Moodily he stared out at the Saro City skyline and forced himself back toward calmness, as much calmness as he was likely to be able to attain this evening.
Onos was beginning now to sink toward the horizon. In a little while it would fade and vanish into the distant mists. Athor watched it as it descended.
He knew he would never see it again as a sane man.
The cold white gleam of Sitha also was visible, low in the sky, far across the city at the other end of the horizon. Sitha’s twin, Tano, was nowhere to be seen—already set, gliding now through the skies of the opposite hemisphere, which soon would be enjoying the extraordinary phenomenon of a five-sun day—and Sitha itself was also swiftly vanishing from view. In another moment it too would disappear.
Behind him he heard Beenay and Theremon whispering.
“Is that man still here?” Athor asked ominously.
Beenay said, “Sir, I think you ought to listen to what he has to tell you.”
“You do? You think I ought to listen to him?” Athor whirled, his eyes gleaming fiercely. “Oh, no, Beenay. No, he’ll be the one to listen to me!” He beckoned peremptorily to the newspaperman, who had made no motion at all to leave. “Come here, young man! I’ll give you your story.”
Theremon walked slowly toward him.
Athor gestured outward. “Sitha is about to set—no, it already has. Onos will be gone also, in another moment or two. Of all the six suns, only Dovim will be left in the sky. Do you see it?”
The question was scarcely necessary to ask. The red dwarf sun looked even smaller than usual this evening, smaller than it had appeared in decades. But it was almost at zenith, and its ruddy light streamed down awesomely, flooding the landscape with an extraordinary blood-red illumination as the brilliant rays of setting Onos died.
Athor’s upturned face flushed redly in the Dovim-light. “In just under four hours,” he said, “civilization, as we have known it, will come to an end. It will do so because, as you see, Dovim will be the only sun in the sky.” He narrowed his eyes, stared toward the horizon. The last yellow blink of Onos now was gone. “There. Dovim is alone! We have four hours, now, until the finish of everything. Print that! But there’ll be no one to read it.”
“But if it turns out that four hours pass—and another four—and nothing happens?” asked Theremon softly.
“Don’t let that worry you. Plenty will happen, I assure you.”
“Perhaps. But if it doesn’t?”
Athor fought against his rising rage. “If you don’t leave, sir, and Beenay refuses to conduct you out, then I’ll call the university guards, and—No. On civilization’s last evening, I’ll allow no discourtesies here. You have five minutes, young man, to say what you have come here to say. At the end of that time, I will either agree to allow you to stay to view the eclipse, or you will leave of your own accord. Is that understood?”
Theremon hesitated only a moment. “Fair enough.”
Athor took out his pocket watch. “Five minutes, then.”
“Good! All right, first thing: what difference would it make if you allowed me to take down an eyewitness account of what’s to come? If your prediction comes true, my presence won’t matter at all—the world will end, there’ll be no newspaper tomorrow, I won’t be able to hurt you in any way. On the other hand, what if there isn’t any eclipse? You people will be the subject of such ridicule as the world has never known. Don’t you think it would be wise to leave that ridicule to friendly hands?”
Athor snorted. “Do you mean your hands?”
“Certainly!” Theremon flung himself down casually in the most comfortable chair in the room and crossed his legs. “My columns may have been a little rough at times, agreed, but I let you people have the benefit of the doubt whenever possible. Beenay’s a friend of mine, after all. He’s the one who first gave me an inkling of what was going on here, and you may recall that at the beginning I was quite sympathetic to your research. But—I ask you, Dr. Athor—how can you, one of the greatest of all scientists in all of history, turn your back on the awareness that the present century is a time of the triumph of reason over superstition, of fact over fantasy, of knowledge over blind fear? The Apostles of Flame are an absurd anachronism. The Book of Revelations is a muddled mass of foolishness. Everyone intelligent, everyone modern, knows that. And so people are annoyed, even angered, to have scientists turn about face and tell us that these cultists are preaching the truth. They—”
“No such thing, young man,” interrupted Athor. “While some of our data has been supplied us by the Apostles, our results contain none of the Apostles’ mysticism. Facts are facts, and there’s no denying that the Apostles’ so-called ‘foolishness’ does have certain facts behind it. We discovered that to our own chagrin, let me assure you. But we’ve scorned their mythologizing and done whatever we could to separate their quite genuine warnings of impending disaster from their quite preposterous and untenable program for transforming and ‘reforming’ society. I assure you that the Apostles hate us now even more than you do.”
“I don’t hate you. I’m just trying to tell you that the public is in an ugly humor. They’re angry.”
Athor twisted his mouth in derision. “Let them be angry!”
“Yes, but what about tomorrow?”
“There’ll be no tomorrow!”
“But if there is. Say that there is—just for the sake of argument. That anger might take shape as something serious. After all, you know, the whole financial world’s been in a nose-dive the last few months. The stock market has crashed three separate times, or haven’t you noticed? Sensible investors don’t really believe the world is coming to an end, but they think other investors might start to think so, and so the smart ones sell out before the panic begins—thus touching off the panic themselves. And then they buy back afterward, and sell again as soon as the market rallies, and begin the whole downward cycle all over again. And what do you think has happened to business? Johnny Public doesn’t believe you either, but there’s no sense buying new porch furniture just now, is there? Better to hang on to your money, just in case, or put it into canned goods and ammunition, and let the furniture wait.
“You see the point, Dr. Athor. Just as soon as this is all over, the business interests will be after your hide. They’ll say that if crackpots—begging your pardon—crackpots in the guise of serious scientists can upset the world’s entire economy any time they want simply by making some cockeyed prediction, then it’s up to the world to keep such things from happening. The sparks will fly, Doctor.”
Athor regarded the columnist indifferently. The five minutes were almost up.
“And just what were you proposing to do to help the situation?”
“Well,” Theremon said, grinning, “what I have in mind is this: starting tomorrow, I’ll serve as your unofficial public-relations representative. By which I mean that I can try to quell the anger you’re going to face, the same way that I’ve been trying to ease the tension the nation has been feeling—through humor, through ridicule, if necessary. I know—I know—it would be hard to stand, I admit, because I’d have to make you all out to be a bunch of gibbering idiots. But if I can get people laughing at you, they might just forget to be angry. In return for that, all I ask is the exclusive right to cover the scene at the Observatory this evening.”
Athor was silent. Beenay burst out, “Sir, it’s worth considering. I know that we’ve examined every possibility, but there’s always a million-to-one chance, a billion-to-one chance, that there’s an error somewhere in our theory or in our calculations. And if there is—”