Prelude to Foundation f-1

by Isaac Asimov

  It was clear to Seldon that he was beginning to like this young woman and that he was gladly seizing on the chance to be educated by her. He was also aware of the fact that he had reached a turning point in his mind.

  He had promised Hummin to attempt to work out a practical psychohistory, but that had been a promise of the mind and not the emotions. Now he was determined to seize psychohistory by the throat—if he had to—in order to make it practical. That, perhaps, was the influence of Dors Venabili.

  Or had Hummin counted on that? Hummin, Seldon decided, might well be a most formidable person.

  19

  Cleon I had finished dinner, which, unfortunately, had been a formal state affair. It meant he had to spend time talking to various officials—not one of whom he knew or recognized—in set phrases designed to give each one his stroke and so activate his loyalty to the crown. It also meant that his food reached him but lukewarm and had cooled still further before he could eat it.

  There had to be some way of avoiding that. Eat first, perhaps, on his own or with one or two close intimates with whom he could relax and then attend a formal dinner at which he could merely be served an imported pear. He loved pears. But would that offend the guests who would take the Emperor’s refusal to eat with them as a studied insult?

  His wife, of course, was useless in this respect, for her presence would but further exacerbate his unhappiness. He had married her because she was a member of a powerful dissident family who could be expected to mute their dissidence as a result of the union, though Cleon devoutly hoped that she, at least, would not do so. He was perfectly content to have her live her own life in her own quarters except for the necessary efforts to initiate an heir, for, to tell the truth, he didn’t like her. And now that an heir had come, he could ignore her completely.

  He chewed at one of a handful of nuts he had pocketed from the table on leaving and said, “Demerzel!”

  “Sire?”

  Demerzel always appeared at once when Cleon called. Whether he hovered constantly in earshot at the door or he drew close because the instinct of subservience somehow alerted him to a possible call in a few minutes, he did appear and that, Cleon thought idly, was the important thing. Of course, there were those times when Demerzel had to be away on Imperial business. Cleon always hated those absences. They made him uneasy.

  “What happened to that mathematician? I forget his name.”

  Demerzel, who surely knew the man the Emperor had in mind, but who perhaps wanted to study how much the Emperor remembered, said, “What mathematician is it that you have in mind, Sire?”

  Cleon waved an impatient hand. “The fortune-teller. The one who came to see me.”

  “The one we sent for?”

  “Well, sent for, then. He did come to see me. You were going to take care of the matter, as I recall. Have you?”

  Demerzel cleared his throat. “Sire, I have tried to.”

  “Ah! That means you have failed, doesn’t it?” In a way, Cleon felt pleased. Demerzel was the only one of his Ministers who made no bones of failure. The others never admitted failure, and since failure was nevertheless common, it became difficult to correct. Perhaps Demerzel could afford to be more honest because he failed so rarely. If it weren’t for Demerzel, Cleon thought sadly, he might never know what honesty sounded like. Perhaps no Emperor ever knew and perhaps that was one of the reasons that the Empire—

  He pulled his thoughts away and, suddenly nettled at the other’s silence and wanting an admission, since he had just admired Demerzel’s honesty in his mind, said sharply, “Well, you have failed, haven’t you?”

  Demerzel did not flinch. “Sire, I have failed in part. I felt that to have him here on Trantor where things are—difficult—might present us with problems. It was easy to consider that he might be more conveniently placed on his home planet. He was planning to return to that home planet the next day, but there was always the chance of complications—of his deciding to remain on Trantor—so I arranged to have two young alley men place him on his plane that very day.”

  “Do you know alley men, Demerzel?” Cleon was amused.

  “It is important, Sire, to be able to reach many kinds of people, for each type has its own variety of use—alley men not the least. As it happens, they did not succeed.”

  “And why was that?”

  “Oddly enough, Seldon was able to fight them off.”

  “The mathematician could fight?”

  “Apparently, mathematics and the martial arts are not necessarily mutually exclusive. I found out, not soon enough, that his world, Helicon, is noted for it—martial arts, not mathematics. The fact that I did not learn this earlier was indeed a failure, Sire, and I can only crave your pardon.”

  “But then, I suppose the mathematician left for his home planet the next day as he had planned.”

  “Unfortunately, the episode backfired. Taken aback by the event, he decided not to return to Helicon, but remained on Trantor. He may have been advised to this effect by a passerby who happened to be present on the occasion of the fight. That was another unlooked-for complication.”

  The Emperor Cleon frowned. “Then our mathematician—what is his name?”

  “Seldon, Sire. Hari Seldon.”

  “Then this Seldon is out of reach.”

  “In a sense, Sire. We have traced his movements and he is now at Streeling University. While there, he is untouchable.”

  The Emperor scowled and reddened slightly. “I am annoyed at that word—‘untouchable.’ There should be nowhere in the Empire my hand cannot reach. Yet here, on my own world, you tell me someone can be untouchable. Insufferable!”

  “Your hand can reach to the University, Sire. You can send in your army and pluck out this Seldon at any moment you desire. To do so, however, is . . . undesirable.”

