by Isaac Asimov
Arcadia’s thoughts kept a sentence ahead of her words. “Uncle Homir is a great authority on the Mule, you know. He’s written books and books about it, and he thinks that all of Galactic history has been changed since the Mule conquered the Foundation.”
“Oh, my.”
“He thinks the Seldon Plan—”
Callia clapped her hands. “I know about the Seldon Plan. The videos about the Traders were always all about the Seldon Plan. It was supposed to arrange to have the Foundation win all the time. Science had something to do with it, though I could never quite see how. I always get so restless when I have to listen to explanations. But you go right ahead, my dear. It’s different when you explain. You make everything seem so clear.”
Arcadia continued, “Well, don’t you see then, that when the Foundation was defeated by the Mule, the Seldon Plan didn’t work and it hasn’t worked since. So who will form the Second Empire?”
“The Second Empire?”
“Yes, one must be formed someday, but how? That’s the problem, you see. And there’s the Second Foundation.”
“The Second Foundation?” She was quite completely lost.
“Yes, they’re the planners of history that are following in the footsteps of Seldon. They stopped the Mule because he was premature, but now, they may be supporting Kalgan.”
“Why?”
“Because Kalgan may now offer the best chance of being the nucleus for a new Empire.”
Dimly, Lady Callia seemed to grasp that. “You mean Poochie is going to make a new Empire.”
“We can’t tell for sure. Uncle Homir thinks so, but he’ll have to see the Mule’s records to find out.”
“It’s all very complicated,” said Lady Callia, doubtfully.
Arcadia gave up. She had done her best.
Lord Stettin was in a more or less savage humor. The session with the milksop from the Foundation had been quite unrewarding. It had been worse; it had been embarrassing. To be absolute ruler of twenty-seven worlds, master of the Galaxy’s greatest military machine, owner of the universe’s most vaulting ambition—and left to argue nonsense with an antiquarian.
Damnation!
He was to violate the customs of Kalgan, was he? To allow the Mule’s palace to be ransacked so that a fool could write another book? The cause of science! The sacredness of knowledge! Great Galaxy! Were these catchwords to be thrown in his face in all seriousness? Besides—and his flesh prickled slightly—there was the matter of the curse. He didn’t believe in it; no intelligent man could. But if he was going to defy it, it would have to be for a better reason than any the fool had advanced.
“What do you want?” he snapped, and Lady Callia cringed visibly in the doorway.
“Are you busy?”
“Yes. I am busy.”
“But there’s nobody here, Poochie. Couldn’t I even speak to you for a minute?”
“Oh, Galaxy! What do you want? Now hurry.”
Her words stumbled. “The little girl told me they were going into the Mule’s palace. I thought we could go with her. It must be gorgeous inside.”
“She told you that, did she? Well, she isn’t and we aren’t. Now go tend your own business. I’ve had about enough of you.”
“But, Poochie, why not? Aren’t you going to let them? The little girl said that you were going to make an Empire!”
“I don’t care what she said— What was that?” He strode to Callia and caught her firmly above the elbow, so that his fingers sank deeply into the soft flesh, “What did she tell you?”
“You’re hurting me. I can’t remember what she said, if you’re going to look at me like that.”
He released her, and she stood there for a moment, rubbing vainly at the red marks. She whimpered, “The little girl made me promise not to tell.”
“That’s too bad. Tell me! Now!”
“Well, she said the Seldon Plan was changed and that there was another Foundation somewheres that was arranging to have you make an Empire. That’s all. She said Mr. Munn was a very important scientist and that the Mule’s palace would have proof of all that. That’s every bit of what she said. Are you angry?”
But Stettin did not answer. He left the room, hurriedly, with Callia’s cowlike eyes staring mournfully after him. Two orders were sent out over the official seal of the First Citizen before the hour was up. One had the effect of sending five hundred ships of the line into space on what were officially to be termed as “war games.” The other had the effect of throwing a single man into confusion.
Homir Munn ceased his preparations to leave when that second order reached him. It was, of course, official permission to enter the palace of the Mule. He read and reread it, with anything but joy.
But Arcadia was delighted. She knew what had happened.
Or, at any rate, she thought she did.
14
ANXIETY
Poli placed the breakfast on the table, keeping one eye on the table news-recorder which quietly disgorged the bulletins of the day. It could be done easily enough without loss of efficiency, this one-eye-absent business. Since all items of food were sterilely packed in containers which served as discardable cooking units, her duties vis-à-vis breakfast consisted of nothing more than choosing the menu, placing the items on the table, and removing the residue thereafter.
She clacked her tongue at what she saw and moaned softly in retrospect.
“Oh, people are so wicked,” she said, and Darell merely hemmed in reply.
Her voice took on the high-pitched rasp which she automatically assumed when about to bewail the evil of the world. “Now why do these terrible Kalganese”—she accented the second syllable and gave it a long “a”—“do like that? You’d think they’d give a body peace. But no, it’s just trouble, trouble, all the time.
