“I was there,” said Mistress Tisalver intransigently. “I saw it.” She stepped aside to let them enter, but delayed long enough to make her reluctance quite plain.
“She acts as though that was the last straw,” said Dors as she and Seldon made their way up to their rooms.
“So? What can she do about it?” asked Seldon.
“I wonder,” said Dors.
OFFICERS
RAYCH— .?.?.?According to Hari Seldon, the original meeting with Raych was entirely accidental. He was simply a gutter urchin from whom Seldon had asked directions. But his life, from that moment on, continued to be intertwined with that of the great mathematician until?.?.?.
77
The next morning, dressed from the waist down, having washed and shaved, Seldon knocked on the door that led to Dors’s adjoining room and said in a moderate voice, “Open the door, Dors.”
She did. The short reddish-gold curls of her hair were still wet and she too was dressed only from the waist down.
Seldon stepped back in embarrassed alarm. Dors looked down at the swell of her breasts indifferently and wrapped a towel around her head. “What is it?” she asked.
Seldon said, looking off to his right, “I was going to ask you about Wye.”
Dors said very naturally, “About why in connection with what? And for goodness sake, don’t make me talk to your ear. Surely, you’re not a virgin.”
Seldon said in a hurt tone, “I was merely trying to be polite. If
“Why do you want to know? Or, if you prefer: Why Wye?”
“Look, Dors, I’m serious. Every once in a while, the Wye Sector is mentioned—the Mayor of Wye, actually. Hummin mentioned him, you did, Davan did. I don’t know anything about either the sector or the Mayor.”
“I’m not a native Trantorian either, Hari. I know very little, but you’re welcome to what I do know. Wye is near the south pole—quite large, very populous—”
“Very populous at the south pole?”
“We’re not on Helicon, Hari. Or on Cinna either. This is Trantor. Everything is underground and underground at the poles or underground at the equator is pretty much the same. Of course, I imagine they keep their day-night arrangements rather extreme—long days in their summer, long nights in their winter—almost as it would be on the surface. The extremes are just affectation; they’re proud of being polar.”
“But Upperside they must be cold, indeed.”
“Oh yes. The Wye Upperside is snow and ice, but it doesn’t lie as thickly there as you might think. If it did, it might crush the dome, but it doesn’t and that is the basic reason for Wye’s power.”
She turned to her mirror, removed the towel from her head, and threw the dry-net over her hair, which, in a matter of five seconds, gave it a pleasant sheen. She said, “You have no idea how glad I am not to be wearing a skincap,” as she put on the upper portion of her clothing.
“What has the ice layer to do with Wye’s power?”
“Think about it. Forty billion people use a great deal of power and every calorie of it eventually degenerates into heat and has to be gotten rid of. It’s piped to the poles, particularly to the south pole, which is the more developed of the two, and is discharged into space. It melts most of the ice in the process and I’m sure that accounts for Trantor’s clouds and rains, no matter how much the meteorology boggins insist that things are more complicated than that.”
“Does Wye make use of the power before discharging it?”
“They may, for all I know. I haven’t the slightest idea, by the way, as to the technology involved in discharging the heat, but I’m talking about political power. If Dahl were to stop producing usable energy, that would certainly inconvenience Trantor, but there are other sectors that produce energy and can up their production and, of course, there is stored energy in one form or another. Eventually, Dahl would have to be dealt with, but there would be time. Wye, on the other hand—”
“Yes?”
“Well, Wye gets rid of at least 90 percent of all the heat developed on Trantor and there is no substitute. If Wye were to shut down its heat emission, the temperature would start going up all over Trantor.”
“In Wye too.”
“Ah, but since Wye is at the south pole, it can arrange an influx of cold air. It wouldn’t do
“And what kind of a person is the present Mayor of Wye?”
“That I don’t know. What I’ve occasionally heard would make it seem that he is very old and pretty much a recluse, but hard as a hypership hull and still cleverly maneuvering for power.”
“Why, I wonder? If he’s that old, he couldn’t hold the power for long.”
“Who knows, Hari? A lifelong obsession, I suppose. Or else it’s the game .?.?. the
Seldon shook his head. “It strikes me that no one could possibly want to be Emperor.”
“No sane person would, I agree, but the ‘Imperial wish,’ as it is frequently called, is like a disease that, when caught, drives out sanity. And the closer you get to high office, the more likely you are to catch the disease. With each ensuing promotion—”
“The disease grows still more acute. Yes, I can see that. But it also seems to me that Trantor is so huge a world, so interlocking in its needs and so conflicting in its ambitions, that it makes up the major part of the inability of the Emperor to rule. Why doesn’t he just leave Trantor and establish himself on some simpler world?”
Dors laughed. “You wouldn’t ask that if you knew your history. Trantor
Seldon sank into silence, his face rigid, and after a while Dors asked, “What’s the matter, Hari?”
“I’m thinking,” he said in a muffled voice. “Ever since you told me that hand-on-thigh story, I’ve had fugitive thoughts that—Now your remark about the Emperor being a place rather than a person seems to have struck a chord.”
“What kind of chord?”
Seldon shook his head. “I’m still thinking. I may be all wrong.” His glance at Dors sharpened, his eyes coming into focus. “In any case, we ought to go down and have breakfast. We’re late and I don’t think Mistress Tisalver is in a good enough humor to have it brought in for us.”
“You optimist,” said Dors. “My own feeling is that she’s not in a good enough humor to want us to stay—
