Foundation's Edge

by Isaac Asimov

  Compor lifted both hands now, palms facing each other. “It’s the safest place, believe me.” And then, checking himself and realizing what the other was about to say, added hurriedly, “Or don’t believe me, it doesn’t matter. I’m telling the truth. I’ve been on the planet several hours longer than you and I’ve checked it out. This is some particular day they have here on Sayshell. It’s a day for meditation, for some reason. Almost everyone is at home—or should be. —You see how empty this place is. You don’t suppose it’s like this every day.”

  Pelorat nodded and said, “I was wondering why it was so empty, at that.” He leaned toward Trevize’s ear and whispered, “Why not let him talk, Golan? He looks miserable, poor chap, and he may be trying to apologize. It seems unfair not to give him the chance to do so.”

  Trevize said, “Dr. Pelorat seems anxious to hear you. I’m willing to oblige him, but you’ll oblige me if you’re brief about it. This may be a good day on which to lose my temper. If everyone is meditating, any disturbance I cause may not produce the guardians of the law. I may not be so lucky tomorrow. Why waste an opportunity?”

  Compor said in a strained voice, “Look, if you want to take a poke at me, do so. I won’t even defend myself, see? Go ahead, hit me—but listen!”

  “Go ahead and talk, then. I’ll listen a while.”

  “In the first place, Golan—”

  “Address me as Trevize, please. I am not on first-name terms with you.”

  “In the first place, Trevize, you did too good a job convincing me of your views—”

  “You hid that well. I could have sworn you were amused by me.”

  “I tried to be amused to hide from myself the fact that you were being extremely disturbing. —Look, let us sit down up against the wall. Even if the place is empty, some few may come in and I don’t think we ought to be needlessly conspicuous.”

  Slowly the three men walked most of the length of the large room. Compor was smiling tentatively again, but remained carefully at more than arm’s length from Trevize.

  They sat down on a seat that gave as their weight was placed upon it and molded itself into the shape of their hips and buttocks. Pelorat looked surprised and made as though to stand up.

  “Relax, Professor,” said Compor. “I’ve been through this already. They’re in advance of us in some ways. It’s a world that believes in small comforts.”

  He turned to Trevize, placing one arm over the back of his chair and speaking easily now. “You disturbed me. You made me feel the Second Foundation did exist, and that was deeply upsetting. Consider the consequences if they did. Wasn’t it likely that they might take care of you somehow? Remove you as a menace? And if I behaved as though I believed you, I might be removed as well. Do you see my point?”

  “I see a coward.”

  “What good would it do to be storybook brave?” said Compor warmly, his blue eyes widening in indignation. “Can you or I stand up to an organization capable of molding our minds and emotions? The only way we could fight effectively would be to hide our knowledge to begin with.”

  “So you hid it and were safe? —Yet you didn’t hide it from Mayor Branno, did you? Quite a risk there.”

  “Yes! But I thought that was worth it. Just talking between ourselves might do nothing more than get ourselves mentally controlled—or our memories erased altogether. If I told the Mayor, on the other hand—She knew my father well, you know. My father and I were immigrants from Smyrno and the Mayor had a grandmother who—”

  “Yes, yes,” said Trevize impatiently, “and several generations farther back you can trace ancestry to the Sirius Sector. You’ve told all that to everyone you know. Get on with it, Compor!”

  “Well, I had her ear. If I could convince the Mayor that there was danger, using your arguments, the Federation might take some action. We’re not as helpless as we were in the days of the Mule and—at the worst—this dangerous knowledge would be spread more widely and we ourselves would not be in as much specific danger.”

  Trevize said sardonically, “Endanger the Foundation, but keep ourselves safe. That’s good patriotic stuff.”

  “That would be at the worst. I was counting on the best.” His forehead had become a little damp. He seemed to be straining against Trevize’s immovable contempt.

  “And you didn’t tell me of this clever plan of yours, did you?”

