Asimov’s Future History Volume 14

by Isaac Asimov

  “Won’t you find it dull after Trantor?”

  “Yes, that’s what I’m counting on. And if it gets coo dull, I can always wangle a grant to go here or there to do a little historical research. That’s the advantage of my field.”

  “A mathematician, on the other hand,” said Seldon with a trace of bitterness at something that had never before bothered him, “is expected to sit at his computer and think. And speaking of computers... He hesitated. Breakfast was done and it seemed to him more than likely she had some duties of her own to attend to.

  But she did not seem to be in any great hurry to leave. “Yes? Speaking of computers?”

  “Would I be able to get permission to use the history library?”

  Now is was she who hesitated. “I chink that can be arranged. If you work on mathematics programming, you’ll probably be viewed as a quasimember of the faculty and I could ask for you to be given permission. Only–”

  “Only?”

  “I don’t want to hurt your feelings, but you’re a mathematician and you say you know nothing about history. Would you know how to make use of a history library?”

  Seldon smiled. “I suppose you use computers very much like those in a mathematics library.”

  “We do, but the programming for each specialty has quirks of its own. You don’t know the standard reference book-films, the quick methods of winnowing and skipping. You may be able to find a hyperbolic interval in the dark...”

  “You mean hyperbolic integral, “interrupted Seldon softly.

  Dors ignored him. “But you probably won’t know how to get the terms of the Treaty of Poldark in less than a day and a half.”

  “I suppose I could learn.”

  “If... if...” She looked a little troubled. “If you want to, I can make a suggestion. I give a week’s course, one hour each day, no credit on library use. It’s for undergraduates. Would you feel it beneath your dignity to sit in on such a course with undergraduates, I mean? It starts in three weeks.”

  “You could give me private lessons.” Seldom felt a little surprised at the suggestive tone that had entered his voice.

  She did not miss it. “I dare say I could, but I think you’d be better off with more formal instruction. We’ll be using the library, you understand, and at the end of the week you will be asked to locate information on particular items of historical interest. You will be competing with the other students all through and that will help you learn. Private tutoring will be far less efficient, I assure you. However, I understand the difficulty of competing with undergraduates. If you don’t do as well as they, you may feel humiliated. You must remember, though, that they have already studied elementary history and you, perhaps, may not have.”

  “I haven’t. No `may’ about it. But I won’t be afraid to compete and I won’t mind any humiliation that may come along-if I manage to learn the cricks of the historical reference trade.”

  It was clear to Seldom that he was beginning to like this young woman and that he was gladly seizing on the chance to be educated by her. He was also aware of the face that he had reached a turning point in his mind.

  He had promised Hummin to attempt to work out a practical psychohistory, but that had been a promise of the mind and not the emotions. Now he was determined to seize psychohistory by the throat if he had to-in order to make it practical. That, perhaps, was the influence of Dors Venabili.

  Or had Hummin counted on that? Hummin, Seldom decided, might well be a most formidable person.

  19.

  Cleon I had finished dinner, which, unfortunately, had been a formal state affair. It meant he had to spend time talking to various officials, not one of whom he knew or recognized, in set phrases designed to give each one his stroke and so activate his loyalty to the crown. It also meant that his food reached him but lukewarm and had cooled still further before he could eat it.

  There had to be some way of avoiding that. Bat first, perhaps, on his own or with one or two close intimates with whom he could relax and then attend a formal dinner at which he could merely be served an imported pear. He loved pears. But would that offend the guests who would take the Emperor’s refusal to sac with them as a studied insult.

  His wife, of course, was useless in this respect, for her presence would but further exacerbate his unhappiness. He had married her because she was a member of a powerful dissident family who could be expected to mute their dissidence as a result of the union, though Cleon devoutly hoped that she, at least, would not do so. He was perfectly content to have her live her own life in her own quarters except for the necessary efforts to initiate an heir, for, to cell the truth, he didn’t like her. And now that an heir had come, he could ignore her completely.

  He chewed at one of a handful of nuts he had pocketed from the table on leaving and said, “Demerzel!”

  “Sire?”

  Demerzel always appeared at once when Cleon called. Whether he hovered constantly in earshot at the door or he drew close because the instinct of subservience somehow alerted him to a possible call in a few minutes, he did appear and that, Cleon thought idly, was the important thing. Of course, there were those times when Demerzel had to be away on Imperial business. Cleon always hated those absences. They made him uneasy.

  “What happened to that mathematician? I forget his name.”

  Demerzel, who surely knew the man the Emperor had in mind, but who perhaps wanted to study how much the Emperor remembered, said, “What mathematician is it that you have in mind, Sire?”

  Cleon waved an impatient hand. “The fortune-teller. The one who came to see me.”

  “The one we sent for?”

  “Well, sent for, then. He did come to see me. You were going to take care of the matter, as I recall. Have you?”

  Demerzel cleared his throat. “Sire, I have cried to.”