“Now look at that headline: ‘Mobs Riot Before Foundation Consulate.’ Oh, would I like to give them a piece of my mind if I could. That’s the trouble with people; they just don’t remember. They just don’t remember, Dr. Darell—got no memory at all. Look at the last war after the Mule died—of course I was just a little girl then—and oh, the fuss and trouble. My own uncle was killed, him being just in his twenties and only two years married, with a baby girl. I remember him even yet—blond hair he had, and a dimple in his chin. I have a trimensional cube of him somewheres—
“And now his baby girl has a son of her own in the navy and most likely if anything happens—
“And we had the bombardment patrols, and all the old men taking turns in the stratospheric defense—I could imagine what they would have been able to do if the Kalganese had come that far. My mother used to tell us children about the food rationing and the prices and taxes. A body could hardly make ends meet—
“You’d think if they had sense people would just never want to start it again; just have nothing to do with it. And I suppose it’s not people that do it, either; I suppose even Kalganese would rather sit at home with their families and not go fooling around in ships and getting killed. It’s that awful man, Stettin. It’s a wonder people like that are let live. He kills the old man—what’s his name—Thallos, and now he’s just spoiling to be boss of everything.
“And why he wants to fight us, I don’t know. He’s bound to lose—like they always do. Maybe it’s all in the Plan, but sometimes I’m sure it must be a wicked Plan to have so much fighting and killing in it, though to be sure I haven’t a word to say about Hari Seldon, who I’m sure knows much more about that than I do and perhaps I’m a fool to question him. And the other Foundation is as much to blame. They could stop Kalgan now and make everything fine. They’ll do it anyway in the end, and you’d think they’d do it before there’s any damage done.”
Dr. Darell looked up. “Did you say something, Poli?”
Poli’s eyes opened wide, then narrowed angrily. “Nothing, doctor, nothing at all. I haven’t got a word to say. A body could as soon choke to death as say a word in this house. It’s jump here, and j
ump there, but just try to say a word—” and she went off simmering.
Her leaving made as little impression on Darell as did her speaking.
Kalgan! Nonsense! A merely physical enemy! Those had always been beaten!
Yet he could not divorce himself of the current foolish crisis. Seven days earlier, the mayor had asked him to be Administrator of Research and Development. He had promised an answer today.
Well—
He stirred uneasily. Why, himself! Yet could he refuse? It would seem strange, and he dared not seem strange. After all, what did he care about Kalgan. To him there was only one enemy. Always had been.
While his wife had lived, he was only too glad to shirk the task; to hide. Those long, quiet days on Trantor, with the ruins of the past about them! The silence of a wrecked world and the forgetfulness of it all!
But she had died. Less than five years, all told, it had been; and after that he knew that he could live only by fighting that vague and fearful enemy that deprived him of the dignity of manhood by controlling his destiny; that made life a miserable struggle against a foreordained end; that made all the universe a hateful and deadly chess game.
Call it sublimation; he, himself did call it that—but the fight gave meaning to his life.
First to the University of Santanni, where he had joined Dr. Kleise. It had been five years well-spent.
And yet Kleise was merely a gatherer of data. He could not succeed in the real task—and when Darell had felt that as certainty, he knew it was time to leave.
Kleise may have worked in secret, yet he had to have men working for him and with him. He had subjects whose brains he probed. He had a University that backed him. All these were weaknesses.
Kleise could not understand that; and he, Darell, could not explain that. They parted enemies. It was well; they had to. He had to leave in surrender—in case someone watched.
Where Kleise worked with charts; Darell worked with mathematical concepts in the recesses of his mind. Kleise worked with many; Darell with none. Kleise in a University; Darell in the quiet of a suburban house.
And he was almost there.
A Second Foundationer is not human as far as his cerebrum is concerned. The cleverest physiologist, the most subtle neurochemist might detect nothing—yet the difference must be there. And since the difference was one of the mind, it was there that it must be detectable.
Given a man like the Mule—and there was no doubt that the Second Foundationers had the Mule’s powers, whether inborn or acquired—with the power of detecting and controlling human emotions, deduce from that the electronic circuit required, and deduce from that the last details of the encephalograph on which it could not help but be betrayed.
And now Kleise had returned into his life, in the person of his ardent young pupil, Anthor.
Folly! Folly! With his graphs and charts of people who had been tampered with. He had learned to detect that years ago, but of what use was it? He wanted the arm; not the tool. Yet he had to agree to join Anthor, since it was the quieter course.
Just as now he would become Administrator of Research and Development. It was the quieter course! And so he remained a conspiracy within a conspiracy.
The thought of Arcadia teased him for a moment, and he shuddered away from it. Left to himself, it would never have happened. Left to himself, no one would ever have been endangered but himself. Left to himself—
He felt the anger rising—against the dead Kleise, the living Anthor, all the well-meaning fools—
Well, she could take care of herself. She was a very mature little girl.
She could take care of herself!
It was a whisper in his mind—
Yet could she?
At the moment that Dr. Darell told himself mournfully that she could, she was sitting in the coldly austere anteroom of the Executive Offices of the First Citizen of the Galaxy. For half an hour she had been sitting there, her eyes sliding slowly about the walls. There had been two armed guards at the door when she had entered with Homir Munn. They hadn’t been there the other times.
