Foundation's Edge

by Isaac Asimov

  The First Speaker snapped awake. The sun was lower in the sky. Had he been mumbling? Had he said anything aloud?

  If the Second Foundation had to know much and say little, the ruling Speakers had to know more and say less, and the First Speaker had to know most and say least.

  He smiled wryly. It was always so tempting to become a Trantorian patriot—to see the whole purpose of the Second Empire as that of bringing about Trantorian hegemony. Seldon had warned of it; he had foreseen even that, five centuries before it could come to pass.

  The First Speaker had not slept too long, however. It was not yet time for Gendibal’s audience.

  Shandess was looking forward to that private meeting. Gendibal was young enough to look at the Plan with new eyes, and keen enough to see what others might not. And it was not beyond possibility that Shandess would learn from what the youngest had to say.

  No one would ever be certain how much Preem Palver—the great Palver himself—had profited from that day when the young Kol Benjoam, not yet thirty, came to talk to him about possible ways of handling the First Foundation. Benjoam, who was later recognized as the greatest theorist since Seldon, never spoke of that audience in later years, but eventually he became the twenty-first First Speaker. There were some who credited Benjoam, rather than Palver, for the great accomplishments of Palver’s administration.

  Shandess amused himself with the thought of what Gendibal might say. It was traditional that keen youngsters, confronting the First Speaker alone for the first time, would place their entire thesis in the first sentence. And surely they would not ask for that precious first audience for something trivial—something that might ruin their entire subsequent career by convincing the First Speaker they were lightweights.

  Four hours later, Gendibal faced him. The young man showed no sign of nervousness. He waited calmly for Shandess to speak first.

  Shandess said, “You have asked for a private audience, Speaker, on a matter of importance. Could you please summarize the matter for me?”

  And Gendibal, speaking quietly, almost as though he were describing what he had just eaten at dinner, said, “First Speaker, the Seldon Plan is meaningless!”

  2.

  STOR GENDIBAL DID NOT REQUIRE THE EVIDENCE of others to give him a sense of worth. He could not recall a time when he did not know himself to be unusual. He had been recruited for the Second Foundation when he was only a ten-year-old boy by an agent who had recognized the potentiality of his mind.

  He had then done remarkably well at his studies and had taken to psychohistory as a spaceship responds to a gravitational field. Psychohistory had pulled at him and he had curved toward it, reading Seldon’s text on the fundamentals when others his age were merely trying to handle differential equations.

  When he was fifteen, he entered Trantor’s Galactic University (as the University of Trantor had been officially renamed), after an interview during which, when asked what his ambitions were, he had answered firmly, “To be First Speaker before I am forty.”

  He had not bothered to aim for the First Speaker’s chair without qualification. To gain it, one way or another, seemed to him to be a certainty. It was to do it in youth that seemed to him to be the goal. Even Preem Palver had been forty-two on his accession.

  The interviewer’s expression had flickered when Gendibal had said that, but the young man already had the feel of psycholanguage and could interpret that flicker. He knew, as certainly as though the interviewer had announced it, that a small notation would go on his records to the effect that he would be difficult to handle.

  Well, of course!

  Gendibal intended to be difficult to handle.

  He was thirty now. He would be thirty-one in a matter of two months and he was already a member of the Council of Speakers. He had nine years, at most, to become First Speaker and he knew he would make it. This audience with the present First Speaker was crucial to his plans and, laboring to present precisely the proper impression, he had spared no effort to polish his command of psycholanguage.

  When two Speakers of the Second Foundation communicate with each other, the language is like no other in the Galaxy. It is as much a language of fleeting gestures as of words, as much a matter of detected mental-change patterns as anything else.

  An outsider would hear little or nothing, but in a short time, much in the way of thought would be exchanged and the communication would be unreportable in its literal form to anyone but still another Speaker.

  The language of Speakers had its advantage in speed and in infinite delicacy, but it had the disadvantage of making it almost impossible to mask true opinion.

  Gendibal knew his own opinion of the First Speaker. He felt the First Speaker to be a man past his mental prime. The First Speaker—in Gendibal’s assessment—expected no crisis, was not trained to meet one, and lacked the sharpness to deal with one if it appeared. With all Shandess’s goodwill and amiability, he was the stuff of which disaster was made.

  All of this Gendibal had to hide not merely from words, gestures, and facial expressions, but even from his thoughts. He knew no way of doing so efficiently enough to keep the First Speaker from catching a whiff of it.

  Nor could Gendibal avoid knowing something of the First Speaker’s feeling toward him. Through bon-homie and goodwill—quite apparent and reasonably sincere—Gendibal could feel the distant edge of condescension and amusement, and tightened his own mental grip to avoid revealing any resentment in return—or as little as possible.

  The First Speaker smiled and leaned back in his chair. He did not actually lift his feet to the desk top, but he got across just the right mixture of self-assured ease and informal friendship—just enough of each to leave Gendibal uncertain as to the effect of his statement.

  Since Gendibal had not been invited to sit down, the actions and attitudes available to him that might be designed to minimize the uncertainty were limited. It was impossible that the First Speaker did not understand this.

