“The Darkness,” said Sheerin.
The word hung there between them like a tangible thing.
Harrim looked troubled by it, even abashed. Sheerin remembered that among people of Harrim’s class it was a word that was rarely used in polite company. To Harrim it was, if not actually obscene, then in some sense sacrilegious. No one on Kalgash liked to think about Darkness; but the less education one had, the more threatening it was to let one’s mind dwell on the possibility that the six friendly suns might somehow totally disappear from the sky all at once, that utter blackness might reign. The idea was unthinkable—literally unthinkable.
“The Darkness, yes,” Harrim said. “What I’m afraid of is that—that if I go outside I’ll find myself in the Darkness again. That’s what it is. The Dark, all over again.”
“Complete symptom reversal in the last few weeks,” Kelaritan said in a low voice. “At first it was just the opposite. You couldn’t get him to go indoors unless you sedated him. A powerful case of claustrophobia first, that is, and then after some time the total switch to claustrophilia. We think it’s a sign that he’s healing.”
“Maybe so,” Sheerin said. “But if you don’t mind—”
To Harrim he said, gently, “You were one of the first to ride through the Tunnel of Mystery, weren’t you?”
“On the very first day.” A note of pride came into Harrim’s voice. “There was a city lottery. A hundred people won free rides. There must have been a million tickets sold, and mine was the fifth one picked. Me, my wife, my son, my two daughters, we all went on it. The very first day.”
“Do you want to tell me a little about what it was like?”
“Well,” Harrim said. “It was—” He paused. “I never was in Darkness ever, you know. Not even a dark room. Not ever. It wasn’t something that interested me. We always had a godlight in the bedroom when I was growing up, and when I got married and had my own house I just naturally had one there too. My wife feels the same way. Darkness, it isn’t natural. It isn’t anything that was meant to be.”
“Yet you entered the lottery.”
“Well, this was just once. And it was like entertainment, you know? Something special. A holiday treat. The big exposition, the five hundredth year of the city, right? Everybody was buying tickets. And I figured, this must be something different, this must be something really good, or why else would they have built it? So I bought the ticket. And when I won, everybody at the docks was jealous, they all wished they had the ticket, some of them even wanted to buy it from me—‘No, sir,’ I told them, ‘not for sale, me and my family, this is our ticket—’ ”
“So you were excited about taking the ride in the Tunnel?”
“Yeah. You bet.”
“And when you were actually doing it? When the ride started? What did that feel like?”
“Well—” Harrim began. He moistened his lips, and his eyes seemed to look off into a great distance. “There were these little cars, you see, nothing but slats inside for seats, and the cars were open on top. You got in, six people in each one, except they let just the five of us go together, because we were all one family, and it was almost enough to fill a whole car without putting a stranger in with us. And then you heard music and the car started to move into the Tunnel. Very slow, it went, not like a car on the highway would, just creeping along. And then you were inside the Tunnel. And then—then—”
Sheerin waited again.
“Go on,” he said after a minute, when Harrim showed no sign of resuming. “Tell me about it. I really want to know what it was like.”
“Then the Darkness,” Harrim said hoarsely. His big hands were trembling at the recollection. “It came down on you like they dropped a giant hat over you, you know? And everything turned black all at once.” The trembling was becoming a violent tremor. “I heard my son Trinit laugh. He’s a wise guy, Trinit is. He thought the Darkness was something dirty, I bet you. So he was laughing, and I told him to shut up, and then one of my daughters began to cry a little, and I told her it was okay, that there was nothing to worry about, that it was just going to be for fifteen minutes, and she ought to look at it like it was a treat, not something to be scared of. And then—then—”
Silence again. This time Sheerin didn’t prompt.
“Then I felt it closing in on me. Everything was Darkness—Darkness—you can’t imagine what it was like—you can’t imagine—how black it was—how black—the Darkness—the Darkness—”
Suddenly Harrim shuddered, and great racking sobs came from him, almost like convulsions.
“The Darkness—oh, God, the Darkness—!”
“Easy, man. There’s nothing to be afraid of here. Look at the sunlight! Four suns today, Harrim. Easy, man.”
“Let me take care of this,” Kelaritan said. He had come rushing to the bedside when the sobbing began. A needle glinted in his hand. He touched it to Harrim’s burly arm, and there was a brief whirr of sound. Harrim grew calm almost at once. He slumped back against his pillow, smiling glassily.—“We need to leave him now,” said Kelaritan.
“But I’ve hardly only begun to—”
“He won’t make any sense again for hours, now. We might as well go for lunch.”
“Lunch, yes,” Sheerin said halfheartedly. To his own surprise he felt almost no appetite at all. He could scarcely remember a time when he had felt that way. “And he’s one of your strongest ones?”
“One of the most stable, yes.”
“What are the others like, then?”
“Some are completely catatonic. Others need sedation at least half the time. In the first stage, as I said, they don’t want to come in out of the open. When they emerged from the Tunnel they seemed to be in perfect order, you understand, except that they had developed instant claustrophobia. They would refuse to go into buildings—any buildings, including palaces, mansions, apartment houses, tenements, huts, shacks, lean-tos, and tents.”
Sheerin felt a profound sense of shock. He had done his doctoral work in darkness-induced disorders. That was why they had asked him to come here. But he had never heard of anything as extreme as this. “They wouldn’t go indoors at all? Where’d they sleep?”
“In the open.”
“Did anyone try to force them inside?”
“Oh, they did, of course they did. Whereupon these people went into violent hysterics. Some of them even became suicidal—they’d run up to a wall and hit their heads against it, things like that. Once you did get them inside, you couldn’t keep them there without a straitjacket and a good stiff injection of some strong sedative.”
Sheerin looked at the big longshoreman, who was sleeping now, and shook his head.
“The poor devils.”
“That was the first phase. Harrim’s in the second phase now, the claustrophilic one. He’s adapted to being here, and the whole syndrome has swung completely around. He knows that it’s safe in the hospitaclass="underline" bright lights all the time. But even though he can see the suns shining through the window he’s afraid to go outside. He thinks it’s dark out there.”
“But that’s absurd,” Sheerin said. “It’s never dark out there.”
The instant he said it, he felt like a fool.
Kelaritan rubbed it in all the same, though. “We all realize that, Dr. Sheerin. Any sane person does. But the trouble with the people who have undergone trauma in the Tunnel of Mystery is that they are no longer sane.”