by Isaac Asimov
“Stop!” The First Speaker was insistent. “You must not say ‘never.’ That is a lazy slurring-over of the facts. Actually, Psychohistory predicts only probabilities. A particular event may be infinitesimally probable, but the probability is always greater than zero.”
“Yes, Speaker. The orientation desired, if I may correct myself, then, is well known to possess no significant probability of spontaneously coming to pass.”
“Better. What is the orientation?”
“It is that of a civilization based on mental science. In all the known history of Mankind, advances have been made primarily in physical technology; in the capacity of handling the inanimate world about Man. Control of self and society has been left to chance or to the vague gropings of intuitive ethical systems based on inspiration and emotion. As a result, no culture of greater stability than about fifty-five percent has ever existed, and these only as the result of great human misery.”
“And why is the orientation we speak of a non-spontaneous one?”
“Because a large minority of human beings are mentally equipped to take part in the advance of physical science, and all receive the crude and visible benefits thereof. Only an insignificant minority, however, are inherently able to lead Man through the greater involvements of Mental Science; and the benefits derived therefrom, while longer lasting, are more subtle and less apparent. Furthermore, since such an orientation would lead to the development of a benevolent dictatorship of the mentally best—virtually a higher subdivision of Man—it would be resented and could not be stable without the application of a force which would depress the rest of Mankind to brute level. Such a development is repugnant to us and must be avoided.”
“What, then, is the solution?”
“The solution is the Seldon Plan. Conditions have been so arranged and so maintained that in a millennium from its beginnings—six hundred years from now—a Second Galactic Empire will have been established in which Mankind will be ready for the leadership of Mental Science. In that same interval, the Second Foundation, in its development, will have brought forth a group of Psychologists ready to assume leadership. Or, as I have myself often thought, the First Foundation supplies the physical framework of a single political unit, and the Second Foundation supplies the mental framework of a ready-made ruling class.”
“I see. Fairly adequate. Do you think that any Second Empire, even if formed in the time set by Seldon, would do as a fulfillment of his Plan?”
“No, Speaker, I do not. There are several possible Second Empires that may be formed in the period of time stretching from nine hundred to seventeen hundred years after the inception of the Plan, but only one of these is the Second Empire.”
“And in view of all this, why is it necessary that the existence of the Second Foundation be hidden—above all, from the First Foundation?”
The Student probed for a hidden meaning to the question and failed to find it. He was troubled in his answer, “For the same reason that the details of the Plan as a whole must be hidden from Mankind in general. The laws of Psychohistory are statistical in nature and are rendered invalid if the actions of individual men are not random in nature. If a sizable group of human beings learned of key details of the Plan, their actions would be governed by that knowledge and would no longer be random in the meaning of the axioms of Psychohistory. In other words, they would no longer be perfectly predictable. Your pardon, Speaker, but I feel that the answer is not satisfactory.”
“It is well that you do. Your answer is quite incomplete. It is the Second Foundation itself which must be hidden, not simply the Plan. The Second Empire is not yet formed. We have still a society which would resent a ruling class of psychologists, and which would fear its development and fight against it. Do you understand that?”
“Yes, Speaker, I do. The point has never been stressed—”
“Don’t minimize. It has never been made—in the classroom, though you should be capable of deducing it yourself. This and many other points we will make now and in the near future during your apprenticeship. You will see me again in a week. By that time, I would like to have comments from you as to a certain problem which I now set before you. I don’t want complete and rigorous mathematical treatment. That would take a year for an expert, and not a week for you. But I do want an indication as to trends and directions—
“You have here a fork in the Plan at a period in time of about half a century ago. The necessary details are included. You will note that the path followed by the assumed reality diverges from all the plotted predictions; its probability being under one percent. You will estimate for how long the divergence may continue before it becomes uncorrectable. Estimate also the probable end if uncorrected, and a reasonable method of correction.”
The Student flipped the Viewer at random and looked stonily at the passages presented on the tiny, built-in screen.
He said: “Why this particular problem, Speaker? It obviously has significance other than purely academic.”
“Thank you, my boy. You are as quick as I had expected. The problem is not suppositious. Nearly half a century ago, the Mule burst into Galactic history and for ten years was the largest single fact in the universe. He was unprovided for; uncalculated for. He bent the Plan seriously, but not fatally.
“To stop him before he did become fatal, however, we were forced to take active part against him. We revealed our existence, and, infinitely worse, a portion of our power. The First Foundation has learned of us, and their actions are now predicated on that knowledge. Observe in the problem presented. Here. And here.
“Naturally, you will not speak of this to anyone.”
There was an appalled pause, as realization seeped into the Student. He said: “Then the Seldon Plan has failed!”
“Not yet. It merely may have failed. The probabilities of success are still twenty-one point four percent, as of the last assessment.”
9
THE CONSPIRATORS
For Dr. Darell and Pelleas Anthor, the evenings passed in friendly intercourse; the days in pleasant unimportance. It might have been an ordinary visit. Dr. Darell introduced the young man as a cousin from across space, and interest was dulled by the cliché.