  “No, I didn’t and I’m sorry about that, Trevize. The Mayor ordered me not to. She said she wanted to know everything you knew but that you were the sort of person who would freeze if you knew that your remarks were being passed on.”

  “How right she was!”

  “I didn’t know—I couldn’t guess—I had no way of conceiving that she was planning to arrest you and throw you off the planet.”

  “She was waiting for the right political moment, when my status as Councilman would not protect me. You didn’t forsee that?”

  “How could I? You yourself did not.”

  “Had I known that she knew my views, I would have.”

  Compor said with a sudden trace of insolence, “That’s easy enough to say—in hindsight.”

  “And what is it you want of me here? Now that you have a bit of hindsight, too.”

  “To make up for all this. To make up for the harm I unwittingly—unwittingly—did you.”

  “Goodness,” said Trevize dryly. “How kind of you! But you haven’t answered my original question. How did you come to be here? How do you happen to be on the very planet I am on?”

  Compor said, “There’s no complicated answer necessary for that. I followed you!”

  “Through hyperspace? With my ship making Jumps in series?”

  Compor shook his head. “No mystery. I have the same kind of a ship you do, with the same kind of computer. You know I’ve always had this trick of being able to guess in which direction through hyperspace a ship would go. It’s not usually a very good guess and I’m wrong two times out of three, but with the computer I’m much better. And you hesitated quite a bit at the start and gave me a chance to evaluate the direction and speed in which you were going before entering hyperspace. I fed the data—together with my own intuitive extrapolations—into the computer and it did the rest.”

  “And you actually got to the city ahead of me?”

  “Yes. You didn’t use gravitics and I did. I guessed you would come to the capital city, so I went straight down, while you—” Compor made a short spiral motion with his finger as though it were a ship riding a directional beam.

  “You took a chance on a run-in with Sayshellian officialdom.”

  “Well—” Compor’s face broke into a smile that lent it an undeniable charm and Trevize felt himself almost warming to him. Compor said, “I’m not a coward at all times and in all things.”

  Trevize steeled himself. “How did you happen to get a ship like mine?”

  “In precisely the same way you got a ship like yours. The old lady—Mayor Branno—assigned it to me.”

  “Why?”

  “I’m being entirely frank with you. My assignment was to follow you. The Mayor wanted to know where you were going and what you would be doing.”

  “And you’ve been reporting faithfully to her, I suppose. —Or have you been faithless to the Mayor also?”

  “I reported to her. I had no choice, actually. She placed a hyper-relay on board ship, which I wasn’t supposed to find, but which I did find.”

  “Well?”

  “Unfortunately it’s hooked up so that I can’t remove it without immobilizing the vessel. At least, there’s no way I can remove it. Consequently she knows where I am—and she knows where you are.”

  “Suppose you hadn’t been able to follow me. Then she wouldn’t have known where I was. Had you thought of that?”

  “Of course I did. I thought of just reporting I had lost you—but she wouldn’t have believed me, would she? And I wouldn’t have been able to get back to Terminus for who knows how long. And I’m not like you
, Trevize. I’m not a carefree person without attachments. I have a wife on Terminus—a pregnant wife—and I want to get back to her. You can afford to think only of yourself. I can’t. —Besides, I’ve come to warn you. By Seldon, I’m trying to do that and you won’t listen. You keep talking about other things.”

  “I’m not impressed by your sudden concern for me. What can you warn me against? It seems to me that you are the only thing I need to be warned about. You betray me, and now you follow me in order to betray me again. No one else is doing me any harm.”

  Compor said earnestly, “Forget the dramatics, man. Trevize, you’re a lightning rod! You’ve been sent out to draw Second Foundation response—if there is such a thing as the Second Foundation. I have an intuitive sense for things other than hyperspatial pursuit and I’m sure that’s what she’s planning. If you try to find the Second Foundation, they’ll become aware of it and they’ll act against you. If they do, they are very likely to tip their hand. And when they do, Mayor Branno will go for them.”

