Prelude to Foundation

by Isaac Asimov

  She looked about for a chair and sat down. "And now the Empire must continue to decay and die when I was prepared to offer it new life."

  "I think," said Dors, "the Empire has avoided an indefinite period of useless fighting and destruction. Console yourself with that, Madam Mayor."

  It was as though Rashelle did not hear her. "So many years of preparation destroyed in a night." She sat there beaten, defeated, and seemed to have aged twenty years.

  Dors said, "It could scarcely have been done in a night. The suborning of your officers-if that took place-must have taken time."

  "At that, Demerzel is a master and quite obviously I underestimated him. How he did it, I don't know-threats, bribes, smooth and specious argument. He is a master at the art of stealth and betrayal-I should have known."

  She went on after a pause. "If this was outright force on his part, I would have had no trouble destroying anything he sent against us. Who would think that Wye would be betrayed, that an oath of allegiance would be so lightly thrown aside?"

  Seldon said with automatic rationality, "But I imagine the oath was made not to you, but to your father."

  "Nonsense," said Rashelle vigorously. "When my father gave me the Mayoral office, as he was legally entitled to do, he automatically passed on to me any oaths of allegiance made to him. There is ample precedence for this. 1 t is customary to have the oath repeated to the new ruler, but that is a ceremony only and not a legal requirement. My officers know that, though they choose to forget. They use my womanhood as an excuse because they quake in fear of Imperial vengeance chat would never have come had they been staunch or tremble with greed for promised rewards they will surely never get-if I know Demerzel."

  She turned sharply toward Seldon. "He wants you, you know. Demerzel struck at us for you."

  Seldon started. "Why me?"

  "Don't be a fool. For the same reason I wanted you . . . to use you as a cool, of course." She sighed. "At least I am not utterly betrayed. There are still loyal soldiers to be found. -Sergeant!"

  Sergeant Emmer Thalus entered with a soft cautious step that seemed incongruous, considering his size. His uniform was spruce, his long blond mustache fiercely curled.

  "Madam Mayor," he said, drawing himself to attention with a snap.

  He was still, in appearance, the side of beef that Hari had named him-a man still following orders blindly, totally oblivious to the new and changed state of affairs.

  Rashelle smiled sadly at Raych. "And how are you, little Raych? I had meant to make something of you. It seems now I won't be able to."

  "Hello, Missus . . . Madam," said Raych awkwardly.

  "And to have made something of you too, Dr. Seldom" said Rashelle, "and there also I must crave pardon. I cannot."

  "For me, Madam, you need have no regrets."

  "But I do. I cannot very well let Demerzel have you. That would be one victory too many for him and at least I can stop that."

  "I would not work for him, Madam, I assure you, any more than I would have worked for you."

  "It is not a matter of work. h is a matter of being used. Farewell, Dr. Seldon. -Sergeant, blast him."

  The sergeant drew his blaster at once and Dors, with a loud cry, lunged forward-but Seldon reached out for her and caught her by the elbow. He hung on desperately.

  "Stay hack, Dors," he shouted, "or he'll kill you. He won't kill me. You too, Raych. Stand back. Don't move."

  Seldon faced the sergeant. "You hesitate, Sergeant, because you know you cannot shoot I might have killed you ten days ago, but I did not. And you gave me your word of honor at that time that you would protect me."

  "What are you waiting for?" snapped Rashelle. "I said shoot him down, Sergeant."

  Seldom said nothing more. He stood there while the sergeant, eyes bulging, held his blaster steady and pointed at Seldon's head.

  "You have your order!" shrieked Rashelle.

  "I have your word," said Seldon quietly.

  And Sergeant Thalus said in a choked tone, "Dishonored either way." His hand fell and his blaster clanged to the floor.

  Rashelle cried out, "Then you too betray me'."

  Before Seldon could move or Dors free herself from his grip, Rashelle seized the blaster, turned it on the sergeant, and closed contact.

  Seldon had never seen anyone blasted before. Somehow, from the name of the weapon perhaps, he had expected a loud noise, an explosion of flesh and blood. This Wyan blaster, at least, did nothing of the sort. What mangling it did to the organs inside the sergeant's chest Seldon mold not tell but, without a change in expression, without a wince of pain, the sergeant crumbled and fell, dead beyond any doubt or any hope.

