by Isaac Asimov
2
Seldon’s thoughtful stroll across the grounds was the epitome of peace. It was hard to believe here, in the midst of the Emperor’s immediate domain, that he was on a world that, except for this area, was totally enclosed by a dome. Here, in this spot, he might be on his home world of Helicon or on Gruber’s home world of Anacreon.
Of course, the sense of peace was an illusion. The grounds were guarded—thick with security.
Once, a thousand years ago, the Imperial Palace grounds—much less palatial, much less differentiated from a world only beginning to construct domes over individual regions—had been open to all citizens and the Emperor himself could walk along the paths, unguarded, nodding his head in greeting to his subjects.
No more. Now security was in place and no one from Trantor itself could possibly invade the grounds. That did not remove the danger, however, for that, when it came, came from discontented Imperial functionaries and from corrupt and suborned soldiers. It was within the grounds that the Emperor and his staff were most in danger. What would have happened if, on that occasion, nearly ten years before, Seldon had not been accompanied by Dors Venabili?
It had been in his first year as First Minister and it was only natural, he supposed (after the fact), that there would be jealous heart-burning over his unexpected choice for the post. Many others, far better qualified in training—in years of service and, most of all, in their own eyes—could view the appointment with anger. They did not know of psychohistory or of the importance the Emperor attached to it and the easiest way to correct the situation was to corrupt one of the sworn protectors of the First Minister.
Dors must have been more suspicious than Seldon himself was. Or else, with Demerzel’s disappearance from the scene, her instructions to guard Seldon had been strengthened. The truth was that, for the first few years of his First Ministership, she was at his side more often than not.
And on the late afternoon of a warm sunny day, Dors noted the glint of the westering sun—a sun never seen under Trantor’s dome—on the metal of a blaster.
“Down, Hari!” she cried suddenly and her legs crushed the grass as she raced toward the sergeant.
“Give me that blaster, Sergeant,” she said tightly.
The would-be assassin, momentarily immobilized by the unexpected sight of a woman running toward him, now reacted quickly, raising the drawn blaster.
But she was already at him, her hand enclosing his right wrist in a steely grip and lifting his arm high. “Drop it,” she said through clenched teeth.
The sergeant’s face twisted as he attempted to yank his arm loose.
“Don’t try, Sergeant,” said Dors. “My knee is three inches from your groin and, if you so much as blink, your genitals will be history. So just freeze. That’s right. Okay, now open your hand. If you don’t drop the blaster right now, I will shatter your arm.”
A gardener came running up with a rake. Dors motioned him away. The sergeant dropped the blaster to the ground.
Seldon had arrived. “I’ll take over, Dors.”
“You will not. Get in among those trees and take the blaster with you. Others may be involved—and ready to act.”
Dors had not loosened her grip on the sergeant. She said, “Now, Sergeant, I want the name of whoever it was who persuaded you to make an attempt on the First Minister’s life—and the name of everyone else who is in this with you.”
The sergeant was silent.
“Don’t be foolish,” said Dors. “Speak!” She twisted his arm and he sank down to his knees. She put her shoe on his neck. “If you think silence becomes you, I can crush your larynx and you will be silent forever. And even before that, I am going to damage you badly—I won’t leave one bone unbroken. You had better talk.”
The sergeant talked.
Later Seldon had said to her, “How could you do that, Dors? I never believed you capable of such … violence.”
Dors said coolly, “I did not actually hurt him much, Hari. The threat was sufficient. In any case, your safety was paramount.”
“You should have let me take care of him.”
“Why? To salvage your masculine pride? You wouldn’t have been fast enough, for one thing. Secondly, no matter what you would have succeeded in doing, you are a man and it would have been expected. I am a woman and women, in popular thought, are not considered as ferocious as men and most, in general, do not have the strength to do what I did. The story will improve in the telling and everyone will be terrified of me. No one will dare to try to harm you for fear of me.”
“For fear of you and for fear of execution. The sergeant and his cohorts are to be killed, you know.”
At this, an anguished look clouded Dors’s usually composed visage, as if she could not stand the thought of the traitorous sergeant being put to death, even though he would have cut down her beloved Hari without a second thought.
“But,” she exclaimed, “there is no need to execute the conspirators. Exile will do the job.”
“No, it won’t,” said Seldon. “It’s too late. Cleon will hear of nothing but executions. I can quote him—if you wish.”
“You mean he’s already made up his mind?”
“At once. I told him that exile or imprisonment would be all that was necessary, but he said no. He said, ‘Every time I try to solve a problem by direct and forceful action, first Demerzel and then you talk of “despotism” and “tyranny.” But this is my Palace. These are my grounds. These are my guardsmen. My safety depends on the security of this place and the loyalty of my people. Do you think that any deviation from absolute loyalty can be met with anything but instant death? How else would you be safe? How else would I be safe?’
“I said there would have to be a trial. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘a short military trial and I don’t expect a single vote for anything but execution. I shall make that quite clear.’ ”
Dors looked appalled. “You’re taking this very quietly. Do you agree with the Emperor?”
Reluctantly Seldon nodded. “I do.”
“Because there was an attempt on your life. Have you abandoned your principles for mere revenge?”
