Nightfall - By Isaac Asimov Robert Silverberg Page 0,10
far as I can tell it is, but it doesn't seem conceivable that that can be so. I've checked and checked and checked, and I get the same result each time, with all sorts of cross-checks built in to tell me that I haven't made an error in computation. But the result that I'm getting is an impossible one. The only explanation I can come up with is that I'm starting from a cockeyed assumption and doing everything else right from then on, in which case I'm going to come up with the same wrong answer no matter which method of checking my calculations I use. I might just be blind to a fundamental problem at the base of my whole set of postulates. If you start with the wrong figure for planetary mass, for instance, you'll get the wrong orbit for your planet no matter how accurate the rest of your calculations may be. Are you following me?"
"So far, yes."
"Therefore I've given the problem to Faro and Yimot, without really telling them what it's all about, and asked them to calculate the whole thing from scratch. They're bright kids. I can count on them to do decent math. And if they end up with the same conclusion I did, even though they're coming at it from an angle that completely excludes whatever error I might have built into my own line of reasoning, then I'll have to admit that my figures are right after all."
"But they can't be right, Beenay. Didn't you say that your findings are contrary to the Universal Law of Gravitation?"
"What if the Universal Law is wrong, Raissta?"
"What? What?"
She stared at him. There was utter bewilderment in her eyes. "You see the problem?" Beenay asked. "Why I need to know right away what Yimot and Faro have found?"
"No," she said. "No, I don't understand at all."
"We can talk about it later. I promise."
"Beenay-" Half in despair.
Chapter Three
"I've got to go. But I'll be back as fast as I can. It's a promise, Raissta! A promise!"
Siferra paused only long enough to snatch a pick and a brush from the equipment tent, which had been knocked askew by the sandstorm but was still reasonably intact. Then she went scrambling up the side of the Hill of Thombo, with Balik ponderously hauling himself right behind her. Young Eilis 18 had appeared from the shelter by the cliff now, and he stood below, staring up at them. Thuvvik and his corps of workmen were a little farther back, watching, scratching their heads in puzzlement.
"Watch out," Siferra called to Balik, when she had reached the beginning of the open gouge in the hill that the sandstorm had carved. "I'm going to run a trial cut."
"Shouldn't we photograph it first, and-"
"I told you to watch out," she said sharply, as she dug her pick into the hillside and sent a shower of loose soil tumbling down onto his head and shoulders.
He jumped aside, spitting out sand.
"Sorry," she said, without looking down. She cut into the hillside a second time, widening the storm gouge. It wasn't the best of technique, she knew, to be slashing away like this. Her mentor, grand old Shelbik, was probably whirling in his grave. And the founder of their science, the revered Galdo 221, no doubt was looking down from his exalted place in the pantheon of archaeologists and shaking his head sadly.
On the other hand, Shelbik and Galdo had had chances of their own to uncover whatever lay in the Hill of Thombo, and they hadn't done it. If she was a little too excited now, a little too hasty in her attack, well, they would simply have to forgive her. Now that the seeming calamity of the sandstorm had been transformed into serendipitous good fortune, now that the apparent ruination of her career had turned unexpectedly into the making of it, Siferra could not hold herself back from finding out what was builed here. Could not. Absolutely could not.
"Look-" she muttered, knocking a great mass of overburden away and going to work with her brush. "We've got a charred layer here, right at the foundation level of the cyclopean city. The place must have burned clear down to the stone. But you look a little lower on the hill and you can see that the crosshatch-style town is sitting right under the fire line-the cyclopean people simply plunked this whole monumental foundation down on top of the older city-"