I would like to see Trantor.

In the morning, could you have someone arrive to instruct us properly? I ask your pardon for inconveniencing you with feminine presence, but it is they who know these things. Seldon, convinced that the young Mycogenian would, on principle, refuse to have heard what a woman said to him, repeated the remark.

And in what way, Hari? The Sisters arrived some six hours later after Seldon and Dors had slept some more, hoping to readjust their biological clocks. The Sisters entered the apartment shyly, almost on tiptoe. Their gowns (which, it turned out, were termed “kirtles” in the Mycogenian dialect) were soft velvety gray, each uniquely decorated by a subtle pattern of fine, darker gray webbing.

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The sky was getting darker. The clouds were getting thicker or, much more likely, night was falling. And it was getting colder and would get colder still. Was he going to stay out here freezing because a perfectly harmless jetdown had made an appearance and had activated a sense of paranoia that he had never felt before? He had a strong impulse to leave the copse and get back to the meteorological station. After all, how would the man Hummin feared so muchDemercel-know that Seldon would, at this particular time, be Upperside and ready to be taken? For a moment, that seemed conclusive and, shivering with the cold, he moved out from behind the tree. And then he scurried back as the vessel reappeared even closer than before.

It did nothing that might be considered sampling, measuring, or testing. Would he see such things if they took place? He did not know the precise sort of instruments the jet-down carried or how they worked. If they were doing meteorological work, he might not be able to tell. After all, what if Demerzel did know of his presence Upperside, simply because an agent of his, working in the University, knew about it and had reported the matter. Listing Randa, that cheerful, smiling little Easterner, had suggested he go Upperside. Was it possible that he was a government agent and had alerted Demerzel somehow? Then there was Leggen, who had given him the sweater.

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Wanda turned and left, the weight of her worries showing in the slope of her shoulders. Hari watched her go, finally allowing his own worries to come to the surface. It had been three days since the hologram transmission from Raych. Seldon knew what he had to do now. The Empire might be down, but it was not out.

Its power, when properly wielded, was still awesome. He, however, had to remain. That was three days ago.

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Thirty thousand years of potential chaos, compressed into a single millennium. That patch, glowing more strongly day by day, is the Terminus equation. And there-skewed beyond repair-are the Trantor figures. But I can see. So beautiful, so alive. The official memorial service on Trantor was simple, though well attended.

Demerzel had not been seen since his mysterious disappearance immediately following the Joranumite Conspiracy during the reign of Emperor Cleon I. Attempts by the Commission of Public Safety to locate Demerzel in the days following the Seldon memorial proved to be unsuccessful. It was rumored that she was grief-stricken and had refused all public appearances. To this day, her whereabouts from then on remain unknown. It has been said that Hari Seldon left this life as he lived it, for he died with the future he created unfolding all around him. It might have been one-tenth its diameter and still contained all the volume it needed to store the accumulated and accumulating data to control all space flight. They needed the extra space, however, so that Joe and I could get inside, if we had to. And we had to.

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Very pleased to have met you. Gaal found a man waiting for him in his room. For a moment, he was too startled to put into words the inevitable, “What are you doing here? He was old and almost bald and he walked with a limp, but his eyes were very bright and blue. Gaal Dornick, using nonmathematical concepts, has defined psychohistory to be that branch of mathematics which deals with the reactions of human conglomerates to fixed social and economic stimuli….

Implicit in all these definitions is the assumption that the human conglomerate being dealt with is sufficiently large for valid statistical treatment. A further necessary assumption is that the human conglomerate be itself unaware of psychohistoric analysis in order that its reactions be truly random… The basis of all valid psychohistory lies in the development of the Seldon. Functions which exhibit properties congruent to those of such social and economic forces as… Ordinarily, we would not have. It is just that if we are to use your services, we must work quickly. It grows continually more difficult to obtain recruits. His first name is Jerril.