“Now, Dors, I’m not a vengeful person. However, it was not myself alone at risk or even the Emperor. If there is anything that the recent history of the Empire shows us, it is that Emperors come and go. It is psychohistory that must be protected. Undoubtedly, even if something happens to me, psychohistory will someday be developed, but the Empire is falling fast and we cannot wait—and only I have advanced far enough to obtain the necessary techniques in time.”
“Then you should teach what you know to others,” said Dors gravely.
“I’m doing so. Yugo Amaryl is a reasonable successor and I have gathered a group of technicians who will someday be useful, but they won’t be as—” He paused.
“They won’t be as good as you—as wise, as capable? Really?”
“I happen to think so,” said Seldon. “And I happen to be human. Psychohistory is mine and, if I can possibly manage it, I want the credit.”
“Human,” sighed Dors, shaking her head almost sadly.
The executions went through. No such purge had been seen in over a century. Two Ministers, five officials of lower ranks, and four soldiers, including the hapless sergeant, met their deaths. Every guardsman who could not withstand the most rigorous investigation was relieved of duty and exiled to the remote Outer Worlds.
Since then, there had been no whisper of disloyalty and so notorious had become the care with which the First Minister was guarded, to say nothing of the terrifying woman—called “The Tiger Woman” by many—who watched over him, that it was no longer necessary for Dors to accompany him everywhere. Her invisible presence was an adequate shield and the Emperor Cleon enjoyed nearly ten years of quiet and absolute security.
Now, however, psychohistory was finally reaching the point where predictions, of a sort, could be made and, as Seldon crossed the grounds in his passage from his office (First Minister) to hi
s laboratory (psychohistorian), he was uneasily aware of the likelihood that this era of peace might be coming to an end.
3
Yet, even so, Hari Seldon could not repress the surge of satisfaction that he felt as he entered his laboratory.
How things had changed.
It had begun twenty years earlier with his own doodlings on his second-rate Heliconian computer. It was then that the first hint of what was to become parachaotic math came to him in a cloudy fashion.
Then there were the years at Streeling University, when he and Yugo Amaryl, working together, attempted to renormalize the equations, get rid of the inconvenient infinities, and find a way around the worst of the chaotic effects. They made very little progress, indeed.
But now, after ten years as First Minister, he had a whole floor of the latest computers and a whole staff of people working on a large variety of problems.
Of necessity, none of his staff—except for Yugo and himself, of course—could really know much more than the immediate problem they were dealing with. Each of them worked with only a small ravine or outcropping on the gigantic mountain range of psychohistory that only Seldon and Amaryl could see as a mountain range—and even they could see it only dimly, its peaks hidden in clouds, its slopes veiled by mist.
Dors Venabili was right, of course. He would have to begin initiating his people into the entire mystery. The technique was getting well beyond what only two men could handle. And Seldon was aging. Even if he could look forward to some additional decades, the years of his most fruitful breakthroughs were surely behind him.
Even Amaryl would be thirty-nine within a month and, though that was still young, it was perhaps not overly young for a mathematician—and he had been working on the problem almost as long as Seldon himself. His capacity for new and tangential thinking might be dwindling, too.
Amaryl had seen him enter and was now approaching. Seldon watched him fondly. Amaryl was as much a Dahlite as Seldon’s foster son, Raych, was, and yet Amaryl, despite his muscular physique and short stature, did not seem Dahlite at all. He lacked the mustache, he lacked the accent, he lacked, it would seem, Dahlite consciousness of any kind. He had even been impervious to the lure of Jo-Jo Joranum, who had appealed so thoroughly to the people of Dahl.
It was as though Amaryl recognized no sectoral patriotism, no planetary patriotism, not even Imperial patriotism. He belonged—completely and entirely—to psychohistory.
Seldon felt a twinge of insufficiency. He himself remained conscious of his first two decades on Helicon and there was no way he could keep from thinking of himself as a Heliconian. He wondered if that consciousness was not sure to betray him by causing him to skew his thinking about psychohistory. Ideally, to use psychohistory properly, one should be above worlds and sectors and deal only with humanity in the faceless abstract—and this was what Amaryl did.
And Seldon didn’t, he admitted to himself, sighing silently.
Amaryl said, “We are making progress, Hari, I suppose.”
“You suppose, Yugo? Merely suppose?”
“I don’t want to jump into outer space without a suit.” He said this quite seriously (he did not have much of a sense of humor, Seldon knew) and they moved into their private office. It was small, but it was also well shielded.
Amaryl sat down and crossed his legs. He said, “Your latest scheme for getting around chaos may be working in part—at the cost of sharpness, of course.”
“Of course. What we gain in the straightaway, we lose in the roundabouts. That’s the way the Universe works. We’ve just got to fool it somehow.”
“We’ve fooled it a little bit. It’s like looking through frosted glass.”
“Better than the years we spent trying to look through lead.”
Amaryl muttered something to himself, then said, “We can catch glimmers of light and dark.”
“Explain!”
“I can’t, but I have the Prime Radiant, which I’ve been working on like a—a—”
“Try lamec. That’s an animal—a beast of burden—we have on Helicon. It doesn’t exist on Trantor.”
