by Isaac Asimov
Seldon said, “I cannot. You accuse me of knowledge I do not possess. I would like to be of assistance, but I cannot.”
Joranum stood up suddenly. “Well, you know my mind and what it is I want of you. Think about it. And I ask you to think about the Empire. You may feel you owe Demerzel—this despoiler of all the millions of planets of humanity—your friendship. Be careful. What you do may shake the very foundation of the Empire. I ask you to help me in the name of the quadrillions of human beings who fill the Galaxy. Think of the Empire.”
His voice had dropped to a thrilling and powerful half-whisper. Seldon felt himself almost trembling. “I will always think of the Empire,” he said.
Joranum said, “Then that is all I ask right now. Thank you for consenting to see me.”
Seldon watched Joranum and his companion leave as the office doors slid open noiselessly and the men strode out.
He frowned. Something was bothering him—and he was not sure what it was.
7
Namarti’s dark eyes remained fixed on Joranum as they sat in their carefully shielded office in the Streeling Sector. It was not an elaborate headquarters; they were as yet weak in Streeling, but they would grow stronger.
It was amazing how the movement was growing. It had started from nothing three years back and now its tentacles stretched—in some places more thickly than others, of course—throughout Trantor. The Outer Worlds were as yet largely untouched. Demerzel had labored mightily to keep them content, but that was his mistake. It was here on Trantor that rebellions were dangerous. Elsewhere, they could be controlled. Here, Demerzel could be toppled. Odd that he should not realize that, but Joranum had always held to the theory that Demerzel’s reputation was overblown, that he would prove an empty shell if anyone dared oppose him, and that the Emperor would destroy him quickly if his own security seemed at stake.
So far, at least, all of Joranum’s predictions had come to pass. He had never once lost his way except in minor matters, such as that recent rally at Streeling University in which this Seldon fellow had interfered.
That might be why Joranum had insisted on the interview with him. Even a minor toe stub must be taken care of. Joranum enjoyed the feeling of infallibility and Namarti had to admit that the vision of a constant string of successes was the surest way of ensuring the continuation of success. People tended to avoid the humiliation of failure by joining the obviously winning side even against their own opinions.
But had the interview with this Seldon been a success or was it a second stub of the toe to be added to the first? Namarti had not enjoyed having been brought along in order to be made to humbly apologize and he didn’t see that it had done any good.
Now Joranum sat there, silent, obviously lost in thought, gnawing at the edge of one thumb as though trying to draw some sort of mental nourishment from it.
“Jo-Jo,” said Namarti softly. He was one of the very few people who could address Joranum by the diminutive that the crowds shouted out endlessly in public. Joranum solicited the love of the mob in this way, among others, but he demanded respect from individuals in private, except for those special friends who had been with him from the start.
“Jo-Jo,” he said again.
Joranum looked up. “Yes, G.D., what is it?” He sounded a little testy.
“What are we going to do about this Seldon fellow, Jo-Jo?”
“Do? Nothing right now. He may join us.”
“Why wait? We can put pressure on him. We can pull a few strings at the University and make life miserable for him.”
“No no. So far, Demerzel has been letting us go our way. The fool is overconfident. The last thing we want to do, though, is to push him into action before we are quite ready. And a heavy-handed move against Seldon may do it. I suspect Demerzel places enormous importance on Seldon.”
“Because of this psychohistory you two talked about?”
“Indeed.”
“What is it? I have never heard of it.”
“Few people have. It’s a mathematical way of analyzing human society that ends by predicting the future.”
Namarti frowned and felt his body move slightly away from Joranum. Was this a joke of Joranum’s? Was this intended to make him laugh? Namarti had never been able to work out when or why people expected him to laugh. He had never had an urge to.
He said, “Predict the future? How?”
“Ah! If I knew that, what need would I have of Seldon?”
“Frankly I don’t believe it, Jo-Jo. How can you foretell the future? It’s fortune-telling.”
“I know, but after this Seldon broke up your little rally, I had him looked into. All the way. Eight years ago, he came to Trantor and presented a paper on psychohistory at a convention of mathematicians and then the whole thing died. It was never referred to again by anyone. Not even by Seldon.”
“It sounds as though there were nothing to it, then.”
“Oh no, just the reverse. If it had faded slowly, if it had been subjected to ridicule, I would have said there was nothing to it. But to be cut off suddenly and completely means that the whole thing has been placed in the deepest of freezes. That is why Demerzel may have been doing nothing to stop us. Perhaps he is not being guided by a foolish overconfidence; perhaps he is being guided by psychohistory, which must be predicting something that Demerzel plans to take advantage of at the right time. If so, we might fail unless we can make use of psychohistory ourselves.”
“Seldon claims it doesn’t exist.”
“Wouldn’t you if you were he?”
“I still say we ought to put pressure on him.”
“It would be useless, G.D. Didn’t you ever hear the story of the Ax of Venn?”
“No.”
“You would if you were from Nishaya. It’s a famous folktale back home. In brief, Venn was a woodcutter who had a magic ax that, with a single light blow, could chop down any tree. It was enormously valuable, but he never made any effort to hide it or preserve it—and yet it was never stolen, because no one could lift or swing the ax but Venn himself.
