Prelude to Foundation (53 page)

“I would not work for him, Madam, I assure you, any more than I would have worked for you.”

“It is not a matter of work. It is a matter of being used. Farewell, Dr. Seldon. —Sergeant, blast him.”

The sergeant drew his blaster at once and Dors, with a loud cry, lunged forward—but Seldon reached out for her and caught her by the elbow. He hung on desperately.

“Stay back, Dors,” he shouted, “or he’ll kill you. He won’t kill me. You too, Raych. Stand back. Don’t move.”

Seldon faced the sergeant. “You hesitate, Sergeant, because you know you cannot shoot. I might have killed you ten days ago, but I did not. And you gave me your word of honor at that time that you would protect me.”

“What are you waiting for?” snapped Rashelle. “I said shoot him down, Sergeant.”

Seldon said nothing more. He stood there while the sergeant, eyes bulging, held his blaster steady and pointed at Seldon’s head.

“You have your order!” shrieked Rashelle.

“I have your word,” said Seldon quietly.

And Sergeant Thalus said in a choked tone, “Dishonored either way.” His hand fell and his blaster clanged to the floor.

Rashelle cried out, “Then you too betray me!”

Before Seldon could move or Dors free herself from his grip, Rashelle seized the blaster, turned it on the sergeant, and closed contact.

Seldon had never seen anyone blasted before. Somehow, from the name of the weapon perhaps, he had expected a loud noise, an explosion of flesh and blood. This Wyan blaster, at least, did nothing of the sort. What mangling it did to the organs inside the sergeant’s chest Seldon could not tell but, without a change in expression, without a wince of pain, the sergeant crumbled and fell, dead beyond any doubt or any hope.

And Rashelle turned the blaster on Seldon with a firmness that put to rest any hope for his own life beyond the next second.

It was Raych, however, who jumped into action the moment the sergeant fell. Racing between Seldon and Rashelle, he waved his hands wildly.

“Missus, Missus,” he called. “Don’t shoot.”

For a moment, Rashelle looked confused. “Out of the way, Raych. I don’t want to hurt you.”

That moment of hesitation was all Dors needed. Breaking loose violently, she plunged toward Rashelle with a long low dive. Rashelle went down with a cry and the blaster hit the ground a second time.

Raych retrieved it.

Seldon, with a deep and shuddering breath, said, “Raych, give that to me.”

But Raych backed away. “Ya ain’t gonna kill her, are ya, Mister Seldon? She was nice to me.”

“I won’t kill anyone, Raych,” said Seldon. “She killed the sergeant and would have killed me, but she didn’t shoot rather than hurt you and we’ll let her live for that.”

It was Seldon who now sat down, the blaster held
loosely in his hand, while Dors removed the neuronic whip from the dead sergeant’s other holster.

A new voice rang out. “I’ll take care of her now, Seldon.”

Seldon looked up and in sudden joy said, “Hummin! Finally!”

“I’m sorry it took so long, Seldon. I had a lot to do. How are you, Dr. Venabili? I take it this is Mannix’s daughter, Rashelle. But who is the boy?”

“Raych is a young Dahlite friend of ours,” said Seldon.

Soldiers were entering and, at a small gesture from Hummin, they lifted Rashelle respectfully.

Dors, able to suspend her intent surveillance of the other woman, brushed at her clothes with her hands and smoothed her blouse. Seldon suddenly realized that he was still in his bathrobe.

Rashelle, shaking herself loose from the soldiers with contempt, pointed to Hummin and said to Seldon, “Who is this?”

Seldon said, “It is Chetter Hummin, a friend of mine and my protector on this planet.”

“Your
protector
?” Rashelle laughed madly. “You fool! You idiot! That man is Demerzel and if you look at your Venabili woman, you will see from her face that she is perfectly aware of that. You have been trapped all along, far worse than ever you were with me!”

Hummin and Seldon sat at lunch that day, quite alone, a pall of quiet between them for the most part.

It was toward the end of the meal that Seldon stirred and said in a lively voice, “Well, sir, how do I
address you? I think of you as ‘Chetter Hummin’ still, but even if I accept you in your other persona, I surely cannot address you as ‘Eto Demerzel.’ In that capacity, you have a title and I don’t know the proper usage. Instruct me.”

The other said gravely, “Call me ‘Hummin’—if you don’t mind. Or ‘Chetter.’ Yes, I am Eto Demerzel, but with respect to you I am Hummin. As a matter of fact, the two are not distinct. I told you that the Empire is decaying and failing. I believe that to be true in both my capacities. I told you that I wanted psychohistory as a way of preventing that decay and failure or of bringing about a renewal and reinvigoration if the decay and failure must run its course. I believe
that
in both my capacities too.”

“But you had me in your grip—I presume you were in the vicinity when I had my meeting with His Imperial Majesty.”

“With Cleon. Yes, of course.”

“And you might have spoken to me, then, exactly as you later did as Hummin.”

“And accomplished what? As Demerzel, I have enormous tasks. I have to handle Cleon, a well-meaning but not very capable ruler, and prevent him, insofar as I can, from making mistakes. I have to do my bit in governing Trantor and the Empire too. And, as you see, I had to spend a great deal of time in preventing Wye from doing harm.”

“Yes, I know,” murmured Seldon.

“It wasn’t easy and I nearly lost out. I have spent years sparring carefully with Mannix, learning to understand his thinking and planning a countermove to his every move. I did not think, at any time, that while he was still alive he would pass on his powers to his daughter. I had not studied her and I was not prepared for her utter lack of caution. Unlike her father, she has been brought up to take power for granted and had no clear idea of its limitations. So she got you and forced me to act before I was quite ready.”

