by Isaac Asimov
“Perhaps,” said the First Speaker, “but you know that we do not recruit on Terminus.”
“I know that well. In any case, even without our training, he has an unusual intuition. It is, of course, thoroughly undisciplined. I was, therefore, not particularly surprised that he had grasped the fact that the Second Foundation still exists. I felt it important enough, however, to direct a memo on the matter to your office.”
“And I take it from your manner that there is a new development?”
“Having grasped the fact that we still exist, thanks to his highly developed intuitive abilities, he then used it in a characteristically undisciplined fashion and has, as a result, been exiled from Terminus.”
The First Speaker lifted his eyebrows. “You stop suddenly. You want me to interpret the significance. Without using my computer, let me mentally apply a rough approximation of Seldon’s equations and guess that a shrewd Mayor, capable of suspecting that the Second Foundation exists, prefers not to have an undisciplined individual shout it to the Galaxy and thus alert said Second Foundation to the danger. I take it Branno the Bronze decided that Terminus is safer with Trevize off the planet.”
“She might have imprisoned Trevize or had him quietly assassinated.”
“The equations are not reliable when applied to individuals, as you well know. They deal only with humanity in mass. Individual behavior is therefore unpredictable and it is possible to assume that the Mayor is a humane individual who feels imprisonment, let alone assassination, is unmerciful.”
Gendibal said nothing for a while. It was an eloquent nothing, and he maintained it just long enough for the First Speaker to grow uncertain of himself but not so long as to induce a defensive anger.
He timed it to the second and then he said, “That is not my interpretation. I believe that Trevize, at this moment, represents the cutting edge of the greatest threat to the Second Foundation in its history—a greater danger even than the Mule!”
4.
GENDIBAL WAS SATISFIED. THE FORCE OF THE statement had worked well. The First Speaker had not expected it and was caught off-balance. From this moment, the whip hand was Gendibal’s. If he had any doubt of that at all, it vanished with Shandess’s next remark.
“Does this have anything to do with your contention that Seldon’s Plan is meaningless?”
Gendibal gambled on complete certainty, driving in with a didacticism that would not allow the First Speaker to recover. He said, “First Speaker, it is an article of faith that it was Preem Palver who restored the Plan to its course after the wild aberrance of the Century of Deviations. Study the Prime Radiant and you will see that the Deviations did not disappear till two decades after Palver’s death and that not one Deviation has appeared since. The credit might rest with the First Speakers since Palver, but that is improbable.”
“Improbable? Granted none of us have been Palvers, but—why improbable?”
“Will you allow me to demonstrate, First Speaker? Using the mathematics of psychohistory, I can clearly show that the chances of total disappearance of Deviation are too microscopically small to have taken place through anything the Second Foundation can do. You need not allow me if you lack the time or the desire for the demonstration, which will take half an hour of close attention. I can, as an alternative, call for a full meeting of the Speaker’s Table and demonstrate it there. But that would mean a loss of time for me and unnecessary controversy.”
“Yes, and a possible loss of face for me. —Demonstrate the matter to me now. But a word of warning.” The First Speaker was making a heroic effort to recover. “If what you show me is worthless, I will not forget that.”
“If it proves worthless,” said Gendibal with an effortless pride that overrode the other, “you will have my resignation on the spot.”
It took, actually, considerably more than half an hour, for the First Speaker questioned the mathematics with near-savage intensity.
Gendibal made up some of the time by his smooth use of his Micro-Radiant. The device—which could locate any portion of the vast Plan holographically and which required neither wall nor desk-sized console—had come into use only a decade ago and the First Speaker had never learned the knack of handling it. Gendibal was aware of that. The First Speaker knew that he was.
Gendibal hooked it over his right thumb and manipulated its controls with his four fingers, using his hand deliberately as though it were a musical instrument. (Indeed, he had written a small paper on the analogies.)
The equations Gendibal produced (and found with sure ease) moved back and forth snakily to accompany his commentary. He could obtain definitions, if necessary; set up axioms; and produce graphics, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional (to say nothing of projections of multi-dimensional relationships).
Gendibal’s commentary was clear and incisive and the First Speaker abandoned the game. He was won over and said, “I do not recall having seen an analysis of this nature. Whose work is it?”
“First Speaker, it is my own. I have published the basic mathematics involved.”
“Very clever, Speaker Gendibal. Something like this will put you in line for the First Speakership, should I die—or retire.”
“I have given that matter no thought, First Speaker—but since there’s no chance of your believing that, I withdraw the comment. I have given it thought and I hope I will be First Speaker, since whoever succeeds to the post must follow a procedure that only I see clearly.”
“Yes,” said the First Speaker, “inappropriate modesty can be very dangerous. What procedure? Perhaps the present First Speaker may follow it, too. If I am too old to have made the creative leap you have, I am not so old that I cannot follow your direction.”
It was a graceful surrender and Gendibal’s heart warmed, rather unexpectedly, toward the older man, even as he realized that this was precisely the First Speaker’s intention.
