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Page 70
postulated. Two months before the story begins, the scientists at Saro University calculated the orbit of the suspected satellite and came up with the prediction of Beta's eclipse. This had been matched with archeological evidence that nine or more previous civilizations on Lagash had reached levels comparable to the present one and then had been mysteriously destroyed by fire.
Further evidence is provided by a cult built around a legend that every two thousand and fifty years Lagash enters a huge cave, all the suns disappear, total darkness comes over all the world, and things called Stars appear, rob men of their souls, and leave them unreasoning brutes who destroy their own civilization. In the two months following the prediction of Beta's eclipse, Saro University scientists have built a Hideout where some three hundred people, mostly women and children, will be shut away from the eclipse and the predicted madness, with food, weapons, and all printed records except the photographs to be taken of the eclipse and the Stars, whatever they are, at the Observatory.
The story develops mostly through lectures by the Director of the University, Aton 77, and a psychologist, Sheerin 501, to Theremon 762, a newspaper reporter who has been ridiculing their predictions in his newspaper column. A Cultist, Latimer 25, also appears, with the intention of destroying the astronomical cameras set up to record the Stars; he thinks photographs will damage the Stars' religious significance. At the end, the eclipse begins. A mob, incited by the Cultists, gathers in the city to storm the Observatory. Its attack is held off until totality occurs and the Stars appear. Everyone goes insane, and Saro City begins to burn as the crazed citizens try to create light.
The story succeeds partly because it is a mystery to be solved, a puzzle to be worked out. Asimov is feeling his way toward his method and recapitulating the way in which he too was forced to solve the question that Campbell posed to him: under what conditions might Emerson's world-of-if become reality, and what would happen if it did? The reader begins by struggling with the meaning of "nightfall," a word that does not occur in the body of the story and for good reason. The Lagashians have no experience with that period of darkness Terrans call night. (The word "night" is used only at the end, in a metaphorical sense in the final sentence, "The long night had come again.") What is this experience of nightfall that Aton describes in such terrible terms on the second page? ''In just under four hours civilization, as we know it, comes to an end. It will do so because, as you see, Beta is the only sun in the sky." The rest of the story, largely lecture though it is, is the

 
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