Foundation's Edge f-6

by Isaac Asimov

  “This is clear to me,” said the First Speaker. “If your mathematics is correct, then in order for the Plan to have recovered as it did and to work as perfectly as it seems to be working, it would be necessary for us to be able to predict the reactions of small groups of people—even of individuals—with some degree of assurance.”

  “Quite so. Since the mathematics of psychohistory does not allow this, the Deviations should not have vanished and, even more so, should not have remained absent. You see, then, what I meant when I said earlier that the flaw in the Seldon Plan was its flawlessness.”

  The First Speaker said, “Either the Seldon Plan does possess Deviations, then, or there is something wrong in your mathematics. Since I must admit that the Seldon Plan has not shown Deviations in a century and more, it follows that there is something wrong with your mathematics—except that I detected no fallacies or missteps.”

  “You do wrong,” said Gendibal, “to exclude a third alternative. It is quite possible for the Seldon Plan to possess no Deviations and yet for there to be nothing wrong in my mathematics when it predicts that to be impossible.”

  “I fail to see the third alternative.”

  “Suppose the Seldon Plan is being controlled by means of a psychohistorical method so advanced that the reactions of small groups of people—even perhaps of individual persons—can be predicted, a method that we of the Second Foundation do not possess. Then, and only then, my mathematics would predict that the Seldon Plan should indeed experience no Deviations!”

  For a while (by Second Foundation standards) the First Speaker made no response. He said, “There is no such advanced psychohistorical method that is known to me or, I am certain from your manner, to you. If you and I know of none, the chance that any other Speaker, or any group of Speakers, has developed such a micropsychohistory—if I may call it that—and has kept it secret from the rest of the Table is infinitesimally small. Don’t you agree?”

  “I agree.”

  “Then either your analysis is wrong or else micropsychohistory is in the hands of some group outside the Second Foundation.”

  “Exactly, First Speaker, the latter alternative must be correct.”

  “Can you demonstrate the truth of such a statement?”

  “I cannot, in any formal way; but consider—Has there not already been a person who could affect the Seldon Plan by dealing with individual people?”

  “I presume you are referring to the Mule.”

  “Yes, certainly.”

  “The Mule could only disrupt. The problem here is that the Seldon Plan is working too well, considerably closer to perfection than your mathematics would allow. You would need an Anti-Mule—someone who is as capable of overriding the Plan as the Mule was, but who acts for the opposite motive—overriding not to disrupt but to perfect.”

  “Exactly, First Speaker. I wish I had thought of that expression. What was the Mule? A mutant. But where did he come from? How did he come to be? No one really knows. Might there not be more?”

  “Apparently not. The one thing that is best known about the Mule is that he was sterile. Hence his name. Or do you think that is a myth?”

  “I am not referring to descendants of the Mule. Might it not be that the Mule was an aberrant member of what is—or has now become—a sizable group of people with Mulish powers who—for some reason of their own—are not disrupting the Seldon Plan but supporting it?”

  “Why in the Galaxy should they support it?”

  “Why do we support it? We plan a Second Empire in which we—or, rather, our intellectual descendants—will be the decision-makers. If some other group is supporting the Plan even more efficiently than we are, they cannot be planning to leave the decision-making to us. They will make the decisions—but to what end? Ought we not try to find out what kind of a Second Empire they are sweeping us into?”

  “And how do you propose to find out?”

  “Well, why has the Mayor of Terminus exiled Golan Trevize? By doing so, she allows a possibly dangerous person to move freely about the Galaxy. That she does it out of motives of humanity, I cannot believe. Historically the rulers of the First Foundation have always acted realistically, which means, usually, without regard for ‘morality.’ One of their heroes—Salvor Hardin—counseled against morality, in fact. No, I think the Mayor acted under compulsion from agents of the Anti-Mules, to use your phrase. I think Trevize has been recruited by them and I think he is the spearhead of danger to us. Deadly danger.”

  And the First Speaker said, “By Seldon, you may be right. But how will we ever convince the Table of this?”

  “First Speaker, you underestimate your eminence.”

  6

  EARTH

  1.

  Trevize was hot and annoyed. He and Pelorat were sitting in the small dining area, having just completed their midday meal.

  Pelorat said, “We’ve only been in space two days and I find myself quite comfortable, although I miss fresh air, nature, and all that. Strange! Never seemed to notice all that sort of thing when it was all around me. Still between my wafer and that remarkable computer of yours, I have my entire library with me—or all that matters, at any rate. And I don’t feel the least bit frightened of being out in space now. Astonishing!”

  Trevize made a noncommittal sound. His eyes were inwardly focused.

  Pelorat said gently, “I don’t mean to intrude, Golan, but I don’t really think you’re listening. Not that I’m a particularly interesting person—always been a bit of a bore, you know. Still, you seem preoccupied in another way. —Are we in trouble? Needn’t be afraid to tell me, you know. Not much I could do, I suppose, but I won’t go into panic, dear fellow.”

  “In trouble?” Trevize seemed to come to his senses, frowning slightly.

  “I mean the ship. It’s a new model, so I suppose there could be something wrong.” Pelorat allowed himself a small, uncertain smile.