“Thank you, First Speaker, for I will need your help badly. I cannot expect to sway the Table without your enlightened leadership.” (Grace for grace.) “I assume, then, that you have already seen from what I have demonstrated that it is impossible for the Century of Deviations to have been corrected under our policies or for all Deviations to have ceased since then.”
“This is clear to me,” said the First Speaker. “If your mathematics is correct, then in order for the Plan to have recovered as it did and to work as perfectly as it seems to be working, it would be necessary for us to be able to predict the reactions of small groups of people—even of individuals—with some degree of assurance.”
“Quite so. Since the mathematics of psychohistory does not allow this, the Deviations should not have vanished and, even more so, should not have remained absent. You see, then, what I meant when I said earlier that the flaw in the Seldon Plan was its flawlessness.”
The First Speaker said, “Either the Seldon Plan does possess Deviations, then, or there is something wrong in your mathematics. Since I must admit that the Seldon Plan has not shown Deviations in a century and more, it follows that there is something wrong with your mathematics—except that I detected no fallacies or missteps.”
“You do wrong,” said Gendibal, “to exclude a third alternative. It is quite possible for the Seldon Plan to possess no Deviations and yet for there to be nothing wrong in my mathematics when it predicts that to be impossible.”
“I fail to see the third alternative.”
“Suppose the Seldon Plan is being controlled by means of a psychohistorical method so advanced that the reactions of small groups of people—even perhaps of individual persons—can be predicted, a method that we of the Second Foundation do not possess. Then, and only then, my mathematics would predict that the Seldon Plan should indeed experience no Deviations!”
For a while (by Second Foundation standards) the First Speaker made no response. He said, “There is no such advanced psychohistorical method that is known to me or, I am certain from your manner, to you. If you and I know of none, the
chance that any other Speaker, or any group of Speakers, has developed such a micropsychohistory—if I may call it that—and has kept it secret from the rest of the Table is infinitesimally small. Don’t you agree?”
“I agree.”
“Then either your analysis is wrong or else micropsychohistory is in the hands of some group outside the Second Foundation.”
“Exactly, First Speaker, the latter alternative must be correct.”
“Can you demonstrate the truth of such a statement?”
“I cannot, in any formal way; but consider—Has there not already been a person who could affect the Seldon Plan by dealing with individual people?”
“I presume you are referring to the Mule.”
“Yes, certainly.”
“The Mule could only disrupt. The problem here is that the Seldon Plan is working too well, considerably closer to perfection than your mathematics would allow. You would need an Anti-Mule—someone who is as capable of overriding the Plan as the Mule was, but who acts for the opposite motive—overriding not to disrupt but to perfect.”
“Exactly, First Speaker. I wish I had thought of that expression. What was the Mule? A mutant. But where did he come from? How did he come to be? No one really knows. Might there not be more?”
“Apparently not. The one thing that is best known about the Mule is that he was sterile. Hence his name. Or do you think that is a myth?”
“I am not referring to descendants of the Mule. Might it not be that the Mule was an aberrant member of what is—or has now become—a sizable group of people with Mulish powers who—for some reason of their own—are not disrupting the Seldon Plan but supporting it?”
“Why in the Galaxy should they support it?”
“Why do we support it? We plan a Second Empire in which we—or, rather, our intellectual descendants—will be the decision-makers. If some other group is supporting the Plan even more efficiently than we are, they cannot be planning to leave the decision-making to us. They will make the decisions—but to what end? Ought we not try to find out what kind of a Second Empire they are sweeping us into?”
“And how do you propose to find out?”
“Well, why has the Mayor of Terminus exiled Golan Trevize? By doing so, she allows a possibly dangerous person to move freely about the Galaxy. That she does it out of motives of humanity, I cannot believe. Historically the rulers of the First Foundation have always acted realistically, which means, usually, without regard for ‘morality.’ One of their heroes—Salvor Hardin—counseled against morality, in fact. No, I think the Mayor acted under compulsion from agents of the Anti-Mules, to use your phrase. I think Trevize has been recruited by them and I think he is the spearhead of danger to us. Deadly danger.”
And the First Speaker said, “By Seldon, you may be right. But how will we ever convince the Table of this?”
“First Speaker, you underestimate your eminence.”
6
EARTH
1.
TREVIZE WAS HOT AND ANNOYED. HE AND PELORAT were sitting in the small dining area, having just completed their midday meal.
Pelorat said, “We’ve only been in space two days and I find myself quite comfortable, although I miss fresh air, nature, and all that. Strange! Never seemed to notice all that sort of thing when it was all around me. Still between my wafer and that remarkable computer of yours, I have my entire library with me—or all that matters, at any rate. And I don’t feel the least bit frightened of being out in space now. Astonishing!”
Trevize made a noncommittal sound. His eyes were inwardly focused.
Pelorat said gently, “I don’t mean to intrude, Golan, but I don’t really think you’re listening. Not that I’m a particularly interesting person—always been a bit of a bore, you know. Still, you seem preoccupied in another way. —Are we in trouble? Needn’t be afraid to tell me, you know. Not much I could do, I suppose, but I won’t go into panic, dear fellow.”
