“The Apostles talk of ‘countless numbers’ of Stars,” Sheerin said. “That doesn’t seem like a dozen or two to me. More like a few million, wouldn’t you think?”
“Poetic exaggeration,” said Beenay. “There just isn’t room enough in the universe for a million suns—not even if they were jammed right up against each other so that they touched.”
“Besides,” Theremon offered, “once we get up to a dozen or two, can we really grasp distinctions of numbers? Two dozen Stars would seem like a ‘countless’ number, I bet—especially if there happens to be an eclipse going on and everybody is wacky already from staring at Darkness. You know, there are tribes in the backwoods that have only three numbers in their language—‘one,’ ‘two,’ ‘many,’ We’re a little more sophisticated than that, maybe. So for us one to two dozen are comprehensible, and then it just feels like ‘countless’ to us.” He shivered with excitement. “A dozen suns, suddenly! Imagine it!”
Beenay said, “There’s more. Another cute little notion. Have you ever thought what a simple problem gravitation would be if only you had a sufficiently simple system? Supposing you had a universe in which there was a planet with only one sun. The planet would travel in a perfect ellipse and the exact nature of the gravitational force would be so evident it could be accepted as an axiom. Astronomers on such a world would start off with gravity probably before they even invent the telescope. Naked-eye observation would be enough to let them figure things out.”
Sheerin looked doubtful. “But would such a system be dynamically stable?” he asked.
“Sure! They call it the ‘one-and-one’ case. It’s been worked out mathematically, but it’s the philosophical implications that interest me.”
“It’s nice to think about,” admitted Sheerin, “as a pretty abstraction—like a perfect gas or absolute zero.”
“Of course,” continued Beenay, “there’s the catch that life would be impossible on such a planet. It wouldn’t get enough heat and light, and if it rotated there would be total Darkness half of each day. That was the planet you once asked me to imagine, remember, Sheerin? Where the native inhabitants would be fully adapted to alternating daylight and night? But I’ve been thinking about that. There wouldn’t be any native inhabitants. You couldn’t expect life—which is fundamentally dependent upon light—to develop under such extreme conditions of light-deprivation. Half of every axial rotation spent in Darkness! No, nothing could exist under conditions like that. But to continue—just speaking hypothetically, the ‘one-and-one’ system would—”
“Wait a minute,” Sheerin said. “That’s pretty glib of you, saying life wouldn’t have developed there. How do you know? What’s so fundamentally impossible about life evolving in a place that has Darkness half the time?”
“I told you, Sheerin, life is fundamentally dependent upon light. And therefore in a world where—”
“Life here is fundamentally dependent on light. But what does that have to do with a planet that—”
“It stands to reason, Sheerin!”
“It stands to circular reason!” Sheerin retorted. “You define life as such-and-such a kind of phenomenon that occurs on Kalgash, and then you try to claim that on a world that’s totally unlike Kalgash life would be—”
Theremon burst suddenly into harsh gusts of laughter.
Sheerin and Beenay looked at him indignantly.
“What’s so funny?” Beenay demanded.
“You are. The two of you. An astronomer and a psychologist having a furious argument about biology. This must be the celebrated interdisciplinary dialogue that I’ve heard so much about, the great intellectual ferment for which this university is famous.” The newspaperman stood up. He was growing restless anyway, and Beenay’s long disquisition on abstract matters was making him even edgier. “Excuse me, will you? I need to stretch my legs.”
“Totality’s almost here,” Beenay pointed out. “You may not want to be off by yourself when that happens.”
“Just a little stroll, and then I’ll be back,” said Theremon.
Before he had taken five steps, Beenay and Sheerin had resumed their argument. Theremon smiled. It was a way of easing the tension, he told himself. Everybody was under tremendous pressure. After all, each tick of the clock was bringing the world closer to full Darkness—closer to—
To the Stars?
To madness?
To the Time of the Heavenly Flames?
Theremon shrugged. He had gone through a hundred gyrations of mood in the past few hours, but now he felt oddly calm, almost fatalistic. He had always believed that he was the master of his own destiny, that he was able to shape the course of his life: that was how he had succeeded in getting himself into places where other newspapermen hadn’t remotely had a chance. But now everything was beyond his control, and he knew it. Come Darkness, come Stars, come Flame, it would all happen without a by-your-leave from him. No sense consuming himself in jittery anticipation, then. Just relax, sit back, wait, watch it all happen.
And then, he told himself—then make sure that you survive whatever turmoil follows.
“Going up to the dome?” a voice asked.
He blinked in the half-darkness. It was the chubby little graduate-student astronomer—Faro, was that his name?
“Yes, as a matter of fact,” Theremon said, though in truth he had had no particular destination in mind.
“So am I. Come on: I’ll take you there.”
A spiral metal staircase wound upward into the high-vaulted top story of the huge building. Faro went chugging up the stairs in a thudding short-legged gait, and Theremon loped along behind him. He had been in the Observatory dome once before, years ago, when Beenay wanted to show him something. But he remembered very little about the place.
Faro pulled back a heavy sliding door, and they went in.
“Come for a close look at the Stars?” Siferra asked.
The tall archaeologist was standing just inside the doorway, watching the astronomers at their work. Theremon reddened. Siferra wasn’t what he wanted to run into just now. Too late he recalled that this was where Beenay had said she had gone. Despite the ambiguous smile she had seemed to cast his way at the moment of the eclipse’s beginning, he still feared the sting of her scorn for him, her anger over what she saw as his betrayal of the Observatory group.
But she showed no sign now of hard feelings. Perhaps, now that the world was plunging headlong into the Cave of Darkness, she felt that anything that had happened before the eclipse was irrelevant, that the coming catastrophe canceled out all errors, all quarrels, all sins.
“Quite a place!” Theremon said.
“Isn’t it amazing? Not that I really know much of what’s going on here. They’ve got the big solarscope trained on Dovim—it’s really a camera more than it is a spyglass, they told me; you can’t just squint through it and see the heavens—and then these smaller telescopes are focused deeper out, watching for some sign that the Stars are appearing—”
“Have they spotted them yet?”
“Not so far as anyone’s told me,” Siferra said.
Theremon nodded. He looked around. This was the heart of the Observatory, the room where the actual scanning of the skies took place. It was the darkest room he had ever been in—not truly dark, of course; there were bronze sconces arrayed in a double row around the curving wall, but the glow that came from the lamps they held was faint and perfunctory. In the dimness he saw a great metal tube going upward and disappearing through an open panel in the roof of the building. He was able to glimpse the sky through the panel also. It had a terrifying dense purple hue now. The diminishing orb of Dovim was still visible, but the little sun seemed to have retreated to an enormous distance.