“Well, at the present moment, no one can handle psychohistory but Seldon himself. If he were on our side only because we had forced him, we could never be certain of his loyalty. Might he not urge a course of action that would seem to work in our favor but would be so subtly drawn that, after a while, we found ourselves quite suddenly destroyed. No, he must come to our side voluntarily and labor for us because he wishes us to win.”
“But how can we bring him around?”
“There’s Seldon’s son. Raych, I think he’s called. Did you observe him?”
“Not particularly.”
“G.D., G.D., you miss points if you don’t observe everything. That young man listened to me with his heart in his eyes. He was impressed. I could tell. If there’s one thing I can tell, it is just how I impress others. I know when I have shaken a mind, when I have edged someone toward conversion.”
Joranum smiled. It was not the pseudowarm ingratiating smile of his public demeanor. It was a genuine smile this time—cold, somehow, and menacing.
“We’ll see what we can do with Raych,” he said, “and if, through him, we can reach Seldon.”
8
Raych looked at Hari Seldon after the two politicians had gone and fingered his mustache. It gave him satisfaction to stroke it. Here in the Streeling Sector, some men wore mustaches, but they were usually thin despicable things of uncertain color—thin despicable things, even if dark. Most men did not wear them at all and suffered with naked upper lips. Seldon didn’t, for instance, and that was just as well. With his color of hair, a mustache would have been a travesty.
He watched Seldon closely, waiting for him to cease being lost in thought, and then found he could wait no longer.
“Dad!” he said.
Seldon looked up and said, “What?” He sounded a little annoyed at having his thoughts interrupted, Raych decided.
Raych said, “I don’t think it was ri
ght for you to see those two guys.”
“Oh? Why not?”
“Well, the thin guy, whatever his name is, was the guy you made trouble for at the Field. He can’t have liked it.”
“But he apologized.”
“He didn’t mean it. But the other guy, Joranum—he can be dangerous. What if they had had weapons?”
“What? Here in the University? In my office? Of course not. This isn’t Billibotton. Besides, if they had tried anything, I could have handled both of them together. Easily.”
“I don’t know, Dad,” said Raych dubiously. “You’re getting—”
“Don’t say it, you ungrateful monster,” said Seldon, lifting an admonishing finger. “You’ll sound just like your mother and I have enough of that from her. I am not getting old—or, at least, not that old. Besides, you were with me and you’re almost as skilled a Twister as I am.”
Raych’s nose wrinkled. “Twisting ain’t much good.” (It was no use. Raych heard himself speak and knew that, even eight years out of the morass of Dahl, he still slipped into using the Dahlite accent that marked him firmly as a member of the lower class. And he was short, too, to the point where he sometimes felt stunted. —But he had his mustache and no one ever patronized him twice.)
He said, “What are you going to do about Joranum?”
“For now, nothing.”
“Well, look, Dad, I saw Joranum on TrantorVision a couple of times. I even made some holotapes of his speeches. —Everyone is talking about him, so I thought I would see what he has to say. And, you know, he makes some kind of sense. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him, but he does make some kind of sense. He wants all sectors to have equal rights and equal opportunities—and there ain’t nothing wrong with that, is there?”
“Certainly not. All civilized people feel that way.”
“So why don’t we have that sort of stuff? Does the Emperor feel that way? Does Demerzel?”
“The Emperor and the First Minister have an entire Empire to worry about. They can’t concentrate all their efforts on Trantor itself. It’s easy for Joranum to talk about equality. He has no responsibilities. If he were in the position to rule, he would find that his efforts would be greatly diluted by an Empire of twenty-five million planets. Not only that, but he would find himself stopped at every point by the sectors themselves. Each one wants a great deal of equality for itself—but not much equality for others. Tell me, Raych, are you of the opinion that Joranum ought to have a chance to rule, just to show what he can do?”
Raych shrugged. “I don’t know. I wonder. —But if he had tried anything on you, I would have been at his throat before he could move two centimeters.”
“Your loyalty to me, then, exceeds your concern for the Empire.”
“Sure. You’re my dad.”
Seldon looked at Raych fondly, but behind that look he felt a trace of uncertainty. How far could Joranum’s nearly hypnotic influence go?
9
Hari Seldon sat back in his chair, the vertical back giving as he did so and allowing him to assume a half-reclining position. His hands were behind his head and his eyes were unfocused. His breathing was very soft, indeed.
Dors Venabili was at the other end of the room, with her viewer turned off and the microfilms back in place. She had been through a rather concentrated period of revision of her opinions on the Florina Incident in early Trantorian history and she found it rather restful to withdraw for a few moments and to speculate on what it was that Seldon was considering.
It had to be psychohistory. It would probably take him the rest of his life, tracking down the byways of this semichaotic technique, and he would end with it incomplete, leaving the task to others (to Amaryl, if that young man had not also worn himself out on the matter) and breaking his heart at the need to do that.