“If the lamec works hard, then that is what my work on the Prime Radiant has been like.”
He pressed the security keypad on his desk and a drawer unsealed and slid open noiselessly. He took out a dark opaque cube that Seldon scrutinized with interest. Seldon himself had worked out the Prime Radiant’s circuitry, but Amaryl had put it together—a clever man with his hands was Amaryl.
The room darkened and equations and relationships shimmered in the air. Numbers spread out beneath them, hovering just above the desk surface, as if suspended by invisible marionette strings.
Seldon said, “Wonderful. Someday, if we live long enough, we’ll have the Prime Radiant produce a river of mathematical symbolism that will chart past and future history. In it we can find currents and rivulets and work out ways of changing them in order to make them follow other currents and rivulets that we would prefer.”
“Yes,” said Amaryl dryly, “if we can manage to live with the knowledge that the actions we take, which we will mean for the best, may turn out to be for the worst.”
“Believe me, Yugo, I never go to bed at night without that particular thought gnawing at me. Still, we haven’t come to it yet. All we have is this—which, as you say, is no more than seeing light and dark fuzzily through frosted glass.”
“True enough.”
“And what is it you think you see, Yugo?” Seldon watched Amaryl closely, a little grimly. He was gaining weight, getting just a bit pudgy. He spent too much time bent over the computers (and now over the Prime Radiant)—and not enough in physical activity. And, though he saw a woman now and then, Seldon knew, he had never married. A mistake! Even a workaholic is forced to take time off to satisfy a mate, to take care of the needs of children.
Seldon thought of his own still-trim figure and of the manner in which Dors strove to make him keep it that way.
Amaryl said, “What do I see? The Empire is in trouble.”
“The Empire is always in trouble.”
“Yes, but it’s more specific. There’s a possibility that we may have trouble at the center.”
“At Trantor?”
“I presume. Or at the Periphery. Either there will be a bad situation here—perhaps civil war—or the outlying Outer Worlds will begin to break away.”
“Surely it doesn’t take psychohistory to point out these possibilities.”
“The interesting thing is that there seems a mutual exclusivity. One or the other. The likelihood of both together is very small. Here! Look! It’s your own mathematics. Observe!”
They bent over the Prime Radiant display for a long time.
Seldon said finally, “I fail to see why the two should be mutually exclusive.”
“So do I, Hari, but where’s the value of psychohistory if it shows us only what we would see anyway? This is showing us something we wouldn’t see. What it doesn’t show us is, first, which alternative is better, and second, what to do to make the better come to pass and depress the possibility of the worse.”
Seldon pursed his lips, then said slowly, “I can tell you which alternative is preferable. Let the Periphery go and keep Trantor.”
“Really?”
“No question. We must keep Trantor stable, if for no other reason than that we’re here.”
“Surely our own comfort isn’t the decisive point.”
“No, but psychohistory is. What good will it do us to keep the Periphery intact if conditions on Trantor force us to stop work on psychohistory? I don’t say that we’ll be killed, but we may be unable to work. The development of psychohistory is on what our fate will depend. As for the Empire, if the Periphery secedes it will only begin a disintegration that may take a long time to reach the core.”
“Even if you’re right, Hari, what do we do to keep Trantor stable?”
“To begin with, we have to think about it.”
A silence fell
between them and then Seldon said, “Thinking doesn’t make me happy. What if the Empire is altogether on the wrong track and has been for all its history? I think of that every time I talk to Gruber.”
“Who’s Gruber?”
“Mandell Gruber. A gardener.”
“Oh. The one who came running up with the rake to rescue you at the time of the assassination attempt?”
“Yes. I’ve always been grateful to him for that. He had only a rake against possibly other conspirators with blasters. That’s loyalty. Anyhow, talking to him is like a breath of fresh air. I can’t spend all my time talking to court officials and to psychohistorians.”
“Thank you.”
“Come! You know what I mean. Gruber likes the open. He wants the wind and the rain and the biting cold and everything else that raw weather can bring to him. I miss it myself sometimes.”
“I don’t. I wouldn’t care if I never go out there.”
“You were brought up under the dome—but suppose the Empire consisted of simple unindustrialized worlds, living by herding and farming, with thin populations and empty spaces. Wouldn’t we all be better off?”
“It sounds horrible to me.”
“I found some spare time to check it as best I could. It seems to me it’s a case of unstable equilibrium. A thinly populated world of the type I describe either grows moribund and impoverished, falling off into an uncultured near-animal level—or it industrializes. It is standing on a narrow point and topples over in either direction and, as it just so happens, almost every world in the Galaxy has fallen over into industrialization.”
“Because that’s better.”
“Maybe. But it can’t continue forever. We’re watching the results of the overtoppling now. The Empire cannot exist for much longer because it has—it has overheated. I can’t think of any other expression. What will follow we don’t know. If, through psychohistory, we manage to prevent the Fall or, more likely, force a recovery after the Fall, is that merely to ensure another period of overheating? Is that the only future humanity has, to push the boulder, like Sisyphus, up to the top of a hill, only to see it roll to the bottom again?”
