The Dying Night

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**The Dying Night**
Author	Isaac Asimov
Country	USA
Language	English
Series	Wendell Urth
Genre(s)	science fiction mystery short story
Released in	Fantasy and Science Fiction
Publisher	Fantasy House
Media Type	Magazine
Released	July 1956
Preceded by	The Talking Stone
Followed by	The Dust of Death

The Dying Night is a science fiction short story by Isaac Asimov. The story first appeared in the July 1956 issue of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, and was reprinted in the collections Nine Tomorrows (1959), Asimov's Mysteries (1968), and The Best of Isaac Asimov (1973). "The Dying Night" is Asimov's third Wendell Urth story.

Spoiler warning: Plot and/or ending details follow.

Three astronomers, who have been working on the Moon, Mercury and the asteroid Ceres, meet for the first time in ten years at a convention on Earth. They also meet a former colleague of theirs, Romero Villiers, who had to stay on Earth, because of illness. Villiers claims to have invented a mass-transference/teleportation device, but dies under suspicious circumstances before he can demonstrate the device to his friends.

Another scientist who has seen the device demonstrated suspects that Villiers has been killed by one of his classmates, and he questions them. In the course of his investigation, a photographic record of a research paper by Villiers describing his theory is discovered on a windowsill of the room, but is found to have been ruined through exposure to sunlight.

When none of the suspects admits any guilt, they are invited to meet Wendell Urth, an eccentric scientist who has had success in investigating crimes. He identifies the guilty astronomer as the one who has been working at the observatory on Mercury. The key to the solution of the mystery lies in the idea (at the time of writing believed to be an astronomical fact) that Mercury has one face always pointing away from the Sun. The guilty party hid the photographic film in a place where it was vulnerable to damage by sunlight because he subconsciously expected the night to last forever.

Since the story was written, it has been discovered that the tidal locking of Mercury's rotation does not in fact result in a permanently dark hemishere, and Asimov was careful to ensure that this was noted when the story appeared in anthologies printed after this advance in scientific knowledge.

Nine Tomorrows