Isaac Asimov - Foundation's Edge

Pelorat nodded and said, “I was wondering why it was so empty, at that.” He leaned toward Trevize’s ear and whispered, “Why not let him talk, Golan? He looks miserable, poor chap, and he may be trying to apologize. It seems unfair not to give him the chance to do so.”

Trevize said, “Dr. Pelorat seems anxious to hear you. I’m willing to oblige him, but you’ll oblige me if you’re brief about it. This may be a good day on which to lose my temper. If everyone is meditating, any disturbance I cause may not produce the guardians of the law. I may not be so lucky tomorrow. Why waste an opportunity?”

Compor said in a strained voice, “Look, if you want to take a poke at me, do so. I won’t even defend myself, see? Go ahead, hit me—but listen! ”

“Go ahead and talk, then. I’ll listen a while.”

“In the first place, Golan—”

“Address me as Trevize, please. I am not on firstname terms with you.”

“In the first place, Trevize , you did too good a job convincing me of your views—”

“You hid that well. I could have sworn you were amused by me.”

“I tried to be amused to hide from myself the fact that you were being extremely disturbing. —Look, let us sit down up against the wall. Even if the place is empty, some few may come in and I don’t think we ought to be needlessly conspicuous.”

Slowly the three men walked most of the length of the large room. Compor was smiling tentatively again, but remained carefully at more than arm’s length from Trevize.

They sat down on a seat that gave as their weight was placed upon it and molded itself into the shape of their hips and buttocks. Pelorat looked surprised and made as though to stand up.

“Relax, Professor,” said Compor. “I’ve been through this already. They’re in advance of us in some ways. It’s a world that believes in small comforts.”

He turned to Trevize, placing one arm over the back of his chair and speaking easily now. “You disturbed me. You made me feel the Second Foundation did exist, and that was deeply upsetting. Consider the consequences if they did. Wasn’t it likely that they might take care of you somehow? Remove you as a menace? And if I behaved as though I believed you, I might be removed as well. Do you see my point?”

“I see a coward.”

“What good would it do to be storybook brave?” said Compor warmly, his blue eyes widening in indignation. “Can you or I stand up to an organization capable of molding our minds and emotions? The only way we could fight effectively would be to hide our knowledge to begin with.”

“So you hid it and were safe? —Yet you didn’t hide it from Mayor Branno, did you? Quite a risk there.”

“Yes! But I thought that was worth it. Just talking between ourselves might do nothing more than get ourselves mentally controlled—or our memories erased altogether. If I told the Mayor, on the other hand—She knew my father well, you know. My father and I were immigrants from Smyrno and the Mayor had a grandmother who—”

“Yes, yes,” said Trevize impatiently, “and several generations farther back you can trace ancestry to the Sirius Sector. You’ve told all that to everyone you know. Get on with it, Compor!”

“Well, I had her ear. If I could convince the Mayor that there was danger, using your arguments, the Federation might take some action. We’re not as helpless as we were in the days of the Mule and—at the worst—this dangerous knowledge would be spread more widely and we ourselves would not be in as much specific danger.”

Trevize said sardonically, “Endanger the Foundation, but keep ourselves safe. That’s good patriotic stuff.”

“That would be at the worst. I was counting on the best.” His forehead had become a little damp. He seemed to be straining against Trevize’s immovable contempt.

“And you didn’t tell me of this clever plan of yours, did you?”

“No, I didn’t and I’m sorry about that, Trevize. The Mayor ordered me not to. She said she wanted to know everything you knew but that you were the sort of person who would freeze if you knew that your remarks were being passed on.”

“How right she was!”

“I didn’t know—I couldn’t guess—I had no way of conceiving that she was planning to arrest you and throw you off the planet.”

“She was waiting for the right political moment, when my status as Councilman would not protect me. You didn’t forsee that?”

“How could I? You yourself did not.”

“Had I known that she knew my views, I would have.”

Compor said with a sudden trace of insolence, “That’s easy enough to say—in hindsight.”

“And what is it you want of me here? Now that you have a bit of hindsight, too.”

“To make up for all this. To make up for the harm I unwittingly— unwittingly —did you.”

“Goodness,” said Trevize dryly. “How kind of you! But you haven’t answered my original question. How did you come to be here ? How do you happen to be on the very planet I am on?”

Compor said, “There’s no complicated answer necessary for that. I followed you!”

“Through hyperspace? With my ship making Jumps in series?”

Compor shook his head. “No mystery. I have the same kind of a ship you do, with the same kind of computer. You know I’ve always had this trick of being able to guess in which direction through hyperspace a ship would go. It’s not usually a very good guess and I’m wrong two times out of three, but with the computer I’m much better. And you hesitated quite a bit at the start and gave me a chance to evaluate the direction and speed in which you were going before entering hyperspace. I fed the data—together with my own intuitive extrapolations—into the computer and it did the rest.”

“And you actually got to the city ahead of me?”

“Yes. You didn’t use gravitics and I did. I guessed you would come to the capital city, so I went straight down, while you—” Compor made a short spiral motion with his finger as though it were a ship riding a directional beam.

“You took a chance on a run-in with Sayshellian officialdom.”

“Well—” Compor’s face broke into a smile that lent it an undeniable charm and Trevize felt himself almost warming to him. Compor said, “I’m not a coward at all times and in all things.”

Trevize steeled himself. “How did you happen to get a ship like mine?”

“In precisely the same way you got a ship like yours. The old lady—Mayor Branno—assigned it to me.”

“Why?”

“I’m being entirely frank with you. My assignment was to follow you. The Mayor wanted to know where you were going and what you would be doing.”

“And you’ve been reporting faithfully to her, I suppose. —Or have you been faithless to the Mayor also?”

“I reported to her. I had no choice, actually. She placed a hyper-relay on board ship, which I wasn’t supposed to find, but which I did find.”

“Well?”

“Unfortunately it’s hooked up so that I can’t remove it without immobilizing the vessel. At least, there’s no way I can remove it. Consequently she knows where I am—and she knows where you are.”

“Suppose you hadn’t been able to follow me. Then she wouldn’t have known where I was. Had you thought of that?”

“Of course I did. I thought of just reporting I had lost you—but she wouldn’t have believed me, would she? And I wouldn’t have been able to get back to Terminus for who knows how long. And I’m not like you, Trevize. I’m not a carefree person without attachments. I have a wife on Terminus—a pregnant wife—and I want to get back to her. You can afford to think only of yourself. I can’t. —Besides, I’ve come to warn you. By Seldon, I’m trying to do that and you won’t listen. You keep talking about other things.”