  “Why don’t you say ‘impractical,’ Demerzel. You sound like the mathematician speaking of his fortune-telling. It is possible, but impractical. I am an Emperor who finds everything possible, but very little practical. Remember, Demerzel, if reaching Seldon is not practical, reaching you is entirely so.”

  Eto Demerzel let this last comment pass. The “man behind the throne” knew his importance to the Emperor; he had heard such threats before. He waited in silence while the Emperor glowered. Drumming his fingers against the arm of his chair, Cleon asked, “Well then, what good is this mathematician to us if he is at Streeling University?”

  “It may perhaps be possible, Sire, to snatch use out of adversity. At the University, he may decide to work on his psychohistory.”

  “Even though he insists it’s impractical?”

  “He may be wrong and he may find out that he is wrong. And if he finds out that he is wrong, we would find some way of getting him out of the University. It is even possible he would join us voluntarily under those circumstances.”

  The Emperor remained lost in thought for a while, then said, “And what if someone else plucks him out before we do?”

  “Who would want to do that, Sire?” asked Demerzel softly.

  “The Mayor of Wye, for one,” said Cleon, suddenly shouting. “He dreams still of taking over the Empire.”

  “Old age has drawn his fangs, Sire.”

  “Don’t you believe it, Demerzel.”

  “And we have no reason for supposing he has any interest in Seldon or even knows of him, Sire.”

  “Come on, Demerzel. If we heard of the paper, so could Wye. If we see the possible importance of Seldon, so could Wye.”

  “If that should happen,” said Demerzel, “or even if there should be a reasonable chance of its happening, then we would be justified in taking strong measures.”

  “How strong?”

  Demerzel said cautiously, “It might be argued that rather than have Seldon in Wye’s hands, we might prefer to have him in no one’s hands. To have him cease to exist, Sire.”

  “To have him killed, you mean,” said Cleon.

  “If you wish to put
it that way, Sire,” said Demerzel.

  20

  Hari Seldon sat back in his chair in the alcove that had been assigned to him through Dors Venabili’s intervention. He was dissatisfied.

  As a matter of fact, although that was the expression he used in his mind, he knew that it was a gross underestimation of his feelings. He was not simply dissatisfied, he was furious—all the more so because he wasn’t sure what it was he was furious about. Was it about the histories? The writers and compilers of histories? The worlds and people that made the histories?

  Whatever the target of his fury, it didn’t really matter. What counted was that his notes were useless, his new knowledge was useless, everything was useless.

  He had been at the University now for almost six weeks. He had managed to find a computer outlet at the very start and with it had begun work—without instruction, but using the instincts he had developed over a number of years of mathematical labors. It had been slow and halting, but there was a certain pleasure in gradually determining the routes by which he could get his questions answered.

  Then came the week of instruction with Dors, which had taught him several dozen shortcuts and had brought with it two sets of embarrassments. The first set included the sidelong glances he received from the undergraduates, who seemed contemptuously aware of his greater age and who were disposed to frown a bit at Dors’s constant use of the honorific “Doctor” in addressing him.

  “I don’t want them to think,” she said, “that you’re some backward perpetual student taking remedial history.”

  “But surely you’ve established the point. Surely, a mere ‘Seldon’ is sufficient now.”

  “No,” Dors said and smiled suddenly. “Besides, I like to call you ‘Dr. Seldon.’ I like the way you look uncomfortable each time.”

  “You have a peculiar sense of sadistic humor.”

  “Would you deprive me?”

  For some reason, that made him laugh. Surely, the natural reaction would have been to deny sadism. Somehow he found it pleasant that she accepted the ball of conversation and fired it back. The thought led to a natural question. “Do you play tennis here at the University?”

  “We have courts, but I don’t play.”

  “Good. I’ll teach you. And when I do, I’ll call you Professor Venabili.”

  “That’s what you call me in class anyway.”

  “You’ll be surprised how ridiculous it will sound on the tennis court.”

  “I may get to like it.”

  “In that case, I will try to find what else you might get to like.”

  “I see you have a peculiar sense of salacious humor.”

  She had put that ball in that spot deliberately and he said, “Would you deprive me?”

  She smiled and later did surprisingly well on the tennis court. “Are you sure you never played tennis?” he said, puffing, after one session.

  “Positive,” she said.

  The other set of embarrassments was more private. He learned the necessary techniques of historical research and then burned—in private—at his earlier attempts to make use of the computer’s memory. It was simply an entirely different mind-set from that used in mathematics. It was equally logical, he supposed, since it could be used, consistently and without error, to move in whatever direction he wanted to, but it was a substantially different brand of logic from that to which he was accustomed.

  But with or without instructions, whether he stumbled or moved in swiftly, he simply didn’t get any results.

  His annoyance made itself felt on the tennis court. Dors quickly reached the stage where it was no longer necessary to lob easy balls at her to give her time to judge direction and distance. That made it easy to forget that she was just a beginner and he expressed his anger in his swing, firing the ball back at her as though it were a laser beam made solid.

