Forward the Foundation

"For feeling attracted to Joranum's program of sector equality and for greater popular representation in government."

"I don't blame you for that. These are attractive suggestions, but you know that Joranum and his gang were using it only as a device to gain power. Afterward-"

"But you had me entrap him, despite my attraction to his views."

Seldon said, "it wasn't easy for me to ask you to do that."

"And now you keep me working at the implementation of Joranum's program, just to show me how hard the task is in reality."

Seldon said to Dors, "How do you like that, Dors? The boy attributes to me a kind of sneaky underhandedness that simply isn't part of my character."

"Surely," said Dors with the ghost of a smile playing at her lips, "you are attributing no such thing to your father."

"Not really. In the ordinary course of life, there's no one straighter than you, Dad. But if you have to, you know you can stack the cards. Isn't that what you hope to do with psychohistory?"

Seldon said sadly, "So far, I've done very little with psychohistory."

"Too bad. I keep thinking that there is some sort of psychohistorical solution to the problem of human bigotry."

"Maybe there is, but, if so, I haven't found it."

When dinner was over, Seldon said, "You and I, Raych, are going to have a little talk now."

"Indeed?" said Dors. "I take it I'm not invited."

"Ministerial business, Dors."

"Ministerial nonsense, Hari. You're going to ask the poor boy to do something I wouldn't want him to do."

Seldon said firmly, "I'm certainly not going to ask him to do anything he doesn't want to do."

Raych said, "It's all right, Mom. Let Dad and me have our talk. I promise I'll tell you all about it afterward."

Dors's eyes rolled upward. "You two will plead 'state secrets.' I know

"As a matter of fact," said Seldon firmly, "that's exactly what I must discuss. And of the first magnitude. I'm serious, Dors."

Dors rose, her lips tightening. She left the room with one final injunction. "Don't throw the boy to the wolves, Hari."

And after she was gone, Seldon said quietly, "I'm afraid that throwing you to the wolves is exactly what I'll have to do, Raych."

8

They faced each other in Seldon's private office, his "thinking place," as he called it. There, he had spent uncounted hours trying to think his way past and through the complexities of Imperial and Trantorian government.

He said, "Have you read much about the recent breakdowns we've been having in planetary services, Raych?"

"Yes," said Raych, "but you know, Dad, we've got an old planet here. What we gotta do is get everyone off it, dig the whole thing up, replace everything, add the latest computerizations, and then bring everyone back-or at least half of everyone. Trantor would be much better off with only twenty billion people."

"Which twenty billion?" asked Seldon smiling.

"I wish I knew," said Raych darkly. "The trouble is, we can't redo the planet, so we just gotta keep patching."

"I'm afraid so, Raych, but there are some peculiar things about it. Now I want you to check me out. I have some thoughts about this."

He brought a small sphere out of his pocket.

"What's that?" asked Raych.

"It's a map of Trantor, carefully programmed. Do me a favor, Raych, and clear off this tabletop."

Seldon placed the sphere more or less in the middle of the table and placed his hand on a keypad in the arm of his desk chair. He used his thumb to close a contact and the light in the room went out while the tabletop glowed with a soft ivory light that seemed about a centimeter deep. The sphere had flattened and expanded to the edges of the table.

The light slowly darkened in spots and took on a pattern. After some thirty seconds, Raych said in surprise, "It is a map of Trantor."

"Of course. I told you it was. You can't buy anything like this at a sector mall, though. This is one of those gadgets the armed forces play with. It could present Trantor as a sphere, but a planar projection would more clearly show what I want to show."

"And what is it you want to show, Dad?"

"Well, in the last year or two, there have been breakdowns. As you say, it's an old planet and we've got to expect breakdowns, but they've been coming more frequently and they would seem, almost uniformly, to be the result of human error."

"Isn't that reasonable?"

"Yes, of course. Within limits. This is true, even where earthquakes are involved."

"Earthquakes? On Trantor?"

"I admit Trantor is a fairly nonseismic planet-and a good thing, too, because enclosing a world in a dome when the world is going to shake itself badly several times a year and smash a section of that dome would be highly impractical. Your mother says that one of the reasons Trantor, rather than some other world, became the Imperial capital is that it was geologically moribund-that's her unflattering expression. Still, it might be moribund, but it's not dead. There are occasional minor earthquakes-three of them in the last two years."

"I wasn't aware of that, Dad."