  “Ah! That means you have failed, doesn’t it?” In a way, Cleon felt pleased. Demerzel was the only one of his Ministers who made no bones of failure. The others never admitted failure, and since failure was nevertheless common, it became difficult to correct. Perhaps Demerzel could afford to be more honest because he failed so rarely. If it weren’t for Demerzel, Cleon thought sadly, he might never know what honesty sounded like. Perhaps no Emperor ever knew and perhaps that was one of the reasons that the Empire–”

  He pulled his thoughts away and, suddenly nettled at the other’s silence and wanting an admission, since he had just admired Demerzel’s honesty in his mind, said sharply, “Well, you have failed, haven’t you?”

  Demerzel did not flinch. “Sire, I have failed in part. I felt that to have him here on Trantor where things are difficult might present us with problems. It was easy to consider that he might be more conveniently placed on his home planet. He was planning to return to that home planet the next day, but there was always the chance of complications, of his deciding to remain on Trantor, so I arranged to have two young alley men place him on his plane that very day.”

  “Do you know alley men, Demerzel?” Cleon was amused.

  “It is important, Sire, to be able to reach many kinds of people, for each type has its own variety of use, alley men not the least. As it happens, they did not succeed.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Oddly enough, Seldon was able to fight them off.”

  “The mathematician could fight?”

  “Apparently, mathematics and the martial arts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I found out, not soon enough, that his world, Helicon, is noted for its martial arts, not mathematics. The fact that I did not learn this earlier was indeed a failure, Sire, and I can only crave your pardon.”

  “But then, I suppose the mathematician left for his home planet the next day as he had planned.”

  “Unfortunately, the episode backfired. Taken aback by the event, he decided not to return to Helicon, but remained on Trantor. He may have been advised to this effect by a passerby who happened to be present on the occasion of the fight. That was
another unlooked-for complication.”

  The Emperor Cleon frowned. “Then our mathematician–what it his name?”

  “Seldon, Sire. Hari Seldon.”

  “Then this Seldon is out of reach.”

  “In a sense, Sire. We have traced his movements and he is now at Streeling University. While there, he is untouchable.”

  The Emperor scowled and reddened slightly. “I am annoyed at that word ‘untouchable.’ There should be nowhere in the Empire my hand cannot reach. Yet here, on my own world, you tell me someone can be untouchable. Insufferable!”

  “Your hand can reach to the University, Sire. You can send in your army and pluck out this Seldon at any moment you desire. To do so, however, is... undesirable.”

  “Why don’t you say ‘impractical, ‘Demerzel. You sound like the mathematician speaking of his fortune-telling. It is possible, but impractical. I am an Emperor who finds everything possible, but very little practical. Remember, Demerzel, if reaching Seldon is not practical, reaching you is entirely so.”

  Eto Demerzel let this last comment pass. The “man behind the throne” knew his importance to the Emperor, he had heard such threats before. He waited in silence while the Emperor glowered. Drumming his fingers against the arm of his chair, Cleon asked,.. Well then, what good is this mathematician to us if he is at Streeling University?”

  “It may perhaps be possible, Sire, to snatch use out of adversity. At the University, he may decide to work on his psychohistory.”

  “Even though he insists it’s impractical?”

  “He may be wrong and he may find out that he is wrong. And if he finds out that he is wrong, we would find some way of getting him out of the University. It is even possible he would join us voluntarily under those circumstances.”

  The Emperor remained lost in thought for a while, then said, “And what if someone else plucks him out before we do?”

  “Who would want to do that, Sire?” asked Demerzel softly.

  “The Mayor of Wye, for one,” said Cleon, suddenly shouting. “He dreams still of taking over the Empire.”

  “Old age has drawn his fangs, Sire.”

  “Don’t you believe it, Demerzel.”

  “And we have no reason for supposing he has any interest in Seldon or even knows of him, Sire.”

  “Come on, Demerzel. If we heard of the paper, so could Wye. If we see the possible importance of Seldon, so could Wye.”

  “If that should happen,” said Demerzel, “or even if there should be a reasonable chance of its happening, then we would be justified in taking strong measures.”

  “How strong?”

  Demerzel said cautiously, “It might be argued that rather than have Seldon in Wye’s hands, we might prefer to have him in no one’s hands. To have him cease to exist, Sire.”

  “To have him killed, you mean,” said Cleon.

  “If you wish to put it that way, Sire,” said Demerzel.

  20.

  Hari Seldon sat back in his chair in the alcove that had been assigned to him through Dors Venabili’s intervention. He was dissatisfied.

  As a matter of fact, although that was the expression he used in his mind, he knew that it was a gross underestimation of his feelings. He was not simply dissatisfied, he was furious, all the more so because he wasn’t sure what it was he was furious about. Was it about the histories? The writers and compilers of histories? The worlds and people that made the histories?

  Whatever the target of his fury, it didn’t really matter. What counted was that his notes were useless, his new knowledge was useless, everything was useless.

  He had been at the University now for almost six weeks. He had managed to find a computer outlet at the very start and with it had begun work, without instruction, but using the instincts he had developed over a number of years of mathematical labors. It had been slow and halting, but there was a certain pleasure in gradually determining the routes by which he could get his questions answered.

