The floor plan was clear in his mind. He was a blob moving noiselessly up the well-carpeted ramp. At its head, he flattened against the wall and waited.
The small closed door of a private room was before him. Behind that door must be the mutant who had beaten the unbeatable. He was early—the bomb had ten minutes of life in it.
Five of these passed, and still in all the world there was no sound. The Mule had five minutes to live—So had Captain Pritcher—
He stepped forward on sudden impulse. The plot could no longer fail. When the bomb went, the palace would go with it—all the palace. A door between—ten yards between—was nothing. But he wanted to see the Mule as they died together.
In a last, insolent gesture, he thundered upon the door—
And it opened and let out the blinding light.
Captain Pritcher staggered, then caught himself. The solemn man, standing in the center of the small room before a suspended fish bowl, looked up mildly.
His uniform was a somber black, and as he tapped the bowl in an absent gesture, it bobbed quickly and the feather-finned orange and vermilion fish within darted wildly.
He said, “Come in, captain!”
To the captain’s quivering tongue the little metal globe beneath was swelling ominously—a physical impossibility, the captain knew. But it was in its last minute of life.
The uniformed man said, “You had better spit out the foolish pellet and free yourself for speech. It won’t blast.”
The minute passed and with a slow, sodden motion the captain bent his head and dropped the silvery globe into his palm. With a furious force it was flung against the wall. It rebounded with a tiny, sharp clangor, gleaming harmlessly as it flew.
The uniformed man shrugged. “So much for that, then. It would have done you no good in any case, captain. I am not the Mule. You will have to be satisfied with his viceroy.”
“How did you know?” muttered the captain, thickly.
“Blame it on an efficient counter-espionage system. I can name every member of your little gang, every step of their planning—”
“And you let it go this far?”
“Why not? It has been one of my great purposes here to find you and some others. Particularly you. I might have had you some months ago, while you were still a worker at the Newton Bearings Works, but this is much better. If you hadn’t suggested the main outlines of the plