Nightfall by Isaac Asimov;Robert Silverberg

Author:Isaac Asimov;Robert Silverberg
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Tags: Science Fiction, American, General, Imaginary Societies, Fiction
ISBN: 9780553290998
Publisher: New Age Library
Published: 2001-01-22T05:00:00+00:00

Nightfall

Sheerin shrugged. He pointed to the floor in front of them. Dovim was past its zenith now, and the square of bloody sunlight that outlined the window upon the floor had moved a few feet toward the center of the room, where it lay like the terrible stain of some ghastly crime. Theremon stared at its dusky color thoughtfully. Then he swung around and squinted once more into the sun itself.

The chip in its side had grown to a black encroachment that covered a third of its visible disk. Theremon shuddered. Once, jokingly, he had talked with Beenay of dragons in the sky. Now it seemed to him that the dragon had come, that it had swallowed five of the suns already, that it was nibbling enthusiastically at the only one that remained.

Sheerin said, “There are probably two million people in Saro City who are all trying to join the Apostles at once. They'll be holding one giant revival meeting down at Mondior's headquarters, I'll bet. -Do I think there's immunity to the Darkness effects? Well, we're about to discover if there is, aren't we?”

“There must be. How else would the Apostles keep the Book of Revelations going from cycle to cycle, and how on Kalgash did it get written in the first place? There must have been some sort of immunity. If everyone had gone mad, who would have been left to write the book?”

“Very likely the members of the secret cult hid themselves away in sanctuaries until it was over, just as some of us are doing tonight,” Sheerin said.

“Not good enough. The Book of Revelations is set up as an eyewitness account. That seems to indicate they had firsthand experience of the madness-and survived it.”

“Well,” said the psychologist, “there are three kinds of people who might remain relatively unaffected. First, the very few who don't get to see the Stars at all-the blind, let's say, or those who drink themselves into a stupor at the beginning of the eclipse and stay that way to the end.”

“They don't count. They're not really witnesses.”

“I suppose not. The second group, though-young children, to whom the world as a whole is too new and strange for anything to seem more unusual than anything else. They wouldn't be frightened by the Darkness or even the Stars, I suspect. Those would just be two more curious events in an endlessly surprising world. You see that, don't you?”

Theremon nodded doubtfully. “I suppose so.”

“Lastly, there are those whose minds are too coarse-grained to be entirely toppled. The very insensitive might scarcely be affected-the real clods. They'd just shrug and wait for Onos to rise, I suppose.”

“So the Book of Revelations was written by insensitive clods?” Theremon asked, grinning.

“Hardly. It would have been written by some of the keenest minds of the new cycle-and it would have been based on the fugitive memories of the children, combined with the confused, incoherent babblings of the half-mad morons, and, yes, perhaps some of the tales that the clods told.

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