Isaac Asimov - Second Foundation

His was easily the least influential voice in the room. Lord Stettin smiled and made a flat gesture with his hand. “The six months—or a year, if necessary—will cost us nothing. The men of the Foundation cannot prepare; they are ideologically incapable of it. It is in their very philosophy to believe that the Second Foundation will save them. But not this time, eh?”

The men in the room stirred uneasily.

“You lack confidence, I believe,” said Stettin, frigidly. “Is it necessary once again to describe the reports of our agents in Foundation territory, or to repeat the findings of Mr. Homir Munn, the Foundation agent now in our . . . uh . . . service? Let us adjourn, gentlemen.”

Stettin returned to his private chambers with a fixed smile still on his face. He sometimes wondered about this Homir Munn. A queer water-spined fellow who certainly did not bear out his early promise. And yet he crawled with interesting information that carried conviction with it—particularly when Callia was present.

His smile broadened. That fat fool had her uses, after all. At least, she got more with her wheedling out of Munn than he could, and with less trouble. Why not give her to Munn? He frowned. Callia. She and her stupid jealousy. Space! If he still had the Darell girl—Why hadn’t he ground Callia’s skull to powder for that?

He couldn’t quite put his finger on the reason.

Maybe because she got along with Munn. And he needed Munn. It was Munn, for instance, who had demonstrated that, at least in the belief of the Mule, there was no Second Foundation. His admirals needed that assurance.

He would have liked to make the proofs public, but it was better to let the Foundation believe in their nonexistent help. Was it actually Callia who had pointed that out? That’s right. She had said—

Oh, nonsense! She couldn’t have said anything.

And yet—

He shook his head to clear it and passed on.

Trantor was a world in dregs and rebirth. Set like a faded jewel in the midst of the bewildering crowd of suns at the center of the Galaxy—in the heaps and clusters of stars piled high with aimless prodigality—it alternately dreamed of past and future.

Time had been when the insubstantial ribbons of control had stretched out from its metal coating to the very edges of stardom. It had been a single city, housing four hundred billion administrators; the mightiest capital that had ever been.

Until the decay of the Empire eventually reached it and in the Great Sack of a century ago, its drooping powers had been bent back upon themselves and broken forever. In the blasting ruin of death, the metal shell that circled the planet wrinkled and crumpled into an aching mock of its own grandeur.

The survivors tore up the metal plating and sold it to other planets for seed and cattle. The soil was uncovered once more and the planet returned to its beginnings. In the spreading areas of primitive agriculture, it forgot its intricate and colossal past.

Or would have but for the still mighty shards that heaped their massive ruins toward the sky in bitter and dignified silence.

Arcadia watched the metal rim of the horizon with a stirring of the heart. The village in which the Palvers lived was but a huddle of houses to her—small and primitive. The fields that surrounded it were golden-yellow, wheat-clogged tracts.

But there, just past the reaching point, was the memory of the past, still glowing in unrusted splendor, and burning with fire where the sun of Trantor caught it in gleaming highlights. She had been there once during the months since she had arrived at Trantor. She had climbed onto the smooth, unjointed pavement and ventured into the silent dust-streaked structures, where the light entered through the jags of broken walls and partitions.

It had been solidified heartache. It had been blasphemy.

She had left, clangingly—running until her feet pounded softly on earth once more.

And then she could only look back longingly. She dared not disturb that mighty brooding once more.

Somewhere on this world, she knew, she had been born—near the old Imperial Library, which was the veriest Trantor of Trantor. It was the sacred of the sacred; the holy of holies! Of all the world, it alone had survived the Great Sack, and for a century it had remained complete and untouched, defiant of the universe.

There Hari Seldon and his group had woven their unimaginable web. There Ebling Mis pierced the secret, and sat numbed in his vast surprise, until he was killed to prevent the secret from going further.

There at the Imperial Library, her grandparents had lived for ten years, until the Mule died, and they could return to the reborn Foundation.

There at the Imperial Library, her own father returned with his bride to find the Second Foundation once again, but failed. There she had been born, and there her mother had died.

She would have liked to visit the Library again, but Preem Palver shook his round head. “It’s thousands of miles, Arkady, and there’s so much to do here. Besides, it’s not good to bother there. You know; it’s a shrine—”

But Arcadia knew that he had no desire to visit the Library; that it was a case of the Mule’s palace over again. There was this superstitious fear on the part of the pygmies of the present for the relics of the giants of the past.

Yet it would have been horrible to feel a grudge against the funny little man for that. She had been on Trantor now for over three months and in all that time, he and she—Pappa and Mamma—had been wonderful to her—

And what was her return? Why, to involve them in the common ruin. Had she warned them that she was marked for destruction, perhaps? No! She let them assume the deadly role of protectors.

Her conscience panged unbearably—yet what choice had she?

She stepped reluctantly down the stairs to breakfast. The voices reached her.

Preem Palver had tucked the napkin down his shirt collar with a twist of his plump neck and had reached for his poached eggs with an uninhibited satisfaction.

“I was down in the city yesterday, Mamma,” he said, wielding his fork and nearly drowning the words with a capacious mouthful.

“And what is down in the city, Pappa?” asked Mamma indifferently, sitting down, looking sharply about the table, and rising again for the salt.

“Ah, not so good. A ship came in from out Kalgan way with newspapers from there. It’s war there.”

“War! So! Well, let them break their heads, if they have no more sense inside. Did your paycheck come yet? Pappa, I’m telling you again. You warn old man Cosker this isn’t the only co-operative in the world. It’s bad enough they pay you what I’m ashamed to tell my friends, but at least on time they could be!”

“Time; shmime,” said Pappa, irritably. “Look, don’t make me silly talk at breakfast, it should choke me each bite in the throat,” and he wreaked havoc among the buttered toast as he said it. He added, somewhat more moderately, “The fighting is between Kalgan and the Foundation, and for two months, they’ve been at it.”

His hands lunged at one another in mock-representation of a space fight.

“Um-m-m. And what’s doing?”

“Bad for the Foundation. Well, you saw Kalgan; all soldiers. They were ready. The Foundation was not, and so— poof !”

And suddenly, Mamma laid down her fork and hissed, “Fool!”

“Huh?”

“Dumb-head! Your big mouth is always moving and wagging.”

She was pointing quickly and when Pappa looked over his shoulder, there was Arcadia, frozen in the doorway.

She said, “The Foundation is at war?”

Pappa looked helplessly at Mamma, then nodded.