Nightfall (15 page)

“Yimot!” he called. “Faro! Beenay! All of you!”

Roly-poly little Faro was the first through the door, with beanpole Yimot just behind him, and then the rest of the Astronomy
Department, Beenay, Thilanda, Klet, Simbron, and some others. They clustered just inside the entrance to his office. Athor saw by the expression of shock on their faces that he must be a frightful sight indeed, no doubt wild and haggard, his white hair standing out in all directions, his face pale, his whole appearance that of an old man right on the edge of collapse.

It was important to defuse their fears right away. This was no moment for melodrama.

Quietly he said, “Yes, I’m very tired and I know it. And I probably look like some demon out of the nether realms. But I’ve got something here that looks like it works.”

“The gravitational lens idea?” Beenay said.

“The gravitational lens is a completely hopeless concept,” Athor said frostily. “The same with the burned-out sun, the fold in space, the zone of negative mass, and the other fantastical notions we’ve been playing with all week. They’re all very pretty ideas but they don’t stand up to hard scrutiny. There is one that does, though.”

He watched their eyes widen.

Turning to the screen, he began once again to set up the numbers of Postulate Eight. His weariness dropped away as he worked: he struck no wrong keys this time, he felt no aches and pains. He had moved into a realm beyond fatigue.

“In this postulate we assume,” he said, “a non-luminous planetary body similar to Kalgash, which is in orbit not around Onos but around Kalgash itself. Its mass is considerable, in fact is nearly the same as that of Kalgash itself: sufficient to exert a gravitational force on our world that causes the perturbations of our orbit which Beenay has called to our attention.”

Athor keyed in the visuals and the solar system appeared on the screen in stylized form: the six suns, Kalgash, and the postulated satellite of Kalgash.

He turned back to face the others. They were all looking at each other uneasily. Though they were half his age, or even less, they must be having as much trouble coming to an intellectual and emotional acceptance of the whole idea of another major heavenly body in the universe as he had had. Or else they simply must think he had become senile, and somehow had slipped up in his calculations.

“The numbers supporting Postulate Eight are correct,” Athor said. “I pledge you that. And the postulate has withstood every test I could apply.”

He glared at them defiantly, looking ferociously at each of them in turn, as if to remind them that he was the Athor 77 who had given the world the Theory of Universal Gravitation, and that he had not yet taken leave of his faculties.

Beenay said softly, “And the reason why we are unable to see this satellite, sir—?”

“Two reasons,” replied Athor serenely. “Like Kalgash itself, this planetary body would shine only by reflected light. If we assume that its surface is made up largely of bluish rock—not an implausible geological likelihood—then the light reflected from it would be positioned along the spectrum in such a way that the eternal blaze of the six suns, combined with the lightscattering properties of our own atmosphere, would completely mask its presence. In a sky where several suns are shining at virtually every moment, such a satellite would be invisible to us.”

Faro said, “Provided the orbit of the satellite is an extremely large one, isn’t that so, sir?”

“Right.” Athor keyed in the second visual. “Here’s a closer look. As you see, our unknown and invisible satellite travels around us on an enormous ellipse that carries it extremely far from us for many years at a time. Not so distant that we don’t display the orbital effects of its presence in the heavens—but far enough so that ordinarily there is no possibility of our getting a naked-eye view of this dim rocky mass in the sky, and very little possibility of our discovering it even with our telescopes. Since we have no way of knowing it’s there by ordinary observation, it would be only by the wildest chance that we’d have detected it astronomically.”

“But of course we can go looking for it now,” said Thilanda 191, whose specialty was astrophotography.

“And of course we will,” Athor told her. They were coming around to the idea now, he saw. Every one of them. He knew them well enough to see that there were no secret scoffers. “Though you may find the search harder than you suspect, very definitely a needle-in-a-haystack proposition. But there’ll
be an immediate appropriation for the work, that I pledge you.”

Beenay said, “One question, sir.”

“Go on.”

