Isaac Asimov - Foundation's Edge

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 anticipate the Mule, First Speaker, and therefore he could not anticipate 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 superstition 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 we 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 anticipate. 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. —I 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-assured 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 indepth 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 had 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 assassinated.”

“The equations are not reliable when applied to individuals, as you well know. They deal only with humanity in mass. Individual behavior is therefore unpredictable and it is possible to assume that the Mayor is a humane individual who feels imprisonment, let alone assassination, 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 hand 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 improbable.”

“Improbable? Granted none of us have been Palvers, but—why improbable?”