Prelude to Foundation

“They must have known for years that any time Mannix laid down his powers or any time he died, Rashelle would be their Mayor, yet they showed no signs of discontent-until you felt it necessary that they show it. Dors described you at one time as a very persuasive man. And so you are. More persuasive than any man could be. But you are not more persuasive than an immortal robot with strange mental powers might be.-Well, Hummin?”

Hummin said, “What is it you expect of me, Hari? Do you expect me to admit I’m a robot? That I only look like a human being? That I am immortal? That I am a mental marvel?!”

Seldon leaned toward Hummin as he sat there on the opposite side of the table. “Yes, Hummin, I do. I expect you to tell me the truth and I strongly suspect that what you have just outlined is the truth. You, Hummin, are the robot that Mother Rittah referred to as Da-Nee, friend of Ba-Lee. You must admit it. You have no choice.”

92.

It was as though they were sitting in a tiny Universe of their own. There, in the middle of Wye, with the Wyan army being disarmed by Imperial force, they sat quietly. There, in the midst of events that all of Trantor-and perhaps all the Galaxy-was watching, there was this small bubble of utter isolation within which Seldon and Hummin were playing their game of attack and defense-Seldon trying hard to force a new reality, Hummin making no move to accept that new reality. Seldon had no fear of interruption. He was certain that the bubble within which they sat had a boundary that could not be penetrated, that Hummin’s-no, the robot’s-powers would keep all at a distance till the game was over.

Hummin finally said, “You are an ingenious fellow, Hari, but I fail to see why I must admit that I am a robot and why I have no choice but to do so. Everything you say may be true as facts-your own behavior, Dors’s behavior, Sunmaster’s, Tisalver’s, the Wyan generals’-all, all may have happened as you said, but that doesn’t force your interpretation of the meaning of the events to be true. Surely, everything that happened can have a natural explanation. You trusted me because you accepted what I said; Dors felt your safety to be important because she felt psychohistory to be crucial, herself being a historian; Sunmaster and Tisalver were beholden to me for favors you know nothing of, the Wyan generals resented being ruled by a woman, no more. Why must we flee to the supernatural?”

Seldon said, “See here, Hummin, do you really believe the Empire to be falling and do you really consider it important that it not be allowed to do so with no move made to save it or, at the least, cushion its Fall?”

“I really do.” Somehow Seldon knew this statement was sincere. “And you really want me to work out the details of psychohistory and you feel that you yourself cannot do it?”

“I lack the capability.”

“And you feel that only I can handle psychohistory-even if I sometimes doubt it myself?”

“Yes.”

“And you must therefore feel that if you can possibly help me in any way, you must.”

“I do.”

“Personal feelings-selfish considerations-could play no part?” A faint and brief smile passed over Hummin’s grave face and for a moment Seldon sensed a vast and arid desert of weariness behind Hummin’s quiet manner. “I have built a long career on paying no heed to personal feelings or to selfish considerations.”

“Then I ask your help. I can work out psychohistory on the basis of Trantor alone, but I will run into difficulties. Those difficulties I may overcome, but how much easier it would be to do so if I knew certain key facts. For instance, was Earth or Aurora the first world of humanity or was it some other world altogether? What was the relationship between Earth and Aurora? Did either or both colonize the Galaxy? If one, why didn’t the other? If both, how was the issue decided? Are there worlds descended from both or from only one? How did robots come to be abandoned? How did Trantor become the Imperial world, rather than another planet? What happened to Aurora and Earth in the meantime? There are a thousand questions I might ask right now and a hundred thousand that might arise as I go along. Would you allow me to remain ignorant, Hummin, and fail in my task when you could inform me and help me succeed?”

Hummin said, “If I were the robot, would I have room in my brain for all of twenty thousand years of history for millions of different worlds?”

“I don’t know the capacity of robotic brains. I don’t know the capacity of yours. But if you lack the capacity, then you must have that information which you cannot hold safely recorded in a place and in a way that would make it possible for you to call upon it. And if you have it and I need information, how can you deny and withhold it from me? And if you cannot withhold it from me, how can you deny that you are a robot-that robot the Renegade?”