Isaac Asimov - Forward the Foundation

Seldon had arrived. “I’ll take over, Dors.”

“You will not . Get in among those trees and take the blaster with you. Others may be involved—and ready to act.”

Dors had not loosened her grip on the sergeant. She said, “Now, Sergeant, I want the name of whoever it was who persuaded you to make an attempt on the First Minister’s life—and the name of everyone else who is in this with you.”

The sergeant was silent.

“Don’t be foolish,” said Dors. “Speak!” She twisted his arm and he sank down to his knees. She put her shoe on his neck. “If you think silence becomes you, I can crush your larynx and you will be silent forever. And even before that, I am going to damage you badly —I won’t leave one bone unbroken. You had better talk.”

The sergeant talked.

Later Seldon had said to her, “How could you do that, Dors? I never believed you capable of such . . . violence .”

Dors said coolly, “I did not actually hurt him much, Hari. The threat was sufficient. In any case, your safety was paramount.”

“You should have let me take care of him.”

“Why? To salvage your masculine pride? You wouldn’t have been fast enough, for one thing. Secondly, no matter what you would have succeeded in doing, you are a man and it would have been expected. I am a woman and women, in popular thought, are not considered as ferocious as men and most, in general, do not have the strength to do what I did. The story will improve in the telling and everyone will be terrified of me. No one will dare to try to harm you for fear of me.”

“For fear of you and for fear of execution. The sergeant and his cohorts are to be killed, you know.”

At this, an anguished look clouded Dors’s usually composed visage, as if she could not stand the thought of the traitorous sergeant being put to death, even though he would have cut down her beloved Hari without a second thought.

“But,” she exclaimed, “there is no need to execute the conspirators. Exile will do the job.”

“No, it won’t,” said Seldon. “It’s too late. Cleon will hear of nothing but executions. I can quote him—if you wish.”

“You mean he’s already made up his mind?”

“At once. I told him that exile or imprisonment would be all that was necessary, but he said no. He said, ‘Every time I try to solve a problem by direct and forceful action, first Demerzel and then you talk of “despotism” and “tyranny.” But this is my Palace. These are my grounds. These are my guardsmen. My safety depends on the security of this place and the loyalty of my people. Do you think that any deviation from absolute loyalty can be met with anything but instant death? How else would you be safe? How else would I be safe?’

“I said there would have to be a trial. ‘Of course,’ he said, ‘a short military trial and I don’t expect a single vote for anything but execution. I shall make that quite clear.’ ”

Dors looked appalled. “You’re taking this very quietly. Do you agree with the Emperor?”

Reluctantly Seldon nodded. “I do.”

“Because there was an attempt on your life. Have you abandoned your principles for mere revenge?”

“Now, Dors, I’m not a vengeful person. However, it was not myself alone at risk or even the Emperor. If there is anything that the recent history of the Empire shows us, it is that Emperors come and go. It is psychohistory that must be protected. Undoubtedly, even if something happens to me, psychohistory will someday be developed, but the Empire is falling fast and we cannot wait—and only I have advanced far enough to obtain the necessary techniques in time.”

“Then you should teach what you know to others,” said Dors gravely.

“I’m doing so. Yugo Amaryl is a reasonable successor and I have gathered a group of technicians who will someday be useful, but they won’t be as—” He paused.

“They won’t be as good as you—as wise, as capable? Really?”

“I happen to think so,” said Seldon. “And I happen to be human. Psychohistory is mine and, if I can possibly manage it, I want the credit.”

“Human,” sighed Dors, shaking her head almost sadly.

The executions went through. No such purge had been seen in over a century. Two Ministers, five officials of lower ranks, and four soldiers, including the hapless sergeant, met their deaths. Every guardsman who could not withstand the most rigorous investigation was relieved of duty and exiled to the remote Outer Worlds.

Since then, there had been no whisper of disloyalty and so notorious had become the care with which the First Minister was guarded, to say nothing of the terrifying woman—called “The Tiger Woman” by many—who watched over him, that it was no longer necessary for Dors to accompany him everywhere. Her invisible presence was an adequate shield and the Emperor Cleon enjoyed nearly ten years of quiet and absolute security.

Now, however, psychohistory was finally reaching the point where predictions, of a sort, could be made and, as Seldon crossed the grounds in his passage from his office (First Minister) to his laboratory (psychohistorian), he was uneasily aware of the likelihood that this era of peace might be coming to an end.

Yet, even so, Hari Seldon could not repress the surge of satisfaction that he felt as he entered his laboratory.

How things had changed.

It had begun twenty years earlier with his own doodlings on his second-rate Heliconian computer. It was then that the first hint of what was to become parachaotic math came to him in a cloudy fashion.

Then there were the years at Streeling University, when he and Yugo Amaryl, working together, attempted to renormalize the equations, get rid of the inconvenient infinities, and find a way around the worst of the chaotic effects. They made very little progress, indeed.

But now, after ten years as First Minister, he had a whole floor of the latest computers and a whole staff of people working on a large variety of problems.

Of necessity, none of his staff—except for Yugo and himself, of course—could really know much more than the immediate problem they were dealing with. Each of them worked with only a small ravine or outcropping on the gigantic mountain range of psychohistory that only Seldon and Amaryl could see as a mountain range—and even they could see it only dimly, its peaks hidden in clouds, its slopes veiled by mist.

Dors Venabili was right, of course. He would have to begin initiating his people into the entire mystery. The technique was getting well beyond what only two men could handle. And Seldon was aging. Even if he could look forward to some additional decades, the years of his most fruitful breakthroughs were surely behind him.

Even Amaryl would be thirty-nine within a month and, though that was still young, it was perhaps not overly young for a mathematician—and he had been working on the problem almost as long as Seldon himself. His capacity for new and tangential thinking might be dwindling, too.

Amaryl had seen him enter and was now approaching. Seldon watched him fondly. Amaryl was as much a Dahlite as Seldon’s foster son, Raych, was, and yet Amaryl, despite his muscular physique and short stature, did not seem Dahlite at all. He lacked the mustache, he lacked the accent, he lacked, it would seem, Dahlite consciousness of any kind. He had even been impervious to the lure of Jo-Jo Joranum, who had appealed so thoroughly to the people of Dahl.

It was as though Amaryl recognized no sectoral patriotism, no planetary patriotism, not even Imperial patriotism. He belonged—completely and entirely—to psychohistory.

Seldon felt a twinge of insufficiency. He himself remained conscious of his first two decades on Helicon and there was no way he could keep from thinking of himself as a Heliconian. He wondered if that consciousness was not sure to betray him by causing him to skew his thinking about psychohistory. Ideally, to use psychohistory properly, one should be above worlds and sectors and deal only with humanity in the faceless abstract—and this was what Amaryl did.