“If the orbit’s as eccentric as your postulate supposes, and therefore this satellite of ours, this—Kalgash Two, let’s call it for the moment—Kalgash Two is extremely distant from us during certain parts of its orbital cycle, then it stands to reason that at other parts of its cycle it’s bound to move into a position that’s very much closer to us. There has to be some range of variation even in the most perfect orbit, and a satellite traveling in a large elliptical orbit is likely to have an extreme range between the farthest and the closest points of approach to the primary.”

“That would be logical, yes,” Athor said.

“But then, sir,” Beenay went on, “if we assume that Kalgash Two has been so far from us during the entire period of modern astronomical science that we’ve been unable to discover its very existence except by the indirect means of measuring its effect on our own world’s orbit, wouldn’t you agree that it’s probably coming back from its farthest distance right now? That it must currently be approaching us?”

“That doesn’t necessarily follow,” Yimot said, with a great flurry of his arms. “We don’t have any idea where it is along its orbital path right now, or how long it takes to make one complete circuit around Kalgash. It might be a ten-thousand-year orbit and Kalgash Two could still be heading away from us after an approach in prehistoric times that no one remembers.”

“True,” Beenay admitted. “We can’t really say whether it’s coming or going at the present moment. Not yet, anyway.”

“But we can try to find out,” Faro said. “Thilanda has the right idea. Even though all the numbers check out, we need to see whether Kalgash Two is actually out there. Once we find it we can begin to calculate its orbit.”

“We should be able to calculate its orbit simply from the perturbations it causes in ours,” said Klet, who was the department’s best mathematician.

“Yes,” Simbron put in—she was a cosmographer—“and we can also figure out whether it’s approaching or heading away from us. Gods! What if it’s heading this way? What an amazing
event that would be! A dark planetary body cutting across the sky—passing between us and the suns! Possibly even blotting out the light of some of them for a couple of hours!”

“How strange that would be,” Beenay mused. “An eclipse, I suppose you could call it. You know: the visual effect that occurs when some object gets between a viewer and the thing he’s looking at. But could it happen? The suns are so huge—how could Kalgash Two actually conceal one of them from view?”

“If it came close enough to us it might,” Faro said. “Why, I could imagine a situation in which—”

“Yes, work out all possible scenarios, why don’t you?” Athor interjected suddenly, cutting Faro off with such brutal abruptness that everyone in the room turned to stare at him. “Play with the idea, all of you. Push it this way and that, and see what you get.”

Suddenly he couldn’t bear to sit here any longer. He had to get away.

The exhilaration he had felt since putting the last piece into place had abruptly deserted him. He felt a terrible leaden weariness, as though he were a thousand years old. Chills were running along his arms down into his fingers, and something was squirming frantically in the muscles of his back. He knew that he had pushed himself beyond all endurance now. It was time for younger workers to relieve him of this enterprise.

Rising from his chair before the screens, Athor took one uncertain reeling step toward the middle of the room, recovered himself before he could stumble, and walked slowly and with all the dignity he could muster past the Observatory staff. “I’m going home,” he said. “I could use some sleep.”

Beenay said, “Am I to understand that the village was destroyed by fire
nine times in a row
, Siferra? And they rebuilt it every time?”

“My colleague Balik thinks there may be only seven villages piled up in the Hill of Thombo,” the archaeologist replied.
“And he may be right, actually. Things are pretty jumbled down toward the lowest levels. But seven villages, nine villages—no matter how many it is exactly, it doesn’t change the fundamental concept. Here: look at these charts. I’ve worked them up from my excavation notes. Of course what we did was just a preliminary dig, a quick slice through the whole hill, with the really meticulous work left for a later expedition. We discovered the hill too late in our work to do anything else. But these charts’ll give you an idea. —You aren’t going to be bored, are you? All this stuff does interest you, doesn’t it, Beenay?”

“I find it completely fascinating. Do you think I’m so totally preoccupied with astronomy that I can’t pay attention to any of the other disciplines? —Besides, archaeology and astronomy sometimes go hand in hand. We’ve learned more than a little about the movements of the suns through the heavens by studying the ancient astronomical monuments that you people have been digging up here and there around the world. Here, let me see.”

They were in Siferra’s office. She had asked Beenay to come there to discuss a problem which she said had unexpectedly arisen in the course of her research. Which puzzled him, because he didn’t immediately see how an astronomer could help an archaeologist in her work, despite what he had just said about archaeology and astronomy sometimes going hand in hand. But he was always glad to have a chance to visit with Siferra.