  Shandess said, “The Seldon Plan is meaningless? What a remarkable statement! Have you looked at the Prime Radiant lately, Speaker Gendibal?”

  “I study it frequently, First Speaker. It is my duty to do so and my pleasure as well.”

  “Do you, by any chance, study only those portions of it that fall under your purview, now and then? Do you observe it in microfashion—an equation system here, an adjustment rivulet there? Highly important, of course, but I have always thought it an excellent occasional exercise to observe the whole course. Studying the Prime Radiant, acre by acre, has its uses—but observing it as a continent is inspirational. To tell you the truth, Speaker, I have not done it for a long time myself. Would you join me?”

  Gendibal dared not pause too long. It had to be done, and it must be done easily and pleasantly or it might as well not be done. “It would be an honor and a pleasure, First Speaker.”

  The First Speaker depressed a lever on the side of his desk. There was one such in the office of every Speaker and the one in Gendibal’s office was in no way inferior to that of the First Speaker. The Second Foundation was an equalitarian society in all its surface manifestations—the unimportant ones. In fact, the only official prerogative of the First Speaker was that which was explicit in his title—he always spoke first.

  The room grew dark with the depression of the lever but, almost at once, the darkness lifted into a pearly dimness. Both long walls turned faintly creamy, then brighter and whiter, and finally there appeared neatly printed equations—so small that they could not be easily read.

  “If you have no objections,” said the First Speaker, making it quite clear that there would be none allowed, “we will reduce the magnification in order to see as much at one time as we can.”

  The neat printing shrank down into fine hairlines, faint black meanderings over the pearly background.

  The First Speaker touched the keys of the small console built into the arm of his chair. “We’ll bring it back to the start—to the lif
etime of Hari Seldon—and we’ll adjust it to a small forward movement. We’ll shutter it so that we can only see a decade of development at a time. It gives one a wonderful feeling of the flow of history, with no distractions by the details. I wonder if you have ever done this.”

  “Never exactly this way, First Speaker.”

  “You should. It’s a marvelous feeling. Observe the sparseness of the black tracery at the start. There was not much chance for alternatives in the first few decades. The branch points, however, increase exponentially with time. Were it not for the fact that, as soon as a particular branch is taken, there is an extinction of a vast array of others in its future, all would soon become unmanageable. Of course, in dealing with the future, we must be careful what extinctions we rely upon.”

  “I know, First Speaker.” There was a touch of dryness in Gendibal’s response that he could not quite remove.

  The First Speaker did not respond to it. “Notice the winding lines of symbols in red. There is a pattern to them. To all appearances, they should exist randomly, as every Speaker earns his place by adding refinements to Seldon’s original Plan. It would seem there is no way, after all, of predicting where a refinement can be added easily or where a particular Speaker will find his interests or his ability tending, and yet I have long suspected that the admixture of Seldon Black and Speaker Red follows a strict law that is strongly dependent on time and on very little else.”

  Gendibal watched as the years passed and as the black and red hairlines made an almost hypnotic interlacing pattern. The pattern meant nothing in itself, of course. What counted were the symbols of which it was composed.

  Here and there a bright-blue rivulet made its appearance, bellying out, branching, and becoming prominent, then falling in upon itself and fading into the black or red.

  The First Speaker said, “Deviation Blue,” and the feeling of distaste, originating in each, filled the space between them. “We catch it over and over, and we’ll be coming to the Century of Deviations eventually.”

  They did. One could tell precisely when the shattering phenomenon of the Mule momentarily filled the Galaxy, as the Prime Radiant suddenly grew thick with branching rivulets of blue—more starting than could be closed down—until the room itself seemed to turn blue as the lines thickened and marked the wall with brighter and brighter pollution. (It was the only word.)

  It reached its peak and then faded, thinned, and came together for a long century before it trickled to its end at last. When it was gone, and when the Plan had returned to black and red, it was clear that Preem Palver’s hand had been there.

  Onward, onward—

  “That’s the present,” said the First Speaker comfortably.

  Onward, onward—

  Then a narrowing into a veritable knot of close-knit black with little red in it.

  “That’s the establishment of the Second Empire,” said the First Speaker.

  He shut off the Prime Radiant and the room was bathed in ordinary light.

  Gendibal said, “That was an emotional experience.”

  “Yes,” smiled the First Speaker, “and you are careful not to identify the emotion, as far as you can manage to fail to identify it. It doesn’t matter. Let me make the points I wish to make.

  “You will notice, first, the all-but-complete absence of Deviation Blue after the time of Preem Palver—over the last twelve decades, in other words. You will notice that there are no reasonable probabilities of Deviations above the fifth-class over the next five centuries. You will notice, too, that we have begun extending the refinements of psychohistory beyond the establishment of the Second Empire. As you undoubtedly know, Hari Seldon—although a transcendent genius—is not, and could not, be all-knowing. We have improved on him. We know more about psychohistory than he could possibly have known.

