“You are still threatening.”
“I am promising. I will do nothing if Professor Seldon is unharmed. Otherwise, Colonel Linn, I will be forced to maim or kill you and—I promise you again—I will do the same to General Tennar.”
Linn said, “You cannot withstand an entire army, no matter how tigerish a woman you are. What then?”
“Stories spread,” said Dors, “and are exaggerated. I have not really done much in the way of tigerishness, but many more stories are told of me than are true. Your guardsmen fell back when they recognized me and they themselves will spread the story, with advantage, of how I made my way to you. Even an army might hesitate to attack me, Colonel Linn, but even if they did and even if they destroyed me, beware the indignation of the people. The junta is maintaining order, but it is doing so only barely and you don’t want anything to upset matters. Think, then, of how easy the alternative is. Simply do not harm Professor Hari Seldon.”
“We have no intention of harming him.”
“Why the interview, then?”
“What’s the mystery? The General is curious about psychohistory. The government records are open to us. The old Emperor Cleon was interested. Demerzel, when he was First Minister, was interested. Why should we not be in our turn? In fact, more so.”
“Why more so?”
“Because time has passed. As I understand it, psychohistory began as a thought in Professor Seldon’s mind. He has been working on it, with increasing vigor and with larger and larger groups of people, for nearly thirty years. He has done so almost entirely with government support, so that, in a way, his discoveries and techniques belong to the government. We intend to ask him about psychohistory, which, by now, must be far advanced beyond what existed in the times of Demerzel and Cleon, and we expect him to tell us what we want to know. We want something more practical than the vision of equations curling their way through air. Do you understand me?”
“Yes,” said Dors, frowning.
“And one more thing. Do not suppose that the danger to your husband comes from the government only and that any harm that reaches him will mean that you must attack us at once. I would suggest that Professor Seldon may have purely private enemies. I have no knowledge of such things, but surely it is possible.”
“I shall keep that in mind. Right now, I want to have you arrange that I join my husband during his interview with the General. I want to know, beyond doubt, that he is safe.”
“That will be hard to arrange and will take some time. It would be impossible to interrupt the conversation, but if you wait till it is ended—”
“Take the time and arrange it. Do not count on double-crossing me and remaining alive.”
16
General Tennar stared at Hari Seldon in a rather pop-eyed manner and his fingers tapped lightly at the desk where he sat.
“Thirty years,” he said. “Thirty years and you are telling me you still have nothing to show for it?”
“Actually, General, twenty-eight years.”
Tennar ignored that. “And all at government expense. Do you know how many billions of credits have been invested in your Project, Professor?”
“I haven’t kept up, General, but we have records that could give me the answer to your question in seconds.”
“And so have we. The government, Professor, is not an endless source of funds. These are not the old times. We don’t have Cleon’s old free-and-easy attitude toward finances. Raising taxes is hard and we need credits for many things. I have called you here, hoping that you can benefit us in some way with your psychohistory. If you cannot, then I must tell you, quite frankly, that we will have to shut off the faucet. If you can continue your research without government funding, do so, for unless you show me something that would make the expense worth it, you will have to do just that.”
“General, you make a demand I cannot meet, but, if in response, you end government support, you will be throwing away the future. Give me time and eventually—”
“Various governments have heard that ‘eventually’ from you for decades. Isn’t it true, Professor, that you say your psychohistory predicts that the junta is unstable, that my rule is unstable, that in a short time it will collapse?”
Seldon frowned. “The technique is not yet firm enough for me to say that this is something that psychohistory states.”
“I put it to you that psychohistory does state it and that this is common knowledge within your Project.”
“No,” said Seldon warmly. “No such thing. It is possible that some among us have interpreted some relationships to indicate that the junta may be an unstable form of government, but there are other relationships that may easily be interpreted to show it is stable. That is the reason why we must continue our work. At the present moment it is all too easy to use incomplete data and imperfect reasoning to reach any conclusion we wish.”
“But if you decide to present the conclusion that the government is unstable and say that psychohistory warrants it—even if it does not actually do so—will it not add to the instability?”
“It may very well do that, General. And if we announced that the government is stable, it may well add to the stability. I have had this very same discussion with Emperor Cleon on a number of occasions. It is possible to use psychohistory as a tool to manipulate the emotions of the people and achieve short-term effects. In the long run, however, the predictions are quite likely to prove incomplete or downright erroneous and psychohistory will lose all its credibility and it will be as though it had never existed.”
“Enough! Tell me straight out! What do you think psychohistory shows about my government?”
“It shows, we think, that there are elements of instability in it, but we are not certain—and cannot be certain—exactly in what way this can be made worse or made better.”
“In other words, psychohistory simply tells you what you would know without psychohistory and it is that in which the government has invested uncounted piles of credits.”
“The time will come when psychohistory will tell us what we could not know without it and then the investment will pay itself back many, many times over.”
“And how long will it be before that time comes?”
“Not too long, I hope. We have been making rather gratifying progress in the last few years.”
Tennar was tapping his fingernail on his desk again. “Not enough. Tell me something helpful now. Something useful.”
Seldon pondered, then said, “I can prepare a detailed report for you, but it will take time.”
“Of course it will. Days, months, years—and somehow it will never be written. Do you take me for a fool?”
“No, of course not, General. However, I don’t want to be taken for a fool, either. I can tell you something that I will take sole responsibility for. I have seen it in my psychohistorical research, but I may have misinterpreted what I saw. However, since you insist—”
“I insist.”
“You mentioned taxes a little while ago. You said raising taxes was difficult. Certainly. It is always difficult. Every government must do its work by collecting wealth in one form or another. The only two ways in which such credits can be obtained are, first, by robbing a neighbor, or second, persuading a government’s own citizens to grant the credits willingly and peaceably.
“Since we have established a Galactic Empire that has been conducting its business in reasonable fashion for thousands of years, there is no possibility of robbing a neighbor, except as the result of an occasional rebellion and its repression. This does not happen often enough to support a government—and, if it did, the government would be too unstable to last long, in any case.”
Seldon drew a deep breath and went on. “Therefore, credits must be raised by asking the citizens to hand