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Raindrop Forty-Three was right in one respect. Here and there a Brother or a Sister worked silently, studying gauges, adjusting controls, sometimes engaged in something as unskilled as polishing equipment-always absorbed in whatever they were doing. Seldon was careful not to ask what they were doing, since he did not want to cause the Sister humiliation in having to answer that she did not know or anger in her having to remind him there were things he must not know. They passed through a lightly swinging door and Seldon suddenly noticed the faintest touch of the odor he remembered.

He looked at Raindrop Forty-Three, but she seemed unconscious of it and soon he too became used to it. The character of the light changed suddenly. The rosiness was gone and the brightness too.

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They were a good way off, in a distant valley, but he could see them clearly enough. He saw no copse, no trees, but there was a depression that snaked about between two domes. Along each side of that crease, the soil was thicker and there were occasional green smears of what might be moss. If he followed the crease and if it got low enough and the soil was thick enough, there might be trees. He looked back, trying to fix landmarks in his mind, but there were just the rise and fall of domes. Still, it seemed clear to him that the crease was a kind of road.

If he followed it for some distance, he only had to turn about and follow it back to return to this spot. He strode off purposefully, following the rounded crease downward. He had made up his mind that he wanted to see trees and that was all that occupied him at the moment. The moss grew thicker and spread out like a carpet and here and there grassy tufts had sprung up. Despite the desolation Upperside, the moss was bright green and it occurred to Seldon that on a cloudy, overcast planet there was likely to be considerable rain. The crease continued to curve and there, just above another dome, was a dark smudge against the gray sky and he knew he had found the trees. Then, as though his mind, having been liberated by the sight of those trees, could turn to other things, Seldon took note of the rumble he had heard before and had, without thinking, dismissed as the sound of machinery. Now he considered that possibility: Was it, indeed, the sound of machinery?

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Yet on Helicon he had never seen one of these Easterners. Did you ever see one? He had tried finding an answer to why that might be in his reference searches and had not succeeded. He said, “Are you all right, Seldon? Why should anything in the history library frustrate you? He felt distinctly angry.

But, you know, I had an uncle who was a mathematician. You might even have heard of him: Kiangtow Randa. I thought somehow that it might please him that I had met a mathematician and I wanted to boast of you-if I could-so I checked what information the mathematics library might have. And when I checked the news files, I found you were at the Decennial Convention earlier this year. Obviously, the first two syllables stir my curiosity.

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We need people on the spot if anything goes wrong. A misfunctioning computer can raise problems up to two thousand kilometers away. What it amounts to is that nothing serious can happen unless human error and computer error take place simultaneously. And that hardly ever happens. Not one of them is at his or her post. There were men and women (Dahl seemed to be a more or less amphisexual society) and both sexes were shirtless. The women wore devices that might be called brassieres, but they were strictly functional. They served to lift the breasts in order to improve ventilation and limit perspiration, but covered nothing.

Dors said in an aside to Seldon, “That makes sense, Hari. They were approaching the congregation of people-about a dozen of them. Dors said, “If any of them make rude remarks, I shall survive. Inspectors are supposed to poke around on their own without anyone from management overseeing them. We have visitors from outside-two Outworlders, two scholars. They think they may learn something. But one young man stepped forward, staring at Seldon with intense deep-set eyes, his face set into a humorless mask.

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The Emperor said, “Demerzel, you had better not. I will not tolerate another mistake in this respect. Jirad Tisalver of the Dahl Sector was short. He did not seem to take that to heart, however. He had handsome, even features, was given to smiling, and sported a thick black mustache and crisply curling black hair.

He lived, with his wife and a half-grown daughter, in an apartment of seven small rooms, kept meticulously clean, but almost bare of furnishings. Tisalver said, “I apologize, Master Seldon and Mistress Venabili, that I cannot give you the luxury to which you must be accustomed, but Dahl is a poor sector and I am not even among the better-off among our people. Master Hummin has arranged to pay us generously for your use of our humble quarters and the credits would be welcome even if you were not-and you are. This one is different. It is poor, unremarkable, and, as a matter of fact, unsafe in some ways. It is not a natural refuge for you, so that the Emperor and his Chief of Staff may not think to turn their eyes in this direction.

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