’t discuss today.”

Athor’s brows furrowed. “What do you mean?”

“Inscribed clay tablets,” she said. “Found in the third and fifth levels from the top. Dr. Mudrin is attempting the very difficult task of translating them. His preliminary opinion is that they’re some kind of priestly warning of the coming fire.”

“The first edition of the Book of Revelations!” Beenay shouted.

“Well, yes, perhaps that is what they are,” Siferra said, laughing without much sign of amusement. “At any rate, I hope to have the tablet texts soon. And then I’ll get all the material together for you, Dr. Athor.”

“Good,” Athor said. “We’ll need everything we can get. This is going to be the job of our lives.” He glanced once more at each of the others in turn. “One important thing to remember, though: my willingness to engage in an approach to the Apostles does not mean that I intend in any way to provide a blanket of respectability for them. I merely hope to find out what they have that will help us to convince the world of what’s about to happen, period. Otherwise I’ll do what I can to distance myself from them. I want no mysticism involved here. I don’t believe a shred of their mumbo-jumbo—I simply want to know how they’ve arrived at their conclusions of catastrophe. And I want the rest of you to be similarly on your guard in any dealings with them. Understood?”

“This is all like a dream,” Beenay said softly.

“A very bad one,” said Athor. “Every atom in my soul cries out that this isn’t happening, that it’s utter fantasy, that the world will keep right on going past next Theptar nineteenth without any harm coming to it. Unfortunately, the figures tell the story.” He looked out the window. Onos now was gone from the sky, and Dovim was only a dot against the horizon. Twilight had descended, and the only real illumination that was visible was the ghostly, uncomforting light of Patru and Trey. “There’s no longer any way for us to doubt it. Darkness will come. Perhaps the Stars, whatever they may be, really will shine forth. Fires will blaze. The end of the world as we know it is at hand. The end of the world!”