“My mind’s all right.”
“You want it to stay that way. How are you feeling?”
“Why—” Theremon narrowed his eyes. His throat was a little dry. He ran his finger along the inside of his collar. Tight. Tight. A hand beginning to close around his throat, was that how it felt? He twisted his neck back and forth but found no relief. “A little trouble breathing, maybe.”
“Difficulty in breathing is one of the first symptoms of a claustrophobic attack,” Sheerin said. “When you feel your chest tightening, you’d be wise to turn away from the window.”
“I want to see what’s happening.”
“Fine. Fine. Whatever you like, then.”
Theremon opened his eyes wide and drew two or three long breaths. “You don’t think I can take it, do you?”
Wearily Sheerin said, “I don’t know anything about anything, Theremon. Things are changing from moment to moment, aren’t they?—Hello, here’s Beenay.”
26
The astronomer had interposed himself between the light and the pair in the corner. Sheerin squinted up at him uneasily. “Hello, Beenay.”
“Mind if I join you?” he asked. “My reckonings are set, and there’s nothing for me to do till totality.” Beenay paused and eyed the Apostle, who was poring intently through a small leather-bound book that he had drawn from the sleeve of his robe. “Say, weren’t we going to put him away?”
“We decided not to,” Theremon said. “Do you know where Siferra is, Beenay? I saw her a little while ago, but she doesn’t seem to be here now.”
“Upstairs, in the dome. She wanted to get a view through the big telescope. Not that there’s anything much to see that we can’t see with our naked eyes.”
“What about Kalgash Two?” Theremon asked.
“What’s there to see? Darkness in Darkness. We can see the effect of its presence as it moves in front of Dovim. Kalgash Two itself, though—it’s just a chunk of night against the night sky.”
“Night,” Sheerin mused. “What a strange word that is.”
“Not any more,” said Theremon. “So you don’t actually see the wandering satellite at all, even with the big telescope?”
Beenay looked abashed. “Our telescopes really aren’t very good, you know. They do fine for solar observations, but let it get just a little dark, and—” He shook his head. His shoulders were thrown back and he seemed to be working hard to pull air into his lungs. “But Kalgash Two is real, all right. The strange zone of Darkness that’s passing between us and Dovim—that’s Kalgash Two.”
Sheerin said, “Have you been having trouble breathing, Beenay?”
“A little.” He sniffled. “A cold, I guess.”
“A touch of claustrophobia, more likely.”
“You think?”
“I’m pretty sure. Anything else feel strange?”
“Well,” Beenay said, “I get the impression that my eyes are going back on me. Things seem to blur, and—well, nothing is as clear as it ought to be. And I’m cold, too.”
“Oh, that’s no illusion. It’s cold, all right,” Theremon said, grimacing. “My toes feel as if I’ve been shipping them cross country in a refrigeration car.”
“What we need right now,” Sheerin said intensely, “is to distract ourselves from the effects we’re feeling. Keep our minds busy, that’s the thing. I was telling you a moment ago, Theremon, why Faro’s experiments with the holes in the roof came to nothing.”
“You were just beginning,” Theremon replied, playing along. He huddled down, encircling a knee with both arms and nuzzling his chin against it. What I ought to do, he thought, is excuse myself and go upstairs to find Siferra, now that the time before totality is running out. But he found himself curiously passive, unwilling to move. Or, he wondered, am I just afraid to face her?
Sheerin said, “What I was about to propose was that they were misled by taking the Book of Revelations literally. There probably wasn’t any sense in attaching any physical significance to the concept of Stars. It might be, you know, that in the presence of total and sustained Darkness the mind finds it absolutely necessary to create light. This illusion of light might be all that the Stars really are.”
“In other words,” Theremon said, starting to get caught up in it now, “you mean the Stars are the results of the madness and not one of the causes? Then what good will the photographs that the astronomers are taking this evening be?”
“To prove that the Stars are an illusion, maybe. Or to prove the opposite, for all I know. Then again—”
Beenay had drawn his chair closer, and there was an expression of sudden enthusiasm on his face. “As long as you’re on the subject of Stars—” he began. “I’ve been thinking about them myself, and I’ve come up with a really interesting notion. Of course, it’s just a wild speculation, and I’m not trying to put it forth in any serious way. But it’s worth thinking about. Do you want to hear it?”
“Why not?” Sheerin said, leaning back.
Beenay looked a little reluctant. He smiled shyly and said, “Well then, supposing there were other suns in the universe.”
Theremon repressed a laugh. “You said this was really wild, but I didn’t imagine—”
“No, it isn’t as crazy as that. I don’t mean other suns right close at hand that we somehow mysteriously aren’t able to see. I’m talking about suns that are so far away that their light isn’t bright enough for us to make them out. If they were nearby, they’d be as bright as Onos, maybe, or Tano and Sitha. But as it is, the light they give off seems to us like nothing more than a little point of illumination, and it’s drowned out by the constant glare from our six suns.”
Sheerin said, “But what about the Law of Universal Gravitation? Aren’t you overlooking that? If these other suns are there, wouldn’t they be disturbing our world’s orbit the way Kalgash Two does, and why, then, haven’t you observed it?”
“Good point,” said Beenay. “But these suns, let’s say, are really far off—maybe as much as four light-years away, or even more.”
“How many years is a light-year?” Theremon asked.
“Not how many. How far. A light-year is a measure of distance—the distance light travels in a year. Which is an immense number of miles, because light is so fast. We’ve measured it at something like 185,000 miles per second, and my suspicion is that that isn’t a really precise figure, that if we had better instruments we’d find out that the speed of light is even a little faster than that. But even figuring at 185,000 miles per second, we can calculate that Onos is about ten light-minutes from here, and Tano and Sitha about eleven times as far as that, and so on. So a sun that’s a few light-years away, why, that would be really distant. We’d never be able to detect any perturbations they might be causing in Kalgash’s orbit, because they’d be so minor. All right: let’s say that there are a lot of suns out there, everywhere around us in the heavens, at a distance of four to eight light-years—say, a dozen or two such suns, maybe.”
Theremon whistled. “What an idea for a great Weekend Supplement piece! Two dozen suns in a universe eight light-years across! Gods! That would shrink our universe into insignificance! Imagine it—Kalgash and its suns just a little trivial suburb of the real universe, and here we’ve been thinking that we’re the whole thing, just us and our six suns, all alone in the cosmos!”
“It’s only a wild notion,” said Beenay with a grin, “but you see where I’m heading, I hope. During eclipse, these dozen suns would suddenly become visible, because for a little while there’d be no real sunlight to drown them out. Since they’re so far off, they’d appear small, like so many little marbles. But there you’d have it: the Stars. The suddenly emerging points of light that the Apostles have been promising us.”