“Not likely. Any Mycogenian victory would be announced in the Book unmistakably and referred to over and over again.”
“There was another point the Book made about the Renegade,” said Seldon, hesitating, “but I can’t be at all sure I understood it.”
Hummin said, “As I told you .?.?. They are deliberately obscure at times.”
“Nevertheless, they seemed to say that the Renegade could somehow tap human emotions .?.?. influence them—”
“Any politician can,” said Hummin with a shrug. “It’s called charisma—when it works.”
Seldon sighed. “Well, I wanted to believe. That was it. I would have given a great deal to find an ancient humaniform robot that was still alive and that I could question.”
“For what purpose?” asked Hummin.
“To learn the details of the primordial Galactic society when it still consisted of only a handful of worlds. From so small a Galaxy psychohistory could be deduced more easily.”
Hummin said, “Are you sure you could trust what you heard? After many thousands of years, would you be willing to rely on the robot’s early memories? How much distortion would have entered into them?”
“That’s right,” said Dors suddenly. “It would be like the computerized records I told you of, Hari. Slowly, those robot memories would be discarded, lost, erased, distorted. You can only go back so far and the farther you go back, the less reliable the information becomes—no matter what you do.”
Hummin nodded. “I’ve heard it referred to as a kind of uncertainty principle in information.”
“But wouldn’t it be possible,” said Seldon thoughtfully, “that
“The key word is ‘particular.’ What the Book may care to preserve may not be what
Seldon said in despair, “In whatever direction I turn to seek a way of working out psychohistory, matters so arrange themselves as to make it impossible. Why bother trying?”
“It might seem hopeless now,” said Hummin unemotionally, “but given the necessary genius, a route to psychohistory may be found that none of us would at this moment expect. Give yourself more time. —But we’re coming to a rest area. Let us pull off and have dinner.”
Over the lamb patties on rather tasteless bread (most unpalatable after the fare at Mycogen), Seldon said, “You seem to assume, Hummin, that I am the possessor of ‘the necessary genius.’ I may not be, you know.”
Hummin said, “That’s true. You may not be. However, I know of no alternate candidate for the post, so I must cling to you.”
And Seldon sighed and said, “Well, I’ll try, but I’m out of any spark of hope. Possible but not practical, I said to begin with, and I’m more convinced of that now than I ever was before.”
HEATSINK
AMARYL, YUGO— .?.?.?A mathematician who, next to Hari Seldon himself, may be considered most responsible for working out the details of psychohistory. It was he who?.?.?.
.?.?.?Yet the conditions under which he began life are almost more dramatic than his mathematical accomplishments. Born into the hopeless poverty of the lower classes of Dahl, a sector of ancient Trantor, he might have passed his life in utter obscurity were it not for the fact that Seldon, quite by accident, encountered him in the course of?.?.?.
61
The Emperor of all the Galaxy felt weary—physically weary. His lips ached from the gracious smile he had had to place on his face at careful intervals. His neck was stiff from having inclined his head this way and that in a feigned show of interest. His ears pained from having to listen. His whole body throbbed from having to rise and to sit and to turn and to hold out his hand and to nod.
It was merely a state function where one had to meet Mayors and Viceroys and Ministers and their wives or husbands from here and there in Trantor and (worse) from here and there in the Galaxy. There were nearly a thousand present, all in costumes that varied from the ornate to the downright outlandish, and he had had to listen to a babble of different accents made the worse by an effort to speak the Emperor’s Galactic as spoken at the Galactic University. Worst of all, the Emperor had had to remember to avoid making commitments of substance, while freely applying the lotion of words without substance.
All had been recorded, sight and sound—very discreetly—and Eto Demerzel would go over it to see if Cleon, First of that Name, had behaved himself. That, of course, was only the way that the Emperor put it to himself. Demerzel would surely say that he was merely collecting data on any unintentional self-revelation on the part of the guests. And perhaps he was.
Fortunate Demerzel!
The Emperor could not leave the Palace and its extensive grounds, while Demerzel could range the Galaxy if he wished. The Emperor was always on display, always accessible, always forced to deal with visitors, from the important to the merely intrusive. Demerzel remained anonymous and never allowed himself to be seen inside the Palace grounds. He remained merely a fearsome name and an invisible (and therefore the more frightening) presence.
The Emperor was the Inside Man with all the trappings and emoluments of power. Demerzel was the Outside Man, with nothing evident, not even a formal title, but with his fingers and mind probing everywhere and asking for no reward for his tireless labors but one—the reality of power.
It amused the Emperor—in a macabre sort of way—to consider that, at any moment, without warning, with a manufactured excuse or with none at all, he could have Demerzel arrested, imprisoned, exiled, tortured, or executed. After all, in these annoying centuries of constant unrest, the Emperor might have difficulty in exerting his will over the various planets of the Empire, even over the various sectors of Trantor—with their rabble of local executives and legislatures that he was forced to deal with in a maze of interlocking decrees, protocols, commitments, treaties, and general interstellar legalities—but at least his powers remained absolute over the Palace and its grounds.
And yet Cleon knew that his dreams of power were useless. Demerzel had served his father and Cleon could not remember a time when he did not turn to Demerzel for everything. It was Demerzel who knew it all, devised it all, did it all. More than that, it was on Demerzel that anything that went wrong could be blamed. The Emperor himself remained above criticism and had nothing to fear—except, of course, palace coups and assassination by his nearest and dearest. It was to prevent this, above all, that he depended upon Demerzel.
Emperor Cleon felt a tiny shudder at the thought of trying to do without Demerzel. There had been Emperors who had ruled personally, who had had a series of Chiefs of Staff of no talent, who had had incompetents serving in the post and had kept them—and somehow they had gotten along for a time and after a fashion.
But Cleon could not. He needed Demerzel. In fact, now that the thought of assassination had come to him —and, in view of the modern history of the Empire, it was inevitable that it had come to him—he could see that getting rid of Demerzel was quite impossible. It couldn’t be done. No matter how cleverly he, Cleon, would attempt