  And Rashelle turned the blaster on Seldon with a firmness that put to rest any hope for his own life beyond the next second.

  It was Raych, however, who jumped into action the moment the sergeant fell. Racing between Seldon and Rashelle, he waved his hands wildly.

  "Missus, Missus," he called. "Don't shoot."

  For a moment, Rashelle looked confused. "Out of the way, Raych. I don't want to hurt you."

  That moment of hesitation was all Dors needed. Breaking loose violently, she plunged toward Rashelle with a long low dive. Rashelle went down with a cry and the blaster hit the ground a second time.

  Raych retrieved it.

  Seldon, with a deep and shuddering breath, said, "Raych, give that to me."

  But Raych backed away. "Ya ain't gonna kill her, are ya, Mister Seldon? She was nice to me."

  "I won't kill anyone, Raych," said Seldon. "She killed the sergeant and would have killed me, but she didn't shoot rather than hurt you and we'll let her live for that."

  h was Seldon, who now sat down, the blaster held loosely in his hand, white Dors removed the neuronic whip from the dead sergeant's other holster.

  A new voice rang out. "I'll take care of her now, Seldon."

  Seldon looked up and in sudden joy said, "Hummin! Finally!"

  "I'm sorry it took so long, Seldon. I had a lot to do. How are you, Dr. Venabili? I take it this is Mannix's daughter, Rashelle. But who is the boy?"

  "Raych is a young Dahlite friend of ours," said Seldon.

  Soldiers were entering and, at a small gesture from Hummin, they lifted Rashelle respectfully.

  Dors, able to suspend her intent surveillance of the other woman, brushed at her clothes with her hands and smoothed her blouse. Seldon suddenly realized that he was still in his bathrobe.

  Rashelle, shaking herself loose from the soldiers with contempt, pointed to Hummin and said to Seldon, "Who is this?"

  Seldon said, "It is Chetter Hummin, a friend of mine and my protector on this planet."

  "Your protector." Rashelle laughed madly. "You fool! You idiot! That man is Demerzel and if you look at your Venabili woman, you will see from her face that she is perfectly aware of that. You have been trapped all along, far worse than ever you were with me!"

  90.

  Hummin and Seldon sat at lunch that day, quite alone, a pall of quiet between them for the most part. h was toward the end of the meal that Seldon stirred and said in a lively voice, "Well, sir, how do I address you? I think of you as 'Chester Hummin' still, but even if I accept you in your other persona, I surely cannot address you as 'Eto Demerzel.' In that capacity, you have a title and I don't know the proper usage. Instruct me."

  The other said gravely, "Call me `Hummin'-if you don't mind. Or 'Chetter.' Yes, I am Eto Demerzel, but with respect to you I am Hummin. As a matter of fact, the two are not distinct. I told you that the Empire is decaying and failing. I believe that to be true in both my capacities. I told you that I wanted psychohistory as a way of preventing that decay and failure or of bringing about a renewal and reinvigoration if the decay and failure must run its course. I believe that in both my capacities too."

  "But you had me in your grip-I presume you were in the vicinity when I Gad my meeting with His Imperial Majesty."

  "With Cleon. Yes, of course."

>   "And you might have spoken to me, then, exactly as you later did as Hummin."

  "And accomplished what? As Demerzel, I have enormous tasks. I have to handle Cleon, a well-meaning but not very capable ruler, and prevent him, insofar as I can, from making mistakes. I have to do my bit in governing Trantor and the Empire coo. And, as you see, I had to spend a great deal of time in preventing Wye from doing harm."

  "Yes, I know," murmured Seldon.

  "It wasn't easy and I nearly lost out. I have spent years sparring carefully with Mannix, learning to understand his chinking and planning a countermove to his every move. I did not think, at any time, that while he was still alive he would pass on his powers to his daughter. I had not studied her and I was not prepared for her utter lack of caution. Unlike her father, she has been brought up to take power for granted and had no clear idea of its limitations. So she got you and forced me to act before I was quite ready."

