Prelude to Foundation

“That’s just an excuse. They’re copying each other. There are twenty-five million worlds out there and there’s significant mention of perhaps twenty-five.”

Dors said, “You’re reading general Galactic histories only. Look up the special histories of some of the minor worlds. On every world, however small, the children are taught local histories before they ever find out there’s a great big Galaxy outside. Don’t you yourself know more about Helicon, right now, than you know about the rise of Trantor or of the Great Interstellar War?”

“That sort of knowledge is limited too,” said Seldon gloomily. “I know Heliconian geography and the stories of its settlement and of the malfeasance and misfeasance of the planet Jennisek-that’s our traditional enemy, though our teachers carefully told us that we ought to say ‘traditional rival.’ But I never learned anything about the contributions of Helicon to general Galactic history.”

“Maybe there weren’t any.”

“Don’t be silly. Of course there were. There may not have been great, huge space battles involving Helicon or crucial rebellions or peace treaties. There may not have been some Imperial competitor making his base on Helicon. But there must have been subtle influences. Surely, nothing can happen anywhere without affecting everywhere else. Yet there’s nothing I can find to help me. See here, Dors. In mathematics, all can be found in the computer; everything we know or have found out in twenty thousand years. In history, that’s not so. Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing.”

“But, Hari,” said Dors, “mathematics is an orderly thing of human invention. One thing follows from another. There are definitions and axioms, all of which are known. It is… it is… all one piece. History is different. It is the unconscious working out of the deeds and thoughts of quadrillions of human beings. Historians must pick and choose.”

“Exactly,” said Seldon, “but I must know all of history if I am to work out the laws of psychohistory.”

“In that case, you won’t ever formulate the laws of psychohistory.”

That was yesterday. Now Seldon sat in his chair in his alcove, having spent another day of utter failure, and he could hear Dors’s voice saying, “In that case, you won’t ever formulate the laws of psychohistory.” It was what he had thought to begin with and if it hadn’t been for Hummin’s conviction to the contrary and his odd ability to fire Seldon with his own blaze of conviction, Seldon would have continued to think so. And yet neither could he quite let go. Might there not be some way out?

He couldn’t think of any.

Upperside

TRANTOR-… It is almost never pictured as a world seen from space. It has long since captured the general mind of humanity as a world of the interior and the image is that of the human hive that existed under the domes. Yet there was an exterior as well and there are holographs that still remain that were taken from space and show varying degrees of [devil] (see Figures 14 and 15). Note that the surface of the domes, the interface of the vast city and the overlying atmosphere, a surface referred to in its time as “Upperside,” is…

Encyclopedia Galactica

21.

Yet the following day found Hari Seldon back in the library. For one thing, there was his promise to Hummin. He had promised to try and he couldn’t very well make it a halfhearted process. For another, he owed something to himself too. He resented having to admit failure. Not yet, at least. Not while he could plausibly tell himself he was following up leads. So he stared at the list of reference book-films he had not yet checked through and tried to decide which of the unappetizing number had the slightest chance of being useful to him. He had about decided that the answer was “none of the above” and saw no way out but to look at samples of each when he was startled by a gentle tap against the alcove wall.