  Then came the week of instruction with Dors, which had taught him several dozen shortcuts and had brought with it two sets of embarrassments. The first set included the sidelong glances he received from the undergraduates, who seemed contemptuously aware of his greater age and who were disposed to frown a bit at Dors’s constant use of the honorific “Doctor” in addressing him.

  “I don’t want them to think,” she said, “that you’re some backward perpetual student taking remedial history.”

  “But surely you’ve established the point. Surely, a mere ‘Seldon’ is sufficient now.”

  “No, “Dors said and smiled suddenly. “Besides, I like to call you ‘Dr. Seldon.’ I like the way you look uncomfortable each time.”

  “You have a peculiar sense of sadistic humor.”

  “Would you deprive me?”

  For some reason, that made him laugh. Surely, the natural reaction would have been to deny sadism. Somehow he found it pleasant that she accepted the ball of conversation and fired it back. The thought led to a natural question. “Do you play tennis here at the University?”

  “We have courts, but I don’t play.”

  “Good. I’ll teach you. And when I do, I’ll call you Professor Venabili.”

  “That’s what you call me in class anyway.”

  “You’ll be surprised how ridiculous it will sound on the tennis court.”

  “I may get to like it.”

  “In that case, I will try to find what else you might get to like.”

  “I see you have a peculiar sense of salacious humor.”

  She had put that ball in that spot deliberately and he said, “Would you deprive me?”

  She smiled and later did surprisingly well on the tennis court. “Are you sure you never played tennis?” he said, puffing, after one session.

  “Positive,” she said.

  The other set of embarrassments was more private. He learned the necessary techniques of historical research and then burned-in private at his earlier attempts to make use of the computer’s memory. It was simply an entirely different mindset from that used in mathematics. It was equally logical, he supposed, since it could be used, consistently and without error, to move in whatever direction he wanted to, but it was a substantially different brand of logic from that to which he was accustomed.

  But with or without instructions, whether he stumbled or moved in swiftly, he simply didn’t get any results.

  His annoyance made itself felt on the tennis court. Dors quickly reached the stage where it was no longer necessary to lob easy balls at her to give her time to judge direction and distance. That made it easy to forget that she was just a beginner and he expressed his anger in his swing, firing the ball back at her as though it were a laser beam made solid.

  She came trotting up to the net and said, “I can understand your wanting to kill me, since it must annoy you to watch me miss the shots so often. How is it, though, that you managed to miss my head by about three centimeters that time? I mean, you didn’t even nick me. Can’t you do better than that?”

  Seldon, horrified, tried to explain, but only managed to sound incoherent.

  She said, “Look. I’m not going to face any other returns of yours today, so why don’t we shower and then get together for some tea and whatever and you can tell me just what you were trying to kill. If it wasn’t my poor head and if you don’t get the real victim off your chest, you’ll be entirely too dangerous on the other side of the net for me to want to serve as a target.”

  Over tea he said, “Dors, I’ve scanned history after history; just scanned, browsed. I haven’t had time for deep study yet. Even so, it’s become obvious. All the book-films concentrate on the same few events.”

  “Crucial ones. History-making ones.”

  “That’s just an excuse. They’re copying each other. There are twenty five million worlds out there and there’s significant mention of perhaps twentyfive.”

  Dors said, “You’re reading general Galactic histories only. Look
up the special histories of some of the minor worlds. On every world, however small, the children are taught local histories before they ever find out there’s a great big Galaxy outside. Don’t you yourself know more about Helicon, right now, than you know about the rise of Trantor or of the Great Interstellar War?”

  “That sort of knowledge is limited too,” said Seldon gloomily. “I know Heliconian geography and the stories of its settlement and of the malfeasance and misfeasance of the planet Jennisek, that’s our traditional enemy, though our teachers carefully told us that we ought to say ‘traditional rival.’ But I never learned anything about the contributions of Helicon to general Galactic history.”

  “Maybe there weren’t any.”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course there were. There may not have been great, huge space battles involving Helicon or crucial rebellions or peace treaties. There may not have been some Imperial competitor making his base on Helicon. But there must have been subtle influences. Surely, nothing can happen anywhere without affecting everywhere else. Yet there’s nothing I can find’ to help me. wee here, Dors. In mathematics, all can be found in the computer; everything we know or have found out in twenty thousand years. In history, that’s not so. Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing.”

  “But, Hari,” said Dors, “mathematics is an orderly thing of human invention. One thing follows from another. There are definitions and axioms, all of which are known. It is... it is... all one piece. History is different. It is the unconscious working out of the deeds and thoughts of quadrillions of human beings. Historians must pick and choose.”

  “Exactly,” said Seldon, “but I must know all of history if I am to work out the laws of psychohistory.”

  “In that case, you won’t ever formulate the laws of psychohistory.”

  That was yesterday. Now Seldon sat in his chair in his alcove, having spent another day of utter failure, and he could hear Dors’s voice saying, “In that case, you won’t ever formulate the laws of psychohistory.”