mother and I have enough of that from her. I am
Raych’s nose wrinkled. “Twisting ain’t much good.” (It was no use. Raych heard himself speak and knew that, even eight years out of the morass of Dahl, he still slipped into using the Dahlite accent that marked him firmly as a member of the lower class. And he was short, too, to the point where he sometimes felt stunted. —But he had his mustache and no one ever patronized him twice.)
He said, “What are you going to do about Joranum?”
“For now, nothing.”
“Well, look, Dad, I saw Joranum on TrantorVision a couple of times. I even made some holotapes of his speeches. —Everyone is talking about him, so I thought I would see what he has to say. And, you know, he makes some kind of sense. I don’t like him and I don’t trust him, but he
“Certainly not. All civilized people feel that way.”
“So why don’t we
“The Emperor and the First Minister have an entire Empire to worry about. They can’t concentrate all their efforts on Trantor itself. It’s easy for Joranum to talk about equality. He has no responsibilities. If he were in the position to rule, he would find that his efforts would be greatly diluted by an Empire of twenty-five million planets. Not only that, but he would find himself stopped at every point by the sectors themselves. Each one wants a great deal of equality for itself—but not much equality for others. Tell me, Raych, are you of the opinion that Joranum ought to have a chance to rule, just to show what he can do?”
Raych shrugged. “I don’t know. I wonder. —But if he had tried anything on you, I would have been at his throat before he could move two centimeters.”
“Your loyalty to me, then, exceeds your concern for the Empire.”
“Sure. You’re my dad.”
Seldon looked at Raych fondly, but behind that look he felt a trace of uncertainty. How far could Joranum’s nearly hypnotic influence go?
9
Hari Seldon sat back in his chair, the vertical back giving as he did so and allowing him to assume a half- reclining position. His hands were behind his head and his eyes were unfocused. His breathing was very soft, indeed.
Dors Venabili was at the other end of the room, with her viewer turned off and the microfilms back in place. She had been through a rather concentrated period of revision of her opinions on the Florina Incident in early Trantorian history and she found it rather restful to withdraw for a few moments and to speculate on what it was that Seldon was considering.
It had to be psychohistory. It would probably take him the rest of his life, tracking down the byways of this semichaotic technique, and he would end with it incomplete, leaving the task to others (to Amaryl, if that young man had not also worn himself out on the matter) and breaking his heart at the need to do that.
Yet it gave him a reason for living. He would live longer with the problem filling him from end to end—and that pleased her. Someday she would lose him, she knew, and she found that the thought afflicted her. It had not seemed it would at the start, when her task had been the simple one of protecting him for the sake of what he knew.
When had it become a matter of personal need? How could there be so personal a need? What was there about the man that caused her to feel uneasy when he was not in her sight, even when she knew he was safe so that the deeply ingrained orders within her were not called into action? His safety was all that she had been ordered to be concerned with. How did the rest intrude itself?
She had spoken of it to Demerzel long before, when the feeling had made itself unmistakable.
He had regarded her gravely and said, “You are complex, Dors, and there are no simple answers. In my life there have been several individuals whose presence made it easier for me to think, pleasanter to make my responses. I have tried to judge the ease of my responses in their presence and the unease of my responses in their final absence to see whether I was the net gainer or loser. In the process, one thing became plain. The pleasantness of their company outweighed the regret of their passing. On the whole, then, it is better to experience what you experience now than not to.”
She thought: Hari will someday leave a void, and each day that someday is closer, and I must not think of it.
It was to rid herself of the thought that she finally interrupted him. “What are you thinking of, Hari?”
“What?” Seldon focused his eyes with an apparent effort.
“Psychohistory, I assume. I imagine you’ve traced another blind pathway.”
“Well now. That’s not on my mind at all.” He laughed suddenly. “Do you want to know what I’m thinking of? —Hair!”
“Hair? Whose?”
“Right now, yours.” He was looking at her fondly.
“Is there something wrong with it? Should I dye it another color? Or perhaps, after all these years, it should go gray.”
“Come! Who needs or wants gray in
“Nishaya? What’s that?”
“It was never part of the pre-Imperial Kingdom of Trantor, so I’m not surprised you haven’t heard of it. It’s a world, a small one. Isolated. Unimportant. Overlooked. I only know anything at all about it because I’ve taken the trouble to look it up. Very few worlds out of twenty-five million can really make much of a sustained splash, but I doubt that there’s another one as insignificant as Nishaya. Which is very significant, you see.”
Dors shoved her reference material to one side and said, “What is this new penchant you have for paradox, which you always tell me you detest? What is this significance of insignificance?”
“Oh, I don’t mind paradoxes when
“Ah, it’s Joranum you’re concerned with.”
“Yes. I’ve been viewing some of his speeches—at Raych’s insistence. They don’t make very much sense, but the total effect can be almost hypnotic. Raych is very impressed by him.”
“I imagine that anyone of Dahlite origins would be, Hari. Joranum’s constant call for sector equality would naturally appeal to the downtrodden heatsinkers. You remember when we were in Dahl?”
“I remember it very well and of course I don’t blame the lad. It just bothers me that Joranum comes from Nishaya.”
Dors shrugged. “Well, Joranum has to come from somewhere and, conversely, Nishaya, like any other world, must send its people out at times, even to Trantor.”
“Yes, but, as I’ve said, I’ve taken the trouble to investigate Nishaya. I’ve even managed to make hyperspatial contact with some minor official—which cost a considerable quantity of credits that I cannot, in good conscience, charge to the department.”
“And did you find anything that was worth the credits?”
“I rather think so. You know, Joranum is always telling little stories to make his points, stories that are legends on his home planet of Nishaya. That serves a good purpose for him here on Trantor, since it makes him appear to be a man of the people, full of homespun philosophy. Those tales litter his speeches. They make him appear to be from a small world, to have been brought up on an isolated farm surrounded by an untamed ecology. People like it, especially Trantorians, who would rather die than be trapped somewhere in an untamed ecology but who love to dream about one just the same.”
