He held the torch at tiptoe height and, propping the tottering psychologist by an elbow, made his way downward in the middle of the protecting circle of illumination.
The offices on the ground floor still possessed what light there was, and Theremon felt the horror about him relax.
"Here," he said brusquely, and passed the torch to Sheerin. "You can hear them outside."
And they could. Little scraps of hoarse, wordless shouts.
But Sheerin was right; the Observatory was built like a fortress. Erected in the last century, when the neo-Gavottian style of architecture was at its ugly height, it had been designed for stability and durability rather than for beauty.
The windows were protected by the grillwork of inch-thick iron bars sunk deep into the concrete sills. The walls were solid masonry that an earthquake couldn't have touched, and the main door was a huge oaken slab rein - forced with iron. Theremon shot the bolts and they slid shut with a dull clang.
At the other end of the corridor, Sheerin cursed weakly. He pointed to the lock of the back door which had been neatly jimmied into uselessness.
"That must be how Latimer got in," he said.
"Well, don't stand there," cried Theremon impatiently. "Help drag up the furniture - and keep that torch out of my eyes. The smoke's killing me."
He slammed the heavy table up against the door as he spoke, and in two minutes had built a barricade which made up for what it lacked in beauty and symmetry by the sheer inertia of its massiveness.
Somewhere, dimly, far off, they could hear the battering of naked fists upon the door; and the screams and yells from outside had a sort of half reality.
That mob had set off from Saro City with only two things in mind: the attainment of Cultist salvation by the destruction of the Observatory, and a maddening fear that all but paralyzed them. There was no time to think of ground cars, or of weapons, or of leadership, or even of organization. They made for the Observatory on foot and assaulted it with bare hands.
And now that they were there, the last flash of Beta, the last ruby-red drop of flame, flickered feebly over a humanity that had left only stark, universal fear!
Theremon groaned, "Let's get back to the dome!" In the dome, only Yimot, at the solarscope, had kept his place. The rest were clustered about the cameras, and Beenay was giving his instructions in a hoarse, strained voice.
"Get it straight, all of you. I'm snapping Beta just before totality and changing the plate. That will leave one of you to each camera. You all know about… about times of exposure - "
There was a breathless murmur of agreement.
Beenay passed a hand over his eyes. "Are the torches still burning? Never mind, I see them!" He was leaning hard against the back of a chair. "Now remember, don't… don't try to look for good shots. Don't waste time trying to get t-two stars at a time in the scope field. One is enough. And… and if you feel yourself going, get away from the camera."
At the door, Sheerin whispered to Theremon, "Take me to Aton. I don't see him."
The newsman did not answer immediately. The vague forms of the astronomers wavered and blurred, and the torches overhead had become only yellow splotches.
"It's dark," he whimpered.
Sheerin held out his hand. "Aton." He stumbled forward. "Aton!"
Theremon stepped after and seized his arm. "Wait, I'll take you." Somehow he made his way across the room. He closed his eyes against the Darkness and his mind against the chaos within it.
No one heard them or paid attention to them. Sheerin stumbled against the wall. "Aton!"
The psychologist felt shaking hands touching him, then withdrawing, a voice muttering, "Is that you, Sheerin?"
"Aton!" He strove to breathe normally. "Don't worry about the mob. The place will hold them off."
Latimer, the Cultist, rose to his feet, and his face twisted in desperation. His word was pledged, and to break it would mean placing his soul in mortal peril. Yet that word had been forced from him and had not been given freely. The Stars would come soon! He could not stand by and allow - And yet his word was pledged.
Beenay's face was dimly flushed as it looked upward at Beta's last ray, and Latimer, seeing him bend over his camera, made his decision. His nails cut the flesh of his palms as he tensed himself.
He staggered crazily as he started his rush. There was nothing before him but shadows; the very floor beneath his feet lacked substance. And then someone was upon him and he went down with clutching fingers at his throat.
He doubled his knee and drove it hard into his assailant. "Let me up or I'll kill you."
Theremon cried out sharply and muttered through a blinding haze of pain. "You double-crossing rat!"
The newsman seemed conscious of everything at once. He heard Beenay croak, "I've got it. At your cameras, men!" and then there was the strange awareness that the last thread of sunlight had thinned out and snapped.
Simultaneously he heard one last choking gasp from Beenay, and a queer little cry from Sheerin, a hysterical giggle that cut off in a rasp - and a sudden silence, a strange, deadly silence from outside.
And Latimer had gone limp in his loosening grasp. Theremon peered into the Cultist's eyes and saw the blankness of them, staring upward, mirroring the feeble yellow of the torches. He saw the bubble of froth upon Latimer's lips and heard the low animal whimper in Latimer's throat.
With the slow fascination of fear, he lifted himself on one arm and turned his eyes toward the blood-curdling blackness of the window.
Through it shone the Stars!
Not Earth's feeble thirty-six hundred Stars visible to the eye; Lagash was in the center of a giant cluster. Thirty thousand mighty suns shone down in a soul-searing splendor that was more frighteningly cold in its awful indifference than the bitter wind that shivered across the cold, horribly bleak world.
Theremon staggered to his feet, his throat, constricting him to breathlessness, all the muscles of his body writhing in an intensity of terror and sheer fear beyond bearing. He was going mad and knew it, and somewhere deep inside a bit of sanity was screaming, struggling to fight off the hopeless flood of black terror. It was very horrible to go mad and know that you were going mad - to know that in a little minute you would be here physically and yet all the real essence would be dead and drowned in the black madness. For this was the Dark - the Dark and the Cold and the Doom. The bright walls of the universe were shattered and their awful black fragments were falling down to crush and squeeze and obliterate him.
He jostled someone crawling on hands and knees, but stumbled somehow over him. Hands groping at his tortured throat, he limped toward the flame of the torches that filled all his mad vision.
"Light!" he screamed.
Aton, somewhere, was crying, whimpering horribly like a terribly frightened child. "Stars - all the Stars - we didn't know at all. We didn't know anything. We thought six stars in a universe is something the Stars didn't notice is Darkness forever and ever and ever and the walls are breaking in and we didn't know we couldn't know and anything - "
Someone clawed at the torch, and it fell and snuffed out. In the instant, the awful splendor of the indifferent Stars leaped nearer to them.
On the horizon outside the window, in the direction of Saro City, a crimson glow began growing, strengthening in brightness, that was not the glow of a sun.
The long night had come again.
In 1948, I woke up one morning to read in the New York Times that Street amp; Smith Publications had discontinued all its pulp magazines.
Since Astounding Science Fiction was one of the Street amp; Smith pulps, everything went black before my eyes. You see, during the six-year period from 1943 to 1948 inclusive, I had sold and published thirteen science fiction stories, every single one of them to Astounding. During that period I had labored constantly with the feeling that I was not a writer at all, but merely a person who happened to click it off with one particular market, and that if anything happened to Astounding or to Mr. Campbell, its editor, I was through.