  “Seldon ended his calculations with the Second Empire and we have continued beyond it. Indeed, if I may say so without offense, the new Hyper-Plan that goes past the establishment of the Second Empire is very largely my doing and has earned me my present post.

  “I tell you all this so that you can spare me unnecessary talk. With all this, how do you manage to conclude that the Seldon Plan is meaningless? It is without flaw. The mere fact that it survived the Century of Deviations—with all due respect to Palver’s genius—is the best evidence we have that it is without flaw. Where is its weakness, young man, that you should brand the Plan as meaningless?”

  Gendibal stood stiffly upright. “You are right, First Speaker. The Seldon Plan has no flaw.”

  “You withdraw your remark, then?”

  “No, First Speaker. Its lack of flaw is its flaw. Its flawlessness is fatal!”

  3.

  THE FIRST SPEAKER REGARDED GENDIBAL WITH equanimity. He had learned to control his expressions and it amused him to watch Gendibal’s ineptness in this respect. At every exchange, the young man did his best to hide his feelings, but each time, he exposed them completely.

  Shandess studied him dispassionately. He was a thin young man, not much above the middle height, with thin lips and bony, restless hands. He had dark, humorless eyes that tended to smolder.

  He would be, the First Speaker knew, a hard person to talk out of his convictions.

  “You speak in paradoxes, Speaker,” he said.

  “It sounds like a paradox, First Speaker, because there is so much about Seldon’s Plan that we take for granted and accept in so unquestioning a manner.”

  “And what is it you question, then?”

  “The Plan’s very basis. We all know that the Plan will not work if its nature—or even its existence—is known to too many of those whose behavior it is designed to predict.”

  “I believe Hari Seldon understood that. I even believe he made it one of his two fundamental axioms of psychohistory.”

  “He did not anticipate the Mule, First Speaker, and therefore he could not anticipate the extent to which the Second Foundation would become an obsession with the people of the First Foundation, once they had been shown its importance by the Mule.”

  “Hari Seldon—” and for one moment, the First Speaker shuddered and fell silent.

  Hari Seldon’s physical appearance was known to all the members of the Second Foundation. Reproductions of him in two and in three dimensions, photographic and holographic, in bas-relief and in the round, sitting and standing, were ubiquitous. They all represented him in the last few years of his life. All were of an old and benign man, face wrinkled with the wisdom of the aged, symbolizing the quintessence of well-ripened genius.

  But the First Speaker now recalled seeing a photograph reputed to be Seldon as a young man. The photograph was neglected, since the thought of a young Seldon was almost a contradiction in terms. Yet Shandess had seen it, and the thought had suddenly come to him that Stor Gendibal looked remarkably like the young Seldon.

  Ridiculous! It was the sort of superstition that afflicted everyone, now and then, however rational they might be. He was deceived by a fugitive similarity. If he had the photograph before him, he would see at once that the similarity was an illusion. Yet why should that silly thought have occurred to him now?

  He recovered. It had been a momentary quaver—a transient derailment of thought—too brief to be noticed by anyone but a Speaker. Gendibal might interpret it as he pleased.

  “Hari Seldon,” he said very firmly the second time, “knew well that there were an infinite number of possibilities he could not foresee, and it was for that reason that he set up the Second Foundation. We did not foresee the Mule either, but we recognized him once he was upon us and we stopped him. We did not foresee the subsequent obsession of the First Foundation with ourselves, but we saw it when it came and we stopped it. What is it about this that you can possibly find fault with?”

  “For one thing,” said Gendibal, “the obsession of the First Foundation with us is not yet over.”

  There was a distinct ebb in the deference with which Gendibal had been speaking.
He had noted the quaver in the First Speaker’s voice (Shandess decided) and had interpreted it as uncertainty. That had to be countered.

  The First Speaker said briskly, “Let me anticipate. There would be people on the First Foundation, who—comparing the hectic difficulties of the first nearly four centuries of existence with the placidity of the last twelve decades—will come to the conclusion that this cannot be unless the Second Foundation is taking good care of the Plan—and, of course, they will be right in so concluding. They will decide that the Second Foundation may not have been destroyed after all—and, of course, they will be right in so deciding. In fact, we’ve received reports that there is a young man on the First Foundation’s capital world of Terminus, an official of their government, who is quite convinced of all this. —I forget his name—”

  “Golan Trevize,” said Gendibal softly. “It was I who first noted the matter in the reports, and it was I who directed the matter to your office.”

  “Oh?” said the First Speaker with exaggerated politeness. “And how did your attention come to be focused on him?”

  “One of our agents on Terminus sent in a tedious report on the newly elected members of their Council—a perfectly routine matter usually sent to and ignored by all Speakers. This one caught my eye because of the nature of the description of one new Councilman, Golan Trevize. From the description, he seemed unusually self-assured and combative.”

  “You recognized a kindred spirit, did you?”

  “Not at all,” said Gendibal, stiffly. “He seemed a reckless person who enjoyed doing ridiculous things, a description which does not apply to me. In any case, I directed an indepth study. It did not take long for me to decide that he would have made good material for us if he had been recruited at an early age.”