  Trevize shook his head vigorously. “Stupid of me to leave you in such uncertainty, Janov. There’s nothing wrong at all with the ship. It’s working perfectly. It’s just that I’ve been looking for a hyper-relay.”

  “Ah, I see. —Except that I don’t. What is a hyper-relay?”

  “Well, let me explain, Janov. I am in communication with Terminus. At least, I can be anytime I wish and Terminus can, in reverse, be in communication with us. They know the ship’s location, having observed its trajectory. Even if they had not, they could locate us by scanning nearspace for mass, which would warn them of the presence of a ship or, possibly, a meteoroid. But they could further detect an energy pattern, which would not only distinguish a ship from a meteoroid but would identify a particular ship, for no two ships make use of energy in quite the same way. In some way, our pattern remains characteristic, no matter what appliances or instruments we turn on and off. The ship may be unknown, of course, but if it is a ship whose energy pattern is on record in Terminus—as ours is—it can be identified as soon as detected.”

  Pelorat said, “It seems to me, Golan, that the advance of civilization is nothing but an exercise in the limiting of privacy.”

  “You may be right. Sooner or later, however, we must move through hyperspace or we will be condemned to remain within a parsec or two of Terminus for the rest of our lives. We will then be unable to engage in interstellar travel to any but the slightest degree. In passing through hyperspace, on the other hand, we undergo a discountinuity in ordinary space. We pass from here to there—and I mean across a gap of hundreds of parsecs sometimes—in an instant of experienced time. We are suddenly enormously far away in a direction that is very difficult to predict and, in a practical sense, we can no longer be detected.”

  “I see that. Yes.”

  “Unless, of course, they have planted a hyper-relay on board. A hyper-relay sends out a signal through hyperspace—a signal characteristic of this ship—and the authorities on Terminus would know where we are at all times. That answers your question, you see. There would be now
here in the Galaxy we could hide and no combination of Jumps through hyperspace would make it possible for us to evade their instruments.”

  “But, Golan,” said Pelorat softly, “don’t we want Foundation protection?”

  “Yes, Janov, but only when we ask for it. You said the advance of civilization meant the continuing restriction of privacy. —Well, I don’t want to be that advanced. I want freedom to move undetected as I wish—unless and until I want protection. So I would feel better, a great deal better, if there weren’t a hyper-relay on board.”

  “Have you found one, Golan?”

  “No, I have not. If I had, I might be able to render it inoperative somehow.”

  “Would you know one if you saw it?”

  “That’s one of the difficulties. I might not be able to recognize it. I know what a hyper-relay looks like generally and I know ways of testing a suspicious object—but this is a late-model ship, designed for special tasks. A hyper-relay may have been incorporated into its design in such a way as to show no signs of its presence.”

  “On the other hand, maybe there is no hyper-relay present and that’s why you haven’t found it.”

  “I don’t dare assume that and I don’t like the thought of making a Jump until I know.”

  Pelorat looked enlightened. “That’s why we’ve just been drifting through space. I’ve been wondering why we haven’t Jumped. I’ve heard about Jumps, you know. Been a little nervous about it, actually—been wondering when you’d order me to strap myself in or take a pill or something like that.”

  Trevize managed a smile. “No need for apprehension. These aren’t ancient times. On a ship like this, you just leave it all to the computer. You give it your instructions and it does the rest. You won’t know that anything has happened at all, except that the view of space will suddenly change. If you’ve ever seen a slide show, you’ll know what happens when one slide is suddenly projected in place of another. Well, that’s what the Jump will seem like.”

  “Dear me. One won’t feel anything? Odd! I find that somewhat disappointing.”

  “I’ve never felt anything and the ships I’ve been in haven’t been as advanced as this baby of ours. —But it’s not because of the hyper-relay that we haven’t Jumped. We have to get a bit further away from Terminus—and from the sun, too. The farther we are from any massive object, the easier to control the Jump, to make re-emergence into space at exactly desired coordinates. In an emergency, you might risk a Jump when you’re only two hundred kilometers off the surface of a planet and just trust to luck that you’ll end up safely. Since there is much more safe than unsafe volume in the Galaxy, you can reasonably count on safety. Still, there’s always the possibility that random factors will cause you to reemerge within a few million kilometers of a large star or in the Galactic core—and you will find yourself fried before you can blink. The further away you are from mass, the smaller those factors and the less likely it is that anything untoward will happen.”

  “In that case, I commend your caution. We’re not in a tearing hurry.”

  “Exactly. —Especially since I would dearly love to find the hyper-relay before I make a move. —Or find a way of convincing myself there is no hyper-relay.”

  Trevize seemed to drift off again into his private concentration and Pelorat said, raising his voice a little to surmount the preoccupation barrier, “How much longer do we have?”

  “What?”

  “I mean, when would you make the Jump if you had no concerns over the hyper-relay, my dear chap?”

  “At our present speed and trajectory, I should say on our fourth day out. I’ll work out the proper time on the computer.”