“You almost lost me as a result. I faced the muzzle of a blaster twice.”

“I know,” said Hummin, nodding. “And we might have lost you Upperside too—another accident I could not foresee.”

“But you haven’t really answered my question. Why did you send me chasing all over the face of Trantor to escape from Demerzel when you yourself were Demerzel?”

“You told Cleon that psychohistory was a purely theoretical concept, a kind of mathematical game that made no practical sense. That might indeed have been so, but if I approached you officially, I was sure you would merely have maintained your belief. Yet I was attracted to the notion of psychohistory. I wondered whether it might not be, after all, just a game. You must understand that I didn’t want merely to use you, I wanted a real and practical psychohistory.

“So I sent you, as you put it, chasing all over the face of Trantor with the dreaded Demerzel close on your heels at all times. That, I felt, would concentrate your mind powerfully. It would make psychohistory something exciting and much more than a mathematical game. You would try to work it out for the sincere idealist Hummin, where you would not for the Imperial flunky Demerzel. Also, you would get a glimpse of various sides of Trantor and that too would be helpful—certainly more helpful than living in an ivory tower on a far-off planet, surrounded entirely by fellow mathematicians. Was I right? Have you made progress?”

Seldon said, “In psychohistory? Yes, I did, Hummin. I thought you knew.”

“How should I know?”

“I told Dors.”

“But you hadn’t told me. Nevertheless, you tell me so now. That is good news.”

“Not entirely,” said Seldon. “I have made only the barest beginning. But it
is
a beginning.”

“Is it the kind of beginning that can be explained to a nonmathematician?”

“I think so. You see, Hummin, from the start I have seen psychohistory as a science that depends on the interaction of twenty-five million worlds, each with an average population of four thousand million. It’s too much. There’s no way of handling something that complex. If I was to succeed at all, if there was to be any way of finding a useful psychohistory, I would first have to find a simpler system.

“So I thought I would go back in time and deal with a single world, a world that was the only one occupied by humanity in the dim age before the colonization of the Galaxy. In Mycogen they spoke of an original world of Aurora and in Dahl I heard word of an original world of Earth. I thought they might be the same world under different names, but they were sufficiently different in one key point, at least, to make that impossible. And it didn’t matter. So little was known of either one, and that little so obscured by myth and legend, that there was no hope of making use of psychohistory in connection with them.”

He paused to sip at his cold juice, keeping his eyes firmly on Hummin’s face.

Hummin said, “Well? What then?”

“Meanwhile, Dors had told me something I call the hand-on-thigh story. It was of no innate significance, merely a humorous and entirely trivial tale. As a result, though, Dors mentioned the different sex mores on various worlds and in various sectors of Trantor. It occurred to me that she treated the different Trantorian sectors as though they were separate worlds. I thought, idly, that instead of twenty-five million different worlds, I had twenty-five million plus eight hundred to deal with. It seemed a trivial difference, so I forgot it and thought no more about it.

“But as I traveled from the Imperial Sector to Streeling to Mycogen to Dahl to Wye, I observed for myself how different each was. The thought of Trantor—not as
a world but as a complex of worlds—grew stronger, but still I didn’t see the crucial point.

“It was only when I listened to Rashelle—you see, it was good that I was finally captured by Wye and it was good that Rashelle’s rashness drove her into the grandiose schemes that she imparted to me—When I listened to Rashelle, as I said, she told me that all she wanted was Trantor and some immediately adjacent worlds. It was an Empire in itself, she said, and dismissed the outer worlds as ‘distant nothings.’

“It was then that, in a moment, I saw what I must have been harboring in my hidden thoughts for a considerable time. On the one hand, Trantor possessed an extraordinarily complex social system, being a populous world made up of eight hundred smaller worlds. It was in itself a system complex enough to make psychohistory meaningful and yet it was simple enough, compared to the Empire as a whole, to make psychohistory perhaps practical.

“And the Outer Worlds, the twenty-five million of them? They were ‘distant nothings.’ Of course, they affected Trantor and were affected by Trantor, but these were second-order effects. If I could make psychohistory work as a first approximation for Trantor alone, then the minor effects of the Outer Worlds could be added as later modifications. Do you see what I mean? I was searching for a single world on which to establish a practical science of psychohistory and I was searching for it in the far past, when all the time the single world I wanted was under my feet
now
.”

Hummin said with obvious relief and pleasure, “Wonderful!”

“But it’s all left to do, Hummin. I must study Trantor in sufficient detail. I must devise the necessary mathematics to deal with it. If I am lucky and live out a full lifetime, I may have the answers before I die. If not, my successors will have to follow me. Conceivably, the Empire may have fallen and splintered before psychohistory becomes a useful technique.”

“I will do everything I can to help you.”

“I know it,” said Seldon.

“You trust me, then, despite the fact I am Demerzel?”

“Entirely. Absolutely. But I do so because you are
not
Demerzel.”

“But I am,” insisted Hummin.

“But you are not. Your persona as Demerzel is as far removed from the truth as is your persona as Hummin.”

“What do you mean?” Hummin’s eyes grew wide and he backed away slightly from Seldon.

“I mean that you probably chose the name ‘Hummin’ out of a wry sense of what was fitting. ‘Hummin’ is a mispronunciation of ‘human,’ isn’t it?”

Hummin made no response. He continued to stare at Seldon.

And finally Seldon said, “Because you’re not human, are you, ‘Hummin/Demerzel’? You’re a robot.”