"I tell you all this so that you can spare me unnecessary talk. With all this, how do you manage to conclude that the Seldon Plan is meaningless? It is without flaw. The mere fact that it survived the Century of Deviations-with all due respect to Palver's genius-is the best evidence we have that it is without flaw. Where is its weakness, young man, that you should brand the Plan as meaningless?"

Gendibal stood stiffly upright. "You are right, First Speaker. The Seldon Plan has no flaw."

"You withdraw your remark, then?"

"No, First Speaker. Its lack of flaw is its flaw. Its flawlessness is fatal!"

The First Speaker regarded Gendibal with equanimity. He had learned to control his expressions and it amused him to watch Gendibal's ineptness in this respect. At every exchange, the young man did his best to hide his feelings, but each time, he exposed them completely.

Shandess studied him dispa.s.sionately. He was a thin young man, not much above the middle height, with thin lips and bony, restless hands. He had dark, humorless eyes that tended to smolder.

He would be, the First Speaker knew, a hard person to talk out of his convictions.

"You speak in paradoxes, Speaker," he said.

"It sounds like a paradox, First Speaker, because there is so much about Seldon's Plan that we take for granted and accept in so unquestioning a manner."

"And what is it you question, then?"

"The Plan's very basis. We all know that the Plan will not work if its nature-or even its existence-is known to too many of those whose behavior it is designed to predict."

"I believe Hari Seldon understood that. I even believe he made it one of his two fundamental axioms of psychohistory."

"He did not antic.i.p.ate the Mule, First Speaker, and therefore he could not antic.i.p.ate the extent to which the Second Foundation would become an obsession with the people of the First Foundation, once they had been shown its importance by the Mule."

"Hari Seldon-" and for one moment, the First Speaker shuddered and fell silent.

Hari Seldon's physical appearance was known to all the members of the Second Foundation. Reproductions of him in two and in three dimensions, photographic and holographic, in bas-relief and in the round, sitting and standing, were ubiquitous. They all represented him in the last few years of his life. All were of an old and benign man, face wrinkled with the wisdom of the aged, symbolizing the quintessence of well-ripened genius.

But the First Speaker now recalled seeing a photograph reputed to be Seldon as a young man. The photograph was neglected, since the thought of a young Seldon was almost a contradiction in terms. Yet Shandess had seen it, and the thought had suddenly come to him that Stor Gendibal looked remarkably like the young Seldon.

Ridiculous? It was the sort of superst.i.tion that afflicted everyone, now and then, however rational they might be. He was deceived by a fugitive similarity. If he had the photograph before him, he would see at once that the similarity was an illusion. Yet why should that silly thought have occurred to him now?

He recovered. It had been a momentary quaver-a transient derailment of thought-too brief to be noticed by anyone but a Speaker. Gendibal might interpret it as he pleased.

"Hari Seldon," he said very firmly the second time, "knew well that there were an infinite number of possibilities he could not foresee, and it was for that reason that he set up the Second Foundation. We did not foresee the Mule either, but tie recognized him once he was upon us and we stopped him. We did not foresee the subsequent obsession of the First Foundation with ourselves, but we saw it when it came and we stopped it. What is it about this that you can possibly find fault with?"

"For one thing," said Gendibal, "the obsession of the First Foundation with us is not yet over."

There was a distinct ebb in the deference with which Gendibal had been speaking. He had noted the quaver in the First Speaker's voice (Shandess decided) and had interpreted it as uncertainty. That had to be countered.

The First Speaker said briskly, "Let me antic.i.p.ate. There would be people on the First Foundation, who-comparing the hectic difficulties of the first nearly four centuries of existence with the placidity of the last twelve decades-will come to the conclusion that this cannot be unless the Second Foundation is taking good care of the Plan-and, of course, they will be right in so concluding. They will decide that the Second Foundation may not have been destroyed after all-and, of course, they will be right in so deciding. In fact, we've received reports that there is a young man on the First Foundation's capital world of Terminus, an official of their government, who is quite convinced of all this. -1 forget his name-"

"Golan Trevize," said Gendibal softly. "It was I who first noted the matter in the reports, and it was I who directed the matter to your office."

"Oh?" said the First Speaker with exaggerated politeness. "And how did your attention come to be focused on him?"

"One of our agents on Terminus sent in a tedious report on the newly elected members of their Council-a perfectly routine matter usually sent to and ignored by all Speakers. This one caught my eye because of the nature of the description of one new Councilman, Golan Trevize. From the description, he seemed unusually self-a.s.sured and combative."

"You recognized a kindred spirit, did you?"

"Not at all," said Gendibal, stiffly. "He seemed a reckless person who enjoyed doing ridiculous things, a description which does not apply to me. In any case, I directed an in-depth study. It did not take long for me to decide that he would have made good material for us if he had been recruited at an early age."

"Perhaps," said the First Speaker, "but you know that we do not recruit on Terminus."

"I know that well. In any case, even without our training, he has an unusual intuition. It is, of course, thoroughly undisciplined. I was, therefore. not particularly surprised that he ??ad grasped the fact that the Second Foundation still exists. I felt it important enough, however, to direct a memo on the matter to your office."

"And I take it from your manner that there is a new development?"

"Having grasped the fact that we still exist, thanks to his highly developed intuitive abilities, he then used it in a characteristically undisciplined fashion and has, as a result, been exiled from Terminus."