  "You almost lost me as a result. I faced the muzzle of a blaster twice.'.

  "I know," said Hummin, nodding. "And we might have lost you Upperside coo-another accident I could not foresee."

  "But you haven't really answered my question. Why did you send me chasing all over the face of Trantor to escape from Demerzel when you yourself were Demerzel?"

  "You told Cleon that psychohistory was a purely theoretical concept, a kind of mathematical game that made no practical sense. That might indeed have been so, but if I approached you officially, I was sure you would merely have maintained your belief. Yet I was attracted to the notion of psychohistory. I wondered whether it might not be, after all, just a game. You must understand that I didn't want merely to use you, I wanted a real and practical psychohistory.

  "So I sent you, as you put it, chasing all over the face of Trantor with the dreaded Demerzel close on your heels at all times. That, I felt, would concentrate your mind powerfully. It would make psychohistory something exciting and much more than a mathematical game. You would try to work it our for the sincere idealist Hummin, where you would not for the Imperial flunky Demerzel. Also, you would get a glimpse of various sides of Trantor and that too would be helpful-certainly more helpful than living in an ivory tower on a far-off planet, surrounded entirely by fellow mathematicians. Was I right? Have you made progress?"

  Seldon said, "In psychohistory? Yes, I did, Hummin. I thought you knew."

  "How should I know?"

  "I told Dors."

  "But you hadn't told me. Nevertheless, you tell me so now. That is good news."

  "Not entirely," said Seldon. "I have made only the barest beginning. But it it a beginning."

  "Is it the kind of beginning that can be explained to a nonmathematician?"

  "I think so. You see, Hummin, from the start I have seen psychohistory as a science that depends on the interaction of twentyfive million worlds, each with an average population of four thousand million. It's too much. There's no way of handling something that complex. If d was to succeed at all, if there was to be any way of finding a useful psychohistory, I would first have to find a simpler system.

  "So I thought I would go back in time and deal with a single world, a world that was the only one occupied by humanity in the dim age before the colonization of the Galaxy. In Mycogen they spoke of an original world of Aurora and in Dahl I heard word of an original world of Earth. I thought they might be the same world under different names, but they were sufficiently different in one key point, at least, to make that impossible. And it didn't matter. So little was known of either one, and that little so obscured by myth and legend, that there was no hope of making use of psychohistory in connection with them."

  He paused to sip at his cold juice, keeping his eyes firmly on Hummin's face.

  Hummin said, "Well? What then?"

  "Meanwhile, Dors had told me something I call the hand-on-thigh story. It was of no innate significance, merely a humorous and entirely trivial tale. As a result, though, Dors mentioned the different sex mores on various worlds and in various sectors of Trantor. h occurred to me that she treated the different Trantorian sectors as though they were separate worlds. I thought, idly, that instead of twenty-five million different worlds, I had twenty-five million plus eight hundred to deal with. It seemed a trivial difference, so I forgot it and thought no more about it.

  "But as I traveled from the Imperial Sector to Streeling to Mycogen to Dahl to Wye, I observed for myself how different each was. The thought of Trantor-not as a world but as a complex of worlds-grew stronger, but still I didn't see the crucial point.

  "It was only when I listened to Rashelle--you see, it was good that I was finally captured by Wye and it was good that Rashelle's rashness drove her into the grandiose schemes that she imparted to me-When I listened to Rashelle, as I said, she told me that all she wanted was Trantor and some immediately adjacent worlds. It was an Empire in itself, she said, and dismissed the outer worlds as 'distant nothings.'

  "It was then that, in a moment, I saw what I must have been harboring in my hidden thoughts for a considerable time. On the one hand, Trantor possessed an extraordinarily complex social system, being a populous world made up of eight hundred smaller worlds. It was in itself a system complex enough to make psychohistory meaningful and yet it was simple enough, compared to the Empire as a whole, to make psychohistory perhaps practical.

  "And the Outer Worlds, the twenty-five million of them? They were 'distant nothings.' Of course, they affected Trantor and were affected by Trantor, but these were second-order effects. If I could make psychohistory work as a first approximation for Trantor alone, then the minor effects of the Outer Worlds could be added as later modifications. Do you see what I mean? I was searching for a single world on which to establish a practical science of psychohistory and I was searching for it in the far past, when all the time the single world I wanted was under my feet now, "

  Hummin said with obvious relief and pleasure, "Wonderful!"