Somehow, however, among the small talk, a name might be mentioned. There would be an easy thoughtfulness. Dr. Darell might say, “No,” or he might say, “Yes.” A call on the open Communi-wave issued a casual invitation, “Want you to meet my cousin.”
And Arcadia’s preparations proceeded in their own manner. In fact, her actions might be considered the least straightforward of all.
For instance, she induced Olynthus Dam at school to donate to her a home-built, self-contained sound-receiver by methods which indicated a future for her that promised peril to all males with whom she might come into contact. To avoid details, she merely exhibited such an interest in Olynthus’ self-publicized hobby—he had a home workshop—combined with such a well-modulated transfer of this interest to Olynthus’ own pudgy features, that the unfortunate youth found himself: 1) discoursing at great and animated length upon the principles of the hyperwave motor; 2) becoming dizzyingly aware of the great, absorbed eyes that rested so lightly upon his; and 3) forcing into her willing hands his own greatest creation, the aforesaid sound-receiver.
Arcadia cultivated Olynthus in diminishing degree thereafter for just long enough to remove all suspicion that the sound-receiver had been the cause of the friendship. For months afterwards, Olynthus felt the memory of that short period in his life over and over again with the tendrils of his mind; until finally, for lack of further addition, he gave up and let it slip away.
When the seventh evening came, and five men sat in the Darell living room with food within and tobacco without, Arcadia’s desk upstairs was occupied by this quite unrecognizable home-product of Olynthus’ ingenuity.
Five men then. Dr. Darell, of course, with graying hair and meticulous clothing, looking somewhat older than his forty-two years. Pelleas Antho
r, serious and quick-eyed at the moment, looking young and unsure of himself. And the three new men: Jole Turbor, visicastor, bulky and plump-lipped; Dr. Elvett Semic, professor-emeritus of physics at the University, scrawny and wrinkled, his clothes only half-filled; Homir Munn, librarian, lanky and terribly ill at ease.
Dr. Darell spoke easily, in a normal, matter-of-fact tone: “This gathering has been arranged, gentlemen, for a trifle more than merely social reasons. You may have guessed this. Since you have been deliberately chosen because of your backgrounds, you may also guess the danger involved. I won’t minimize it, but I will point out that we are all condemned men, in any case.
“You will notice that none of you have been invited with any attempt at secrecy. None of you have been asked to come here unseen. The windows are not adjusted to noninsight. No screen of any sort is about the room. We have only to attract the attention of the enemy to be ruined; and the best way to attract that attention is to assume a false and theatrical secrecy.”
(Hah, thought Arcadia, bending over the voices coming—a bit screechily—out of the little box.)
“Do you understand that?”
Elvett Semic twitched his lower lip and bared his teeth in the screwup, wrinkled gesture that preceded his every sentence. “Oh, get on with it. Tell us about the youngster.”
Dr. Darell said, “Pelleas Anthor is his name. He was a student of my old colleague, Kleise, who died last year. Kleise sent me Anthor’s brain-pattern to the fifth sublevel before he died, which pattern has been now checked against that of the man before you. You know, of course, that a brain-pattern cannot be duplicated that far, even by men of the Science of Psychology. If you don’t know that, you’ll have to take my word for it.”
Turbor said, purse-lipped, “We might as well make a beginning somewheres. We’ll take your word for it, especially since you’re the greatest electroneurologist in the Galaxy now that Kleise is dead. At least, that is the way I’ve described you in my visicast comment, and I even believe it myself. How old are you, Anthor?”
“Twenty-nine, Mr. Turbor.”
“Hm-m-m. And are you an electroneurologist, too? A great one?”
“Just a student of the science. But I work hard, and I’ve had the benefit of Kleise’s training.”
Munn broke in. He had a slight stammer at periods of tension. “I . . . I wish you’d g . . . get started. I think everyone’s t . . . talking too much.”
Dr. Darell lifted an eyebrow in Munn’s direction. “You’re right, Homir. Take over, Pelleas.”
“Not for a while,” said Pelleas Anthor, slowly, “because before we can get started—although I appreciate Mr. Munn’s sentiment—I must request brainwave data.”
Darell frowned. “What is this, Anthor? What brainwave data do you refer to?”
“The patterns of all of you. You have taken mine, Dr. Darell. I must take yours and those of the rest of you. And I must take the measurements myself.”
Turbor said, “There’s no reason for him to trust us, Darell. The young man is within his rights.”
“Thank you,” said Anthor. “If you’ll lead the way to your laboratory then, Dr. Darell, we’ll proceed. I took the liberty this morning of checking your apparatus.”
The science of electroencephalography was at once new and old. It was old in the sense that the knowledge of the microcurrents generated by nerve cells of living beings belonged to that immense category of human knowledge whose origin was completely lost. It was knowledge that stretched back as far as the earliest remnants of human history—
And yet it was new, too. The fact of the existence of microcurrents slumbered through the tens of thousands of years of Galactic Empire as one of those vivid and whimsical, but quite useless, items of human knowledge. Some had attempted to form classifications of waves into waking and sleeping, calm and excited, well and ill—but even the broadest conceptions had had their hordes of vitiating exceptions.
