Forward the Foundation

"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?"