  She came trotting up to the net and said, “I can understand your wanting to kill me, since it must annoy you to watch me miss the shots so often. How is it, though, that you managed to miss my head by about three centimeters that time? I mean, you didn’t even nick me. Can’t you do better than that?”

  Seldon, horrified, tried to explain, but only managed to sound incoherent.

  She said, “Look. I’m not going to face any other returns of yours today, so why don’t we shower and then get together for some tea and whatever and you can tell me just what you were trying to kill. If it wasn’t my poor head and if you don’t get the real victim off your chest, you’ll be entirely too dangerous on the other side of the net for me to want to serve as a target.”

  Over tea he said, “Dors, I’ve scanned history after history; just scanned, browsed. I haven’t had time for deep study yet. Even so, it’s become obvious. All the book-films concentrate on the same few events.”

  “Crucial ones. History-making ones.”

  “That’s just an excuse. They’re copying each other. There are twenty-five million worlds out there and there’s significant mention of perhaps twenty-five.”

  Dors said, “You’re reading general Galactic histories only. Look up the special histories of some of the minor worlds. On every world, however small, the children are taught local histories before they ever find out there’s a great big Galaxy outside. Don’t you yourself know more about Helicon, right now, than you know about the rise of Trantor or of the Great Interstellar War?”

  “That sort of knowledge is limited too,” said Seldon gloomily. “I know Heliconian geography and the stories of its settlement and of the malfeasance and misfeasance of the planet Jennisek—that’s our traditional enemy, though our teachers carefully told us that we ought to say ‘traditional rival.’ But I never learned anything about the contributions of Helicon to general Galactic history.”

  “Maybe there weren’t any.”

  “Don’t be silly. Of course there were. There may not have been great, huge space battles involving Helicon or crucial rebellions or peace treaties. There may not have been some Imperial competitor making his base on Helicon. But there must have been subtle influences. Surely, nothing can happen anywhere without affecting everywhere else. Yet there’s nothing I can find to help me. —See here, Dors. In mathematics, all can be found in the computer; everything we know or have found out in twenty thousand years. In history, that’s not so. Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing.”

  “But, Hari,” said Dors, “mathematics is an orderly thing of human invention. One thing follows from another. There are definitions and axioms, all of which are known. It is . . . it is . . . all one piece. History is different. It is the unconscious working out of the deeds and thoughts of quadrillions of human beings. Historians must pick and choose.”

  “Exactly,” said Seldon, “but I must know all of history if I am to work out the laws of psychohistory.”

  “In that case, you won’t ever formulate the laws of psychohistory.”

  That was yesterday. Now Seldon sat in his chair in his alcove, having spent another day of utter failure, and he could hear Dors’s voice saying, “In that case, you won’t ever formulate the laws of psychohistory.”

  It was what he had thought to begin with and if it hadn’t been for Hummin’s conviction to the contrary and his odd ability to fire Seldon with his own blaze of conviction, Seldon would have continued to think so.

  And yet neither could he quite let go. Might there not be some way out?

  He couldn’t think of any.

  UPPERSIDE

  TRANTOR— . . . It is almost never pictured as a world seen from space. It has long since captured the general mind of humanity as a world of the interior and the image is that of the human hive that existed under the domes. Yet there was an exterior as well and there are holographs that still remain that were taken from space and show varying degrees of detail (see Figures 14 and 15). Note that the surface of the domes, the interface of the vast city and the overlying atmosphere, a surface referred to in its time
as “Upperside,” is . . .

  ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

  21

  Yet the following day found Hari Seldon back in the library. For one thing, there was his promise to Hummin. He had promised to try and he couldn’t very well make it a halfhearted process. For another, he owed something to himself too. He resented having to admit failure. Not yet, at least. Not while he could plausibly tell himself he was following up leads.

  So he stared at the list of reference book-films he had not yet checked through and tried to decide which of the unappetizing number had the slightest chance of being useful to him. He had about decided that the answer was “none of the above” and saw no way out but to look at samples of each when he was startled by a gentle tap against the alcove wall.

  Seldon looked up and found the embarrassed face of Lisung Randa peering at him around the edge of the alcove opening. Seldon knew Randa, had been introduced to him by Dors, and had dined with him (and with others) on several occasions.

  Randa, an instructor in psychology, was a little man, short and plump, with a round cheerful face and an almost perpetual smile. He had a sallow complexion and the narrowed eyes so characteristic of people on millions of worlds. Seldon knew that appearance well, for there were many of the great mathematicians who had borne it, and he had frequently seen their holograms. Yet on Helicon he had never seen one of these Easterners. (By tradition they were called that, though no one knew why; and the Easterners themselves were said to resent the term to some degree, but again no one knew why.)

  “There’s millions of us here on Trantor,” Randa had said, smiling with no trace of self-consciousness, when Seldon, on first meeting him, had not been able to repress all trace of startled surprise. “You’ll also find a lot of Southerners—dark skins, tightly curled hair. Did you ever see one?”

  “Not on Helicon,” muttered Seldon.