Others had tried to show the existence of brainwave groups, analogous to the well-known blood groups, and to show that external environment was not the defining factor. These were the race-minded people who claimed that humanity could be divided into subspecies. But such a philosophy could make no headway against the overwhelming ecumenical drive involved in the fact of Galactic Empire—one political unit covering twenty million stellar systems, involving all of Man from the central world of Trantor—now a gorgeous and impossible memory of the great past—to the loneliest asteroid on the periphery.
And then again, in a society given over, as that of the First Empire was, to the physical sciences and inanimate technology, there was a vague but mighty sociological push away from the study of the mind. It was less respectable because less immediately useful; and it was poorly financed since it was less profitable.
After the disintegration of the First Empire, there came the fragmentation of organized science, back, back—past even the fundamentals of nuclear power into the chemical power of coal and oil. The one exception to this, of course, was the First Foundation where the spark of science, revitalized and grown more intense, was maintained and fed to flame. Yet there, too, it was the physical that ruled, and the brain, except for surgery, was neglected ground.
Hari Seldon was the first to express what afterwards came to be accepted as truth.
“Neural microcurrents,” he once said, “carry within them the spark of every varying impulse and response, conscious and unconscious. The brainwaves recorded on neatly squared paper in trembling peaks and troughs are the mirrors of the combined thought-pulses of billions of cells. Theoretically, analysis should reveal the thoughts and emotions of the subject, to the last and least. Differences should be detected that are due not only to gross physical defects, inherited or acquired, but also to shifting states of emotion, to advancing education and experience, even to something as subtle as a change in the subject’s philosophy of life.”
But even Seldon could approach no further than speculation.
And now for fifty years, the men of the First Foundation had been tearing at that incredibly vast and complicated storehouse of new knowledge. The approach, naturally, was made through new techniques—as, for example, the use of electrodes at skull sutures by a newly developed means which enabled contact to be made directly with the gray cells, without even the necessity of shaving a patch of skull. And then there was a recording device which automatically recorded the brainwave data as an overall total, and as separate functions of six independent variables.
What was most significant, perhaps, was the growing respect in which encephalography and the encephalographer were held. Kleise, the greatest of them, sat at scientific conventions on an equal basis with the physicist. Dr. Darell, though no longer active in the science, was known for his brilliant advances in encephalographic analysis almost as much as for the fact that he was the son of Bayta Darell, the great heroine of the past generation.
And so now, Dr. Darell sat in his own chair, with the delicate touch of the feathery electrodes scarcely hinting at pressure upon his skull, while the vacuum-incased needles wavered to and fro. His back was to the recorder—otherwise, as was well known, the sight of the moving curves induced an unconscious effort to control them, with noticeable results—but he knew that the central dial was expressing the strongly rhythmic and little-varying Sigma curve, which was to be expected of his own powerful and disciplined mind. It would be strengthened and purified in the subsidiary dial dealing with the Cerebellar wave. There would be the sharp, near-discontinuous leaps from the frontal lobe, and the subdued shakiness from the subsurface regions with their narrow range of frequencies—
He knew his own brainwave pattern much as an artist might be perfectly aware of the color of his eyes.
Pelleas Anthor made no comment when Darell rose from the reclining chair. The young man abstracted the seven recordings, glanced at them with the quick, all-embracing eyes of one who knows exactly what tiny facet of near-nothingness is being looked for.
&nbs
p; “If you don’t mind, Dr. Semic.”
Semic’s age-yellowed face was serious. Electroencephalography was a science of his old age of which he knew little; an upstart that he faintly resented. He knew that he was old and that his wave-pattern would show it. The wrinkles on his face showed it, the stoop in his walk, the shaking of his hand—but they spoke only of his body. The brainwave patterns might show that his mind was old, too. An embarrassing and unwarranted invasion of a man’s last protecting stronghold, his own mind.
The electrodes were adjusted. The process did not hurt, of course, from beginning to end. There was just that tiny tingle, far below the threshold of sensation.
And then came Turbor, who sat quietly and unemotionally through the fifteen-minute process, and Munn, who jerked at the first touch of the electrodes and then spent the session rolling his eyes as though he wished he could turn them backwards and watch through a hole in his occiput.
“And now—” said Darell, when all was done.
“And now,” said Anthor, apologetically, “there is one more person in the house.”
Darell, frowning, said: “My daughter?”
“Yes. I suggested that she stay home tonight, if you’ll remember.”
“For encephalographical analysis? What in the Galaxy for?”
“I cannot proceed without it.”
Darell shrugged and climbed the stairs. Arcadia, amply warned, had the sound-receiver off when he entered; then followed him down with mild obedience. It was the first time in her life—except for the taking of her basic mind pattern as an infant, for identification and registration purposes—that she found herself under the electrodes.