Prelude to Foundation

you didn’t need to and that predisposed me in your favor, since I didn’t realize at the time that they were your hirelings, doing what you had instructed them to do. —But never mind that.”

“No,” said Hummin, a hint of amusement—finally—in his voice.

“I trusted you. I was easily convinced not to go home to Helicon and to make myself a wanderer over the face of Trantor. I believed everything you told me without question. I placed myself entirely in your hands. Looking back on it now, I see myself as not myself. I am not a person to be so easily led, yet I was. More than that, I did not even think it strange that I was behaving so far out of character.”

“You know yourself best, Hari.”

“It wasn’t only me. How is it that Dors Venabili, a beautiful woman with a career of her own, should abandon that career in order to join me in my flight? How is it that she should risk her life to save mine, seeming to take on, as a kind of holy duty, the task of protecting me and becoming single-minded in the process? Was it simply because you asked her to?”

“I did ask her to, Hari.”

“Yet she does not strike me as the kind of person to make such a radical changeover in her life merely because someone asks her to. Nor could I believe it was because she had fallen madly in love with me at first sight and could not help herself. I somehow wish she had, but she seems quite the mistress of her emotional self, more —I am now speaking to you frankly—than I myself am with respect to her.”

“She is a wonderful woman,” said Hummin. “I don’t blame you.”

Seldon went on. “How is it, moreover, that Sunmaster Fourteen, a monster of arrogance and one who leads a people who are themselves stiff-necked in their own conceit, should be willing to take in tribespeople like Dors and myself and to treat us as well as the Mycogenians could and did? When we broke every rule, committed every sacrilege, how is it that you could still talk him into letting us go?

“How could you talk the Tisalvers, with their petty prejudices, into taking us in? How can you be at home everywhere in the world, be friends with everyone, influence each person, regardless of their individual peculiarities? For that matter, how do you manage to manipulate Cleon too? And if he is viewed as malleable and easily molded, then how were you able to handle his father, who by all accounts was a rough and arbitrary tyrant? How could you do all this?

“Most of all, how is it that Mannix IV of Wye could spend decades building an army without peer, one trained to be proficient in every detail, and yet have it fall apart when his daughter tries to make use of it? How could you persuade them to play the Renegade, all of them, as you have done?”

Hummin said, “Might this mean no more than that I am a tactful person used to dealing with people of different types, that I am in a position to have done favors for crucial people and am in a position to do additional favors in the future? Nothing I have done, it might seem, requires the supernatural.”

“Nothing you have done? Not even the neutralization of the Wyan army?”

“They did not wish to serve a woman.”

“They must have known for years that any time Mannix laid down his powers or any time he died, Rashelle would be their Mayor, yet they showed no signs of discontent—until you felt it necessary that they show it. Dors described you at one time as a very persuasive man. And so you are. More persuasive than any man could be. But you are not more persuasive than an immortal robot with strange mental powers might be. —Well, Hummin?”

Hummin said, “What is it you expect of me, Hari? Do you expect me to admit I’m a robot? That I only look like a human being? That I am immortal? That I am a mental marvel?!”

Seldon leaned toward Hummin as he sat there on the opposite side of the table. “Yes, Hummin, I do. I expect you to tell me the truth and I strongly suspect that what you have just outlined is the truth. You, Hummin, are the robot that Mother Rittah referred to as Da-Nee, friend of Ba-Lee. You must admit it. You have no choice.”

92

It was as though they were sitting in a tiny Universe of their own. There, in the middle of Wye, with the Wyan army being disarmed by Imperial force, they sat quietly. There, in the midst of events that all of Trantor—and perhaps all the Galaxy—was watching, there was this small bubble of utter isolation within which Seldon and Hummin were playing their game of attack and defense—Seldon trying hard to force a new reality, Hummin making no move to accept that new reality.

Seldon had no fear of interruption. He was certain that the bubble within which they sat had a boundary that could not be penetrated, that Hummin’s—no, the robot’s—powers would keep all at a distance till the game was over.

Hummin finally said, “You are an ingenious fellow, Hari, but I fail to see why I must admit that I am a robot and why I have no choice but to do so. Everything you say may be true as facts—your own behavior, Dors’s behavior, Sunmaster’s, Tisalver’s, the Wyan generals’—all, all may have happened as you said, but that doesn’t force your interpretation of the meaning of the events to be true. Surely, everything that happened can have a natural explanation. You trusted me because you accepted what I said; Dors felt your safety to be important because she felt psychohistory to be crucial, herself being a historian; Sunmaster and Tisalver were beholden to me for favors you know nothing of, the Wyan generals resented being ruled by a woman, no more. Why must we flee to the supernatural?”

Seldon said, “See here, Hummin, do you really believe the Empire to be falling and do you really consider it important that it not be allowed to do so with no move made to save it or, at the least, cushion its Fall?”

“I really do.” Somehow Seldon knew this statement was sincere.

“And you really want me to work out the details of psychohistory and you feel that you yourself cannot do it?”

“I lack the capability.”

“And you feel that only I can handle psychohistory—even if I sometimes doubt it myself?”

“Yes.”

“And you must therefore feel that if you can possibly help me in any way, you must.”

“I do.”

“Personal feelings—selfish considerations—could play no part?”

A faint and brief smile passed over Hummin’s grave face and for a moment Seldon sensed a vast and arid desert of weariness behind Hummin’s quiet manner. “I have built a long career on paying no heed to personal feelings or to selfish considerations.”

“Then I ask your help. I can work out psychohistory on the basis of Trantor alone, but I will run into difficulties. Those difficulties I may overcome, but how much easier it would be to do so if I knew certain key facts. For instance, was Earth or Aurora the first world of humanity or was it some other world altogether? What was the relationship between Earth and Aurora? Did either or both colonize the Galaxy? If one, why didn’t the other? If both, how was the issue decided? Are there worlds descended from both or from only one? How did robots come to be abandoned? How did Trantor become the Imperial world, rather than another planet? What happened to Aurora and Earth in the meantime? There are a thousand questions I might ask right now and a hundred thousand that might arise as I go along. Would you allow me to remain ignorant, Hummin, and fail in my task when you could inform me and help me succeed?”

Hummin said, “If I were the robot, would I have room in my brain for all of twenty thousand years of history for millions of different worlds?”

“I don’t know the capacity of robotic brains. I don’t know the capacity of yours. But if you lack the capacity, then you must have that information which you cannot hold safely recorded in a place and in a way that would make it possible for you to call upon it. And if you have it and I need information, how can you deny and withhold it from me? And if you cannot withhold it from me, how can you deny that you are a robot—that robot—the Renegade?”

Seldon sat back and took a deep breath. “So I ask you again: Are you that robot? If you want psychohistory, then you must admit it. If you still deny you are a robot and if you convince me you are not, then my chances at