  “A pity your famous intuition wasn’t working when Branno was planning my arrest.”

  Compor flushed and muttered, “You know it doesn’t always work.”

  “And now it tells you she’s planning to attack the Second Foundation. She wouldn’t dare.”

  “I think she would. But that’s not the point. The point is that right now she is throwing you out as bait.”

  “So?”

  “So by all the black holes in space, don’t search for the Second Foundation. She won’t care if you’re killed in the search, but I care. I feel responsible for this and I care.”

  “I’m touched,” said Trevize coldly, “but as it happens I have another task on hand at the moment.”

  “You have?”

  “Pelorat and I are on the track of Earth, the planet that some think was the original home of the human race. Aren’t we, Janov?”

  Pelorat nodded his head. “Yes, it’s a purely scientific matter and a long-standing interest of mine.”

  Compor looked blank for a moment. Then, “Looking for Earth? But why?”

  “To study it,” said Pelorat. “As the one world on which human beings developed—presumably from lower forms of life, instead of, as on all others, merely arriving ready-made—it should be a fascinating study in uniqueness.”

  “And,” said Trevize, “as a world where, just possibly, I may learn more of the Second Foundation. —Just possibly.”

  Compor said, “But there isn’t any Earth. Didn’t you know that?”

  “No Earth?” Pelorat looked utterly blank, as he always did when he was preparing to be stubborn. “Are you saying there was no planet on which the human species originated?”

  “Oh no. Of course, there was an Earth. There’s no question of that! But there isn’t any Earth now. No inhabited Earth. It’s gone!”

  Pelorat said, unmoved, “There are tales—”

  “Hold on, Janov,” said Trevize. “Tell me, Compor, how do you know this?”

  “What do you mean, how? It’s my heritage. I trace my ancestry from the Sirius Sector, if I may repeat that fact without boring you. We know all about Earth out there. It exists in that sector, which means it’s not part of the Foundation Federation, so apparently no one on Terminus bothers with it. But that’s where Earth is, just the same.”

  “That is one suggestion, yes,” said Pelorat. “There was considerable enthusiasm for that ‘Sirius Alternative,’ as they called it, in the days of the Empire.”

  Compor said vehemently, “It’s not an alternative. It’s a fact.”

  Pelorat said, “What would you say if I told you I know of many different places in the Galaxy that are called Earth—or were called Earth—by the people who lived in its stellar neighborhood?”

  “But this is the real thing,” said Compor. “The Sirius Sector is the longest-inhabited portion of the Galaxy. Everyone knows that.”

  “The Sirians claim it, certainly,” said Pelorat, unmoved.

  Compor looked frustrated. “I tell you—”

  But Trevize said, “Tell us what happened to Earth. You say it’s not inhabited any longer. Why not?”

  “Radioactivity. The whole planetary surface is radioactive because of nuclear reactions that went out of control, or nuclear explosions—I’m not sure—and now no life is possible there.”

  The three stared at each other for a while and then Compor felt it necessary to repeat. He said, “I tell you, there’s no Earth. There’s no use looking for it.”

  2.

  JANOV PELORAT’S FACE WAS, FOR ONCE, NOT EXPRESSIONLESS. It was not that there was passion in it—or any of the more unstable emotions. It was that his eyes had narrowed—and that a kind of fierce intensity had filled every plane of his face.

  He said, and his voice lacked any trace of its usual tentative quality, “How did you say you know all this?”

  “I told you,” said Compor. “It’s my heritage.”

  “Don’t be silly, young man. You are a Councilman. That means you must be born on one of the Federation worlds—Smyrno, I think you said earlier.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Well then, what heritage are you talking about? Are you telling me that you possess Sirian genes that fill you with inborn knowledge of the Sirian myths concerning Earth?”

  Compor looked taken aback. “No, of course not.”

  “Then what are you talking about?”