Yet it gave him a reason for living. He would live longer with the problem filling him from end to end—and that pleased her. Someday she would lose him, she knew, and she found that the thought afflicted her. It had not seemed it would at the start, when her task had been the simple one of protecting him for the sake of what he knew.
When had it become a matter of personal need? How could there be so personal a need? What was there about the man that caused her to feel uneasy when he was not in her sight, even when she knew he was safe so that the deeply ingrained orders within her were not called into action? His safety was all that she had been ordered to be concerned with. How did the rest intrude itself?
She had spoken of it to Demerzel long before, when the feeling had made itself unmistakable.
He had regarded her gravely and said, “You are complex, Dors, and there are no simple answers. In my life there have been several individuals whose presence made it easier for me to think, pleasanter to make my responses. I have tried to judge the ease of my responses in their presence and the unease of my responses in their final absence to see whether I was the net gainer or loser. In the process, one thing became plain. The pleasantness of their company outweighed the regret of their passing. On the whole, then, it is better to experience what you experience now than not to.”
She thought: Hari will someday leave a void, and each day that someday is closer, and I must not think of it.
It was to rid herself of the thought that she finally interrupted him. “What are you thinking of, Hari?”
“What?” Seldon focused his eyes with an apparent effort.
“Psychohistory, I assume. I imagine you’ve traced another blind pathway.”
“Well now. That’s not on my mind at all.” He laughed suddenly. “Do you want to know what I’m thinking of? —Hair!”
“Hair? Whose?”
“Right now, yours.” He was looking at her fondly.
“Is there something wrong with it? Should I dye it another color? Or perhaps, after all these years, it should go gray.”
“Come! Who needs or wants gray in your hair. —But it’s led me to other things. Nishaya, for instance.”
“Nishaya? What’s that?”
“It was never part of the pre-Imperial Kingdom of Trantor, so I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it. It’s a world, a small one. Isolated. Unimportant. Overlooked. I only know anything at all about it because I’ve taken the trouble to look it up. Very few worlds out of twenty-five million can really make much of a sustained splash, but I doubt that there’s another one as insignificant as Nishaya. Which is very significant, you see.”
Dors shoved her reference material to one side and said, “What is this new penchant you have for paradox, which you always tell me you detest? What is this significance of insignificance?”
“Oh, I don’t mind paradoxes when I perpetrate them. You see, Joranum comes from Nishaya.”
“Ah, it’s Joranum you’re concerned with.”
“Yes. I’ve been viewing some of his speeches—at Raych’s insistence. They don’t make very much sense, but the total effect can be almost hypnotic. Raych is very impressed by him.”
“I imagine that anyone of Dahlite origins would be, Hari. Joranum’s constant call for sector equality would naturally appeal to the downtrodden heatsinkers. You remember when we were in Dahl?”
“I remember it very well and of course I don’t blame the lad. It just bothers me that Joranum comes from Nishaya.”
Dors shrugged. “Well, Joranum has to come from somewhere and, conversely, Nishaya, like any other world, must send its people out at times, even to Trantor.”
“Yes, but, as I’ve said, I’ve taken the trouble to investigate Nishaya. I’ve even managed to make hyperspatial contact with some minor official—which cost a considerable quantity of credits that I cannot, in good conscience, charge to the department.”
“And did you find anything that was worth the credits?”
“I rather think so. You know, Joranum is always telling little stories to make his points, stories that are legends on his home planet of Nishaya. That serves a good purpose for him here on Trantor, since
it makes him appear to be a man of the people, full of homespun philosophy. Those tales litter his speeches. They make him appear to be from a small world, to have been brought up on an isolated farm surrounded by an untamed ecology. People like it, especially Trantorians, who would rather die than be trapped somewhere in an untamed ecology but who love to dream about one just the same.”
“But what of it all?”
“The odd point is that not one of the stories was familiar to the person I spoke to on Nishaya.”
“That’s not significant, Hari. It may be a small world, but it’s a world. What is current in Joranum’s birth section of the world may not be current in whatever place your official came from.”
“No no. Folktales, in one form or another, are usually worldwide. But aside from that, I had considerable trouble in understanding the fellow. He spoke Galactic Standard with a thick accent. I spoke to a few others on the world, just to check, and they all had the same accent.”
“And what of that?”
“Joranum doesn’t have it. He speaks a fairly good Trantorian. It’s a lot better than mine, actually. I have the Heliconian stress on the letter ‘r.’ He doesn’t. According to the records, he arrived on Trantor when he was nineteen. It is just impossible, in my opinion, to spend the first nineteen years of your life speaking that barbarous Nishayan version of Galactic Standard and then come to Trantor and lose it. However long he’s been here, some trace of the accent would have remained—Look at Raych and the way he lapses into his Dahlite way of speaking on occasion.”
“What do you deduce from all this?”
“What I deduce—what I’ve been sitting here all evening, deducing like a deduction machine—is that Joranum didn’t come from Nishaya at all. In fact, I think he picked Nishaya as the place to pretend to come from, simply because it is so backwoodsy, so out-of-the-way, that no one would think of checking it. He must have made a thorough computer search to find the one world least likely to allow him to be caught in a lie.”