“In trouble?” Trevize seemed to come to his senses, frowning slightly.
“I mean the ship. It’s a new model, so I suppose there could be something wrong.” Pelorat allowed himself a small, uncertain smile.
Trevize shook his head vigorously. “Stupid of me to leave you in such uncertainty, Janov. There’s nothing wrong at all with the ship. It’s working perfectly. It’s just that I’ve been looking for a hyper-relay.”
“Ah, I see. —Except that I don’t. What is a hyper-relay?”
“Well, let me explain, Janov. I am in communication with Terminus. At least, I can be anytime I wish and Terminus can, in reverse, be in communication with us. They know the ship’s location, having observed its trajectory. Even if they had not, they could locate us by scanning nearspace for mass, which would warn them of the presence of a ship or, possibly, a meteoroid. But they could further detect an energy pattern, which would not only distinguish a ship from a meteoroid but would identify a particular ship, for no two ships make use of energy in quite the same way. In some way, our pattern remains characteristic, no matter what appliances or instruments we turn on and off. The ship may be unknown, of course, but if it is a ship whose energy pattern is on record in Terminus—as ours is—it can be identified as soon as detected.”
Pelorat said, “It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”
“You may be right. Sooner or later, however, we must move through hyperspace or we will be condemned to remain within a parsec or two of Terminus for the rest of our lives. We will then be unable to engage in interstellar travel to any but the slightest degree. In passing through hyperspace, on the other hand, we undergo a discountinuity in ordinary space. We pass from here to there—and I mean across a gap of hundreds of parsecs sometimes—in an instant of experienced time. We are suddenly enormously far away in a direction that is very difficult to predict and, in a practical sense, we can no longer be detected.”
“I see that. Yes.”
“Unless, of course, they have planted a hyper-relay on board. A hyper-relay sends out a signal through hyperspace—a signal characteristic of this ship—and the authorities on Terminus would know where we are at all times. That answers your question, you see. There would be nowhere in the Galaxy we could hide and no combination of Jumps through hyperspace would make it possible for us to evade their instruments.”
“But, Golan,” said Pelorat softly, “don’t we want Foundation protection?”
“Yes, Janov, but only when we ask for it. You said the advance of civilization meant the continuing restriction of privacy. —Well, I don’t want to be that advanced. I want freedom to move undetected as I wish—unless and until I want protection. So I would feel better, a great deal better, if there weren’t a hyper-relay on board.”
“Have you found one, Golan?”
“No, I have not. If I had, I might be able to render it inoperative somehow.”
“Would you know one if you saw it?”
“That’s one of the difficulties. I might not be able to recognize it. I know what a hyper-relay looks like generally and I know ways of testing a suspicious object—but this is a late-model ship, designed for special tasks. A hyper-relay may have been incorporated into its design in such a way as to show no signs of its presence.”
“On the other hand, maybe there is no hyper-relay present and that’s why you haven’t found it.”
“I don’t dare assume that and I don’t like the thought of making a Jump until I know.”
Pelorat looked enlightened. “That’s why we’ve just been drifting through space. I’ve been wondering why we haven’t Jumped. I’ve heard about Jumps, you know. Been a little nervous about it, actually—been wondering when you’d order me to strap myself in or take a pill or something like that.”
Trevize managed a smile. “No need for apprehension. These aren’t ancient times. On a ship like this, you just leave it all to the computer. You give it your instructions and it does the rest. You won�
��t know that anything has happened at all, except that the view of space will suddenly change. If you’ve ever seen a slide show, you’ll know what happens when one slide is suddenly projected in place of another. Well, that’s what the Jump will seem like.”
“Dear me. One won’t feel anything? Odd! I find that somewhat disappointing.”
“I’ve never felt anything and the ships I’ve been in haven’t been as advanced as this baby of ours. —But it’s not because of the hyper-relay that we haven’t Jumped. We have to get a bit further away from Terminus—and from the sun, too. The farther we are from any massive object, the easier to control the Jump, to make re-emergence into space at exactly desired co-ordinates. In an emergency, you might risk a Jump when you’re only two hundred kilometers off the surface of a planet and just trust to luck that you’ll end up safely. Since there is much more safe than unsafe volume in the Galaxy, you can reasonably count on safety. Still, there’s always the possibility that random factors will cause you to reemerge within a few million kilometers of a large star or in the Galactic core—and you will find yourself fried before you can blink. The further away you are from mass, the smaller those factors and the less likely it is that anything untoward will happen.”
“In that case, I commend your caution. We’re not in a tearing hurry.”
“Exactly. —Especially since I would dearly love to find the hyper-relay before I make a move. —Or find a way of convincing myself there is no hyper-relay.”
Trevize seemed to drift off again into his private concentration and Pelorat said, raising his voice a little to surmount the preoccupation barrier, “How much longer do we have?”
“What?”
“I mean, when would you make the Jump if you had no concerns over the hyper-relay, my dear chap?”
“At our present speed and trajectory, I should say on our fourth day out. I’ll work out the proper time on the computer.”
“Well, then, you still have two days for your search. May I make a suggestion?”