They had met initially five years before, when they were working together on an interdisciplinary faculty committee that was planning the expansion of the university library. Though Siferra had been out of the country most of the time since then doing field work, she and Beenay did enjoy meeting for lunch now and then when she was there. He found her challenging, highly intelligent, and abrasive in a refreshing sort of way. What she saw in him he had no idea: perhaps just an intellectually stimulating young man who wasn’t involved in the poisonous rivalries and feuds of her own field and had no apparent designs on her body.

Siferra unfolded the charts, huge sheets of thin parchment-like paper on which complex, elegant diagrams had been ruled
with pencil, and she and Beenay bent forward to examine them at close range.

He had been telling the truth when he said he was fascinated by archaeology. Ever since he’d been a boy, he had enjoyed reading the narratives of the great explorers of antiquity, such men as Marpin, Shelbik, and of course Galdo 221. He found the remote past nearly as exciting to think about as the remote reaches of interstellar space.

His contract-mate Raissta wasn’t greatly pleased by his friendship with Siferra. She had rather testily implied, a couple of times, that it was Siferra herself who fascinated him, not her field of research. But Beenay thought Raissta’s jealousy was absurd. Certainly Siferra was an attractive woman—it would be disingenuous to pretend otherwise—but she was relentlessly non-romantic and every man on campus knew it. Besides, she was something like ten years older than Beenay. Handsome as she was, Beenay had never thought of her with any sort of intimate intentions.

“What we have here, first, is a cross section of the entire hill,” Siferra told him. “I’ve plotted each separate level of occupation in a schematic way. The newest settlement’s at the top, naturally—huge stone walls, what we call the cyclopean style of architecture, typical of the Beklimot culture in its mature period of development. This line here in the level of the cyclopean walls represents a layer of charcoal remains—enough charcoal to indicate a widespread conflagration that must have utterly wiped the city out. And here, below the cyclopean level and the burn line, is the next oldest settlement.”

“Which is constructed in a different style.”

“Exactly. You see how I’ve drawn the stones of the walls? It’s what we call the crosshatch style, characteristic of the early Beklimot culture, or perhaps the culture that developed into Beklimot. Both these styles can be seen in the Beklimot-era ruins that surround the Hill of Thombo. The main ruins are cyclopean, and here and there we’ve found a little crosshatch stuff, just a mere outcropping or two, which we call proto-Beklimot. Now, look here, at the border between the cross-hatch settlement and the cyclopean ruins above it.”

“Another fire line?” Beenay said.

“Another fire line, yes. What we have in this hill is like a
sandwich—a layer of human occupation, a layer of charcoal, another layer of human occupation, another layer of charcoal. So what I think happened is something like this. During the time of the crosshatch people there was a devastating fire that scorched a pretty good chunk of the Sagikan Peninsula and forced the abandonment of the Thombo village and other crosshatch-style villages nearby. Afterward, when the inhabitants came back and began to rebuild, they used a brand-new and more elaborate architectural style, which we call cyclopean because of the huge building-stones. But then came
another
fire and wiped out the cyclopean settlement. At that point the people of the area gave up trying to build cities on the Hill of Thombo and this time when they rebuilt they chose another site nearby, which we term Beklimot Major. We’ve believed for a long time that Beklimot Major was the first true human city, emerging from the smaller crosshatch-type proto-Beklimot-period settlements scattered all around it. What Thombo tells us is that there was at least one important cyclopean city in the area before Beklimot Major existed.”

“And the Beklimot Major site,” Beenay said, “shows no trace of fire damage?”

“No. So it wasn’t there when the city on top of Thombo was burned. Eventually the whole Beklimot culture collapsed and Beklimot Major itself was abandoned, but that was for other reasons having to do with climatic shifts. Fire had nothing to do with it. That was perhaps a thousand years ago. But the fire that wrecked the topmost Thombo village seems to have been much earlier than that. I’d guess about a thousand years earlier. The radiocarbon dates from the charcoal samples will give us a more precise figure when we get them from the lab.”