She was alone, now, yet she sensed the unfriendliness of the very furnishings of the room. And for the first time.
Now, why should that be?
Homir was with Lord Stettin. Well, was that wrong?
It made her furious. In similar situations in the book-films and the videos, the hero foresaw the conclusion, was prepared for it when it came, and she—she just sat there. Anything could happen. Anything! And she just sat there.
Well, back again. Think it back. Maybe something would come.
For two weeks, Homir had nearly lived inside the Mule’s palace. He had taken her once, with Stettin’s permission. It was large and gloomily massive, shrinking from the touch of life to life sleeping within its ringing memories, answering the footsteps with a hollow boom or a savage clatter. She hadn’t liked it.
Better the great, gay highways of the capital city; the theaters and spectacles of a world essentially poorer than the Foundation, yet spending more of its wealth on display.
Homir would return in the evening, awed—
“It’s a dream-world for me,” he would whisper. “If I could only chip the palace down stone by stone, layer by layer of the aluminum sponge. If I could carry it back to Terminus— What a museum it would make.”
He seemed to have lost that early reluctance. He was eager, instead; glowing. Arcadia knew that by the one sure sign; he practically never stuttered throughout that period.
One time, he said, “There are abstracts of the records of General Pritcher—”
“I know him. He was the Foundation renegade, who combed the Galaxy for the Second Foundation, wasn’t he?”
“Not exactly a renegade, Arkady. The Mule had Converted him.”
“Oh, it’s the same thing.”
“Galaxy, that combing you speak of was a hopeless task. The original records of the Seldon Convention that established both Foundations five hundred years ago make only one reference to the Second Foundation. They say it’s located ‘at the other end of the Galaxy at Star’s End.’ That’s all the Mule and Pritcher had to go on. They had no method of recognizing the Second Foundation even if they found it. What madness!
“They have records”—he was speaking to himself, but Arcadia listened eagerly—“which must cover nearly a thousand worlds, yet the number of worlds available for study must have been closer to a million. And we are no better off—”
Arcadia broke in anxiously, “Shhh-h” in a tight hiss.
Homir froze, and slowly recovered. “Let’s not talk,” he mumbled.
And now Homir was with Lord Stettin and Arcadia waited outside alone and felt the blood squeezing out of her heart for no reason at all. That was more frightening than anything else. That there seemed no reason.
On the other side of the door, Homir, too, was living in a sea of gelatin. He was fighting, with furious intensity, to keep from stuttering and, of course, could scarcely speak two consecutive words clearly as a result.
Lord Stettin was in full uniform, six-feet-six, large-jawed, and hard-mouthed. His balled, arrogant fists kept a powerful time to his sentences.
“Well, you have had two weeks, and you come to me with tales of nothing. Come, sir, tell me the worst. Is my navy to be cut to ribbons? Am I to fight the ghosts of the Second Foundation as well as the men of the First?”
“I . . . I repeat, my lord, I am no p . . . pre . . . predictor. I . . . I am at a complete . . . loss.”
“Or do you wish to go back to warn your countrymen? To deep Space with your play-acting. I want the truth or I’ll have it out of you along with half your guts.”
“I’m t . . . telling only the truth, and I’ll have you re . . . remember, my l . . . lord, that I am a citizen of the Foundation. Y . . . you cannot touch me without harvesting m . . . m . . . more than you count on.”
The Lord of Kalgan laughed uproariously. “A threat to frighten children. A horror with which to b
eat back an idiot. Come, Mr. Munn, I have been patient with you. I have listened to you for twenty minutes while you detailed wearisome nonsense to me which must have cost you sleepless nights to compose. It was wasted effort. I know you are here not merely to rake through the Mule’s dead ashes and to warm over the cinders you find—you come here for more than you have admitted. Is that not true?”
Homir Munn could no more have quenched the burning horror that grew in his eyes than, at that moment, he could have breathed. Lord Stettin saw that, and clapped the Foundation man upon his shoulder so that he and the chair he sat on reeled under the impact.
“Good. Now let us be frank. You are investigating the Seldon Plan. You know that it no longer holds. You know, perhaps, that I am the inevitable winner now; I and my heirs. Well, man, what matters it who establishes the Second Empire, so long as it is established. History plays no favorites, eh? Are you afraid to tell me? You see that I know your mission.”
Munn said thickly, “What is it y . . . you w . . . want?”
“Your presence. I would not wish the Plan spoiled through overconfidence. You understand more of these things than I do; you can detect small flaws that I might miss. Come, you will be rewarded in the end; you will have your fair glut of the loot. What can you expect at the Foundation? To turn the tide of a perhaps inevitable defeat? To lengthen the war? Or is it merely a patriotic desire to die for your country?”
“I . . . I—” He finally spluttered into silence. Not a word would come.
“You will stay,” said the Lord of Kalgan, confidently. “You have no choice. Wait”—an almost forgotten afterthought—“I have information to the effect that your niece is of the family of Bayta Darell.”
Homir uttered a startled: “Yes.” He could not trust himself at this point to be capable of weaving anything but cold truth.
“It is a family of note on the Foundation?”