  "But it's all left to do, Hummin. I must study Trantor in sufficient detail. I must devise the necessary mathematics to deal with it. If I am lucky and live out a full lifetime, I may have the answers before I die. If not, my successors will have to follow me. Conceivably, the Empire may have fallen and splintered before psychohistory becomes a useful technique."

  "I will do everything I can to help you."

  "I know it," said Seldon.

  "You trust me, then, despite the fact I am Demerzel?"

  "Entirely. Absolutely. But I do so because you are not Demerzel."

  "But I am," insisted Hummin.

  "But you are not. Your persona as Demerzel is as far removed from the truth as is your persona as Hummin."

  "What do you mean?" Hummin's eyes grew wide and he backed away slightly from Seldon.

  "I mean that you probably chose the name 'Hummin' out of a wry sense of what was fitting. 'Hummin' is a mispronunciation of 'human,' isn't it?"

  Hummin made no response. He continued to stare at Seldon.

  And finally Seldon said, "Because you're not human, are you, 'Hummin/Demerzel'? You're a robot."

  * * *

  Dors

  SELDON, HARI- . . . h is customary to think of Hari Seldon only in connection with psychohistory, to see him only as mathematics and social change personified. There is no doubt that he himself encouraged this for at no time in his formal writings did he give any hint as to how he came to solve the various problems of psychohistory. His leaps of thought might have all been plucked from air, for all he tells us. Nor does he tell us of the blind alleys into which he crept or the wrong turnings he may have made .

  . . . As for his private life, it is a blank. Concerning his parents and siblings, we know a handful of factors, no more. His only son, Raych Seldon, is known to have been adopted, but how that came about is not known. Concerning his wife, we only know that she existed. Clearly, Seldon wanted to be a cipher except where psychohistory was concerned. It is as though he felt-or wanted it to be felt-that he did not live, he mere
ly psychohistorified.

  ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

  91.

  Hummin sat calmly, not a muscle twitching, still looking at Hari Seldon and Seldon, for his part, waited. It was Hummin, he thought, who should speak next.

  Hummin did, but said merely, "A robot? Me? -By robot, I presume you mean an artificial being such as the object you saw in the Sacratorium in Mycogen."

  "Not quite like that," said Seldon.

  "Not metal? Not burnished? Not a lifeless simulacrum?" Hummin said it without any evidence of amusement.

  "No. To be of artificial life is not necessarily to be made of metal. I speak of a robot indistinguishable from a human being in appearance.'.

  "If indistinguishable, Hari, then how do you distinguish?"

  "Not by appearance. "

  "Explain."

  "Hummin, in the course of my flight from yourself as Demerzel, I heard of two ancient worlds, as I told you-Aurora and Earth. Each seemed to be spoken of as a first world or an only world. In both cases, robots were spoken of, but with a difference."

  Seldon was staring thoughtfully at the man across the table, wondering if, in any way, he would give some sign that he was less than a man-or more. He said, "Where Aurora was in question, one robot was spoken of as a renegade, a traitor, someone who deserted the cause. Where Earth was in question, one robot was spoken of as a hero, one who represented salvation. Was it too much to suppose that it was the same robot?"

  "Was it?" murmured Hummin.

  "This is what I thought, Hummin. I thought that Earth and Aurora were two separate worlds, co-existing in time. I don't know which one preceded the other. From the arrogance and the conscious sense of superiority of the Mycogenians, I might suppose that Aurora was the original world and that they despised the Earthmen who derived from them-or who degenerated from them.

  "On the other hand, Mother Rittah, who spoke to me of Earth, was convinced that Earth was the original home of humanity and, certainly, the tiny and isolated position of the Mycogenians in a whole galaxy of quadrillions of people who lack the strange Mycogenian ethos might mean that Earth was indeed the original home and that Aurora was the aberrant offshoot. I cannot tell, but I pass on to you my thinking, so that you will understand my final conclusions."