The main door was open. The warm and heartening glow of sunlight was visible beyond.
Carefully Sheerin picked his way through the chaos toward the exit.
“Dr. Sheerin?” a voice said suddenly, unexpectedly.
He whirled, brandishing his hatchet so fiercely that he came close to laughing at his own feigned belligerence.
“Who’s there?”
“Me. Yimot.”
“Who?”
“Yimot. You remember me, don’t you?”
“Yimot, yes.” The gangling, gawky young graduate astronomy student from some backwoods province. Sheerin saw the boy now, half hidden in an alcove. His face was blackened with ashes and soot and his clothing was torn, and he looked stunned and shaken, but he seemed otherwise to be all right. As he came forward, in fact, he moved in a far less comical way than usual, none of his jerky mannerisms, no wild swings of his arms or twitches of his head. Terror does strange things to people, Sheerin told himself.—“Have you been hiding here all through the night?”
“I tried to get out of the building when the Stars came, but I got jammed up in here. Have you seen Faro, Dr. Sheerin?”
“Your friend? No. I haven’t seen anyone.”
“We were together for a while. But then, with all the shoving and pushing, things got so wild—” Yimot managed an odd smile. “I thought they would burn the building down. But then the sprinklers came on.” He pointed at the townspeople who lay all around.—“Are they all dead, do you think?”
“Some of them are just insane. They saw the Stars.”
“I did too, just for a moment,” Yimot said. “Just for a moment.”
“What were they like?” Sheerin asked.
“You didn’t see them, Doctor? Or is it that you just don’t remember?”
“I was in the basement. Nice and snug.”
Yimot craned his long neck upward as though the Stars were still blazing in the ceiling of the hallway. “They were—awesome,” he whispered. “I know that doesn’t tell you anything, but that’s the only word I can use. I saw them only for two seconds, maybe three, and I could feel my mind spinning, I could feel the top of my head starting to lift off, so I looked away. Because I’m not very brave, Dr. Sheerin.”
“No. Neither am I.”
“But I’m glad I had those two or three seconds. The Stars are very frightening, but they’re also very beautiful. At least to an astronomer they are. They were nothing at all like those silly little pinpricks of light that Faro and I created in that stupid experiment of ours. We must be right in the middle of an immense cluster of them, you know. We have our six suns in a tight group close by us—some of them closer than others, I mean—and then farther back, five or ten light-years back, or more, there’s this whole giant sphere of Stars, which are suns, thousands of suns, a tremendous globe of suns completely enclosing us, but invisible to us normally because of the light of our own suns shining all the time. Just as Beenay said. Beenay’s a wonderful astronomer, you know. He’ll be greater than Dr. Athor some day.—You didn’t see the Stars at all?”
“Just the merest quick glimpse,” said Sheerin, a little sadly. “Then I went and hid.—Look, boy, we’ve got to get ourselves out of this place.”
“I’d like to try to find Faro first.”
“If he’s all right, he’s outside. If he isn’t, there’s nothing you can do for him.”
“But if he’s underneath one of those heaps—”
“No,” Sheerin said. “You can’t go poking around those people. They’re all still stunned, but if you provoke them there’s no telling what they’ll do. The safest thing is to get out of here. I’m going to try to make it to the Sanctuary. If you’re smart, you’ll come with me.”
“But Faro—”
“Very well,” Sheerin said, with a sigh. “Let’s look for Faro. Or Beenay, or Athor, or Theremon, any of the others.”
But it was hopeless. For perhaps ten minutes they picked through the heaps of dead and unconscious and semi-conscious people in the hallway; but none of them were university people. Their faces were appalling, horribly distorted by fear and madness. Some stirred when they were disturbed, and began to froth and mutter in a horrifying way. One snatched at Sheerin’s hatchet, and Sheerin had to use the butt end to push him away. It was impossible to ascend the stairs to the upper levels of the building; the staircase was blocked by bodies, and there was broken plaster everywhere. Pools of muddy water had collected on the floor. The harsh, piercing smell of smoke was intolerable.
“You’re right,” Yimot said finally. “We’d better go.”
Sheerin led the way, stepping out into the sunlight. After the hours that had just passed, golden Onos was the most welcome sight in the universe, though the psychologist found his eyes unaccustomed to so much bright light after the long hours of Darkness. It hit him with almost tangible force. For a few moments after he emerged he stood blinking, waiting for his eyes to readapt. After a time he was able to see, and gasped at what he saw.
“How awful,” Yimot murmured.
More bodies. Madmen wandering in circles, singing to themselves. Burned-out vehicles by the side of the road. The shrubbery and trees hacked up as though by blind monstrous forces. And, off in the distance, a ghastly pall of brown smoke rising above the spires of Saro City.
Chaos, chaos, chaos.
“So this is what the end of the world looks like,” Sheerin said quietly. “And here we are, you and I. Survivors.” He laughed bitterly. “What a pair we are. I’m carrying a hundred pounds too many around my middle and you’ve got a hundred pounds too few. But we’re still here. I wonder if Theremon made it out of there alive. If anyone did, he would have. But I wouldn’t have bet very much on you or me.—The Sanctuary’s midway between Saro City and the Observatory. We ought to be able to walk it in half an hour or so, if we don’t get into any trouble. Here, take this.”
He scooped up a thick gray billy-club that was lying beside one of the fallen rioters and tossed it to Yimot, who caught it clumsily and stared at it as though he had no idea what it might be.
“What will I do with it?” he asked finally.
Sheerin said, “Pretend that you’ll use it to bash in the skull of anybody that bothers us. Just as I’m pretending that I’d use this hatchet if I needed to defend myself. And if necessary I will. It’s a new world out here, Yimot. Come on. And keep your wits about you as we go.”
30
The Darkness was still upon the world, the Stars still were flooding Kalgash with their diabolical rivers of light, when Siferra 89 came stumbling out of the gutted Observatory building. But the faint pink glow of dawn was showing on the eastern horizon, the first hopeful sign that the suns might be returning to the heavens.
She stood on the Observatory lawn, legs far apart, head thrown back, pulling breath deep down into her lungs.
Her mind was numb. She had no idea how many hours had passed since the sky had turned dark and the Stars had erupted into view like the blast of a million trumpets. All the night long she had wandered the corridors of the Observatory in a daze, unable to find her way out, struggling with the madmen who swarmed about her on all sides. That she had gone mad too was not something she stopped to think about. The only thing on her mind was survivaclass="underline" beating back the hands that clutched at her; parrying the swinging clubs with blows of the club that she herself had snatched up from a fallen man; avoiding the screaming, surging stampedes of maniacs who rumbled arm in arm in groups of six or eight through the hallways, trampling everyone in their way.