The First Speaker lifted his eyebrows. "You stop suddenly. You want me to interpret the significance. Without using my computer, let me mentally apply a rough approximation of Seldon's equations and guess that a shrewd Mayor, capable of suspecting that the Second Foundation exists, prefers not to have an undisciplined individual shout it to the Galaxy and thus alert said Second Foundation to the danger. I take it Branno the Bronze decided that Terminus is safer with Trevize off the planet."

"She might have imprisoned Trevize or had him quietly a.s.sa.s.sinated."

"The equations are not reliable when applied to individuals, as you well know. They deal only with humanity in ma.s.s. Individual behavior is therefore unpredictable and it is possible to a.s.sume that the Mayor is a humane individual who feels imprisonment, let alone a.s.sa.s.sination, is unmerciful."

Gendibal said nothing for a while. It was an eloquent nothing, and he maintained it just long enough for the First Speaker to grow uncertain of himself but not so long as to induce a defensive anger.

He timed it to the second and then he said, "That is not my interpretation. I believe that Trevize, at this moment, represents the cutting edge of the greatest threat to the Second Foundation in its history-a greater danger even than the Mule!"

Gendibal was satisfied. The force of the statement had worked well. The First Speaker had not expected it and was caught off-balance. From this moment, the whip hard was Gendibal's. If he had any doubt of that at all, it vanished with Shandess's next remark.

"Does this have anything to do with your contention that Seldon's Plan is meaningless?"

Gendibal gambled on complete certainty, driving in with a didacticism that would not allow the First Speaker to recover. He said, "First Speaker, it is an article of faith that it was Preem Palver who restored the Plan to its course after the wild aberrance of the Century of Deviations. Study the Prime Radiant and you will see that the Deviations did not disappear till two decades after Palver's death and that not one Deviation has appeared since. The credit might rest with the First Speakers since Palver, but that is improb- "Improbable? Granted none of us have been Palvers, but-why "Will you allow me to demonstrate, First Speaker? Using the mathematics of psychohistory, I can clearly show that the chances of total disappearance of Deviation are too microscopically small to have taken place through anything the Second Foundation can do. You need not allow me if you lack the time or the desire for the demonstration, which will take half an hour of close attention. I can, as an alternative, call for a full meeting of the Speaker's Table and demonstrate it there. But that would mean a loss of time for me and unnecessary controversy."

"Yes, and a possible loss of face for me. -Demonstrate the matter to me now. But a word of warning." The First Speaker was making a heroic effort to recover. "If what you show me is worthless, I will not forget that."

"If it proves worthless," said Gendibal with an effortless pride that overrode the other, "you will have my resignation on the spot."

It took, actually, considerably more than half an hour, for the First Speaker questioned the mathematics with near-savage intensity.

Gendibal made up some of the time by his smooth use of his MicroRadiant. The device-which could locate any portion of the vast Plan holographically and with required n either wall nor desk sized console-had come into use only a decade ago and the First Speaker had never learned the knack of handling it. Gendibal was aware of that. The First Speaker knew that he was.

Gendibal hooked it over his rigth thumb and manipulated it with his four fingers, using his hand deliberately as though it were a musical instrument. (Indeed, he had written a small paper on the a.n.a.logies. ) The equations Gendibal produced (and found with sure ease) moved back and forth snakily to accompany his commentary. He could obtain definitions, if necessary; set up axioms; and produce graphics, both two-dimensional and three-dimensional (to say nothing of projections of multidimensional relationships).

Gendibal's commentary was clear and incisive and the First Speaker abandoned the game. He was won over and said, "I do not recall having seen an a.n.a.lysis of this nature. Whose work is it?"

"First Speaker, it is my own. I have published the basic mathematics involved."

"Very clever, Speaker Gendibal. Something like this will put you in line for the First Speakership, should I die-or retire."

"I have given that matter no thought, First Speaker-but since there's no chance of your believing that, I withdraw the comment. I have given it thought and I hope I will be First Speaker, since whoever succeeds to the post must follow a procedure that only I see clearly."

"Yes," said the First Speaker, "inappropriate modesty can be very dangerous. What procedure? Perhaps the present First Speaker may follow it, too. If I am too old to have made the creative leap you have, I am not so old that I cannot follow your direction."

It was a graceful surrender and Gendibal's heart warned, rather unexpectedly, toward the older man, even as he realized that this was precisely the First Speaker's intention.

"Thank you, First Speaker, for I will need your help badly. I cannot expect to sway the Table without your enlightened leadership." (Grace for grace.) "I a.s.sume, then, that you have already seen from what I have demonstrated that it is impossible for the Century of Deviations to have been corrected under our policies or for all Deviations to have ceased since then."

"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 a.s.surance."

"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 a.n.a.lysis 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."

CHAPTER SIX

EARTH

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 s.p.a.ce 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 round 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 s.p.a.ce 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 hit 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 near-s.p.a.ce for ma.s.s, 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 hypers.p.a.ce or we will be condemned to remain within a pa.r.s.ec 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 pa.s.sing through hypers.p.a.ce, on the other hand, we undergo a discontinuity in ordinary s.p.a.ce. We pa.s.s from here to there-and I mean across a gap of hundreds of pa.r.s.ecs 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 hyperrelay sends out a signal through hypers.p.a.ce - 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 nowhere in the Galaxy we could hide and no combination of jumps through hypers.p.a.ce would make it possible for us to evade their instruments:"

"But, Golan," bald Pelorat softly, "don't 13'e 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?"