  Compor paused and seemed to gather his thoughts. He said quietly, “My family has old books of Sirian history. An external heritage, not an internal one. It’s not something we talk about outside, especially if one is intent on political advancement. Trevize seems to think I am, but, believe me, I mention it only to good friends.”

  There was a trace of bitterness in his voice. “Theoretically all Foundation citizens are alike, but those from the old worlds of the Federation are more alike than those from the newer ones—and those that trace from worlds outside the Federation are least alike of all. But, never mind that. Aside from the books, I once visited the old worlds. Trevize—hey, there—”

  Trevize had wandered off toward one end of the room, looking out a triangular window. It served to let in a view of the sky and to diminish the view of the city—more light and more privacy. Trevize stretched upward to look down.

  He returned through the empty room. “Interesting window design,” he said. “You called me, Councilman?”

  “Yes. Remember the postcollegiate tour I took?”

  “After graduation? I remember very well. We were pals. Pals forever. Foundation of trust. Two against the world. You went off on your tour. I joined the Navy, full of patriotism. Somehow I didn’t think I wanted to tour with you—some instinct told me not to. I wish the instinct had stayed with me.”

  Compor did not rise to the bait. He said, “I visited Comporellon. Family tradition said that my ancestors had come from there—at least on my father’s side. We were of the ruling family in ancient times before the Empire absorbed us, and my name is derived from the world—or so the family tradition has it. We had an old, poetic name for the star Comporellon circled—Epsilon Eridani.”

  “What does that mean?” asked Pelorat.

  Compor shook his head. “I don’t know that it has any meaning. Just tradition. They live with a great deal of tradition. It’s an old world. They have long, detailed records of Earth’s history, but no one talks about it much. They’re superstitious about it. Every time they mention the word, they lift up both hands with first and second fingers crossed to ward off misfortune.”

  “Did you tell this to anyone when you came back?”

  “Of course not. Who would be interested? And I wasn’t going to force the tale on anyone. No, thank you! I had a political career to develop and the last thing I want is to stress my foreign origin.”

  “What about the satellite? Describe Earth’s satellite,” said Pelorat sharply.

  Compor looked astonished. “I don’t know anything about th
at.”

  “Does it have one?”

  “I don’t recall reading or hearing about it. But I’m sure if you’ll consult the Comporellonian records, you can find out.”

  “But you know nothing?”

  “Not about the satellite. Not that I recall.”

  “Huh! How did Earth come to be radioactive?”

  Compor shook his head and said nothing.

  Pelorat said, “Think! You must have heard something.”

  “It was seven years ago, Professor. I didn’t know then you’d be questioning me about it now. There was some sort of legend—they considered it history—”

  “What was the legend?”

  “Earth was radioactive—ostracized and mistreated by the Empire, its population dwindling—and it was going to destroy the Empire somehow.”

  “One dying world was going to destroy the whole Empire?” interposed Trevize.

  Compor said defensively, “I said it was a legend. I don’t know the details. Bel Arvardan was involved in the tale, I know.”

  “Who was he?” asked Trevize.

  “A historical character. I looked him up. He was an honest-to-Galaxy archaeologist back in the early days of the Empire and he maintained that Earth was in the Sirius Sector.”

  “I’ve heard the name,” said Pelorat.

  “He’s a folk hero in Comporellon. Look, if you want to know these things—go to Comporellon. It’s no use hanging around here.”

  Pelorat said, “Just how did they say Earth planned to destroy the Empire?”

  “Don’t know.” A certain sullenness was entering Compor’s voice.

  “Did the radiation have anything to do with it?”

  “Don’t know. There were tales of some mind-expander developed on Earth—a Synapsifier or something.”

  “Did it create superminds?” said Pelorat in deepest tones of incredulity.

  “I don’t think so. What I chiefly remember is that it didn’t work. People became bright and died young.”

  Trevize said, “It was probably a morality myth. If you ask for too much, you lose even that which you have.”

  Pelorat turned on Trevize in annoyance. “What do you know of morality myths?”