Isaac Asimov - Foundation's Edge

“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 Micro-Radiant. The device—which could locate any portion of the vast Plan holographically and which required neither 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 right thumb and manipulated its controls with his four fingers, using his hand deliberately as though it were a musical instrument. (Indeed, he had written a small paper on the analogies.)

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 multi-dimensional 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 analysis 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 warmed, 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 assume, 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 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.”