  “Well, then, you still have two days for your search. May I make a suggestion?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I have always found in my own work—quite different from yours, of course, but possibly we may generalize—that zeroing in tightly on a particular problem is self-defeating. Why not relax and talk about something else, and your unconscious mind—not laboring under the weight of concentrated thought—may solve the problem for you.”

  Trevize looked momentarily annoyed and then laughed. “Well, why not? —Tell me, Professor, what got you interested in Earth? What brought up this odd notion of a particular planet from which we all started?”

  “Ah!” Pelorat nodded his head reminiscently. “That’s going back a while. Over thirty years. I planned to be a biologist when I was going to college. I was particularly interested in the variation of species on different worlds. The variation, as you know—well, maybe you don’t know, so you won’t mind if I tell you—is very small. All forms of life throughout the Galaxy—at least all that we have yet encountered—share a water-based protein / nucleic acid chemistry.”

  Trevize said, “I went to military college, which emphasized nucleonics and gravitics, but I’m not exactly a narrow specialist. I know a bit about the chemical basis of life. We were taught that water, proteins, and nucleic acids are the only possible basis for life.”

  “That, I think, is an unwarranted conclusion. It is safer to say that no other form of life has yet been found—or, at any rate, been recognized—and let it go at that. What is more surprising is that indigenous species—that is, species found on only a single planet and no other—are few in number. Most of the species that exist, including Homo sapiens in particular, are distributed through all or most of the inhabited worlds of the Galaxy and are closely related biochemically, physiologically, and morphologically. The indigenous species, on the other hand, are widely separated in characteristics from both the widespread forms and from each other.”

  “Well, what of that?”

  “The conclusion is that one world in the Galaxy—one world—is different from the rest. Tens of millions of worlds in the Galaxy—no one knows exactly how many—have developed life. It was simple life, sparse life, feeble life—not very variegated, not easily maintained, and not easily spread. One world, one world alone, developed life in millions of species—easily millions—some of it very specialized, highly developed, very prone to multiplication and to spreading, and including us. We were intelligent enough to form a civilization, to develop hyperspatial flight, and to colonize the Galaxy—and, in spreading through the Galaxy, we took many other forms of life—forms related to each other and to ourselves—along with us.”

  “If you stop to think of it,” said Trevize rather indifferently, “I suppose that stands to reason. I mean, here we are in a human Galaxy. If we assume that it all started on some one world, then that one world would have to be different. But why not? The chances of life developing in that riotous fashion must be very slim indeed—perhaps one in a hundred million—so the chances are that it happened in one life-bearing world out of a hundred million. It had to be one.”

  “But what is it that made that particular one world so different from the others?” said Pelorat excitedly. “What were the conditions that made it unique?”

  “Merely chance, perhaps. After all, human beings and the life-forms they brought with them now exist on tens of millions of planets, all of which can support life, so all those worlds must be good enough.”

  “No! Once the human species had evolved, once it had developed a technology, once it had toughened itself in the hard struggle for survival, it could then adapt to life on any world that is in the least hospitable—on Terminus, for instance. But can you imagine intelligent life having developed on Terminus? When Terminus was first occupied by human beings in the days of the Encyclopedists, the highest form of plant life it produced was a moss-like growth on rocks; the highest forms of animal life were small coral-like growths in the ocean and insectlike flying organisms on land. We just about wiped them out and stocked sea and land with fish and rabbits and goats and grass and grain and trees and so on. We have nothing left of the indigenous life, except for what exists in zoos and aquaria.”

  “Hmm,” said Trevize.

  Pelorat stared at him for a full minut
e, then sighed and said, “You don’t really care, do you? Remarkable! I find no one who does, somehow. My fault, I think. I cannot make it interesting, even though it interests me so much.”

  Trevize said, “It’s interesting. It is. But—but—so what?”

  “It doesn’t strike you that it might be interesting scientifically to study a world that gave rise to the only really flourishing indigenous ecological balance the Galaxy has ever seen?”

  “Maybe, if you’re a biologist. —I’m not, you see. You must forgive me.”

  “Of course, dear fellow. It’s just that I never found any biologists who were interested, either. I told you I was a biology major. I took it up with my professor and he wasn’t interested. He told me to turn to some practical problem. That so disgusted me I took up history instead—which had been rather a hobby of mine from my teenage years, in any case—and tackled the ‘Origin Question’ from that angle.”

  Trevize said, “But at least it has given you a lifework, so you must be pleased that your professor was so unenlightened.”

  “Yes, I suppose one might look at it that way. And the lifework is an interesting one, of which I have never tired. —But I do wish it interested you. I hate this feeling of forever talking to myself.”

  Trevize leaned his head back and laughed heartily.

  Pelorat’s quiet face took on a trace of hurt. “Why are you laughing at me?”

  “Not you, Janov,” said Trevize. “I was laughing at my own stupidity. Where you’re concerned, I am completely grateful. You were perfectly right, you know.”

  “To take up the importance of human origins?”

  “No, no. —Well, yes, that too. —But I meant you were right to tell me to stop consciously thinking of my problem and to turn my mind elsewhere. It worked. When you were talking about the manner in which life evolved, it finally occurred to me that I knew how to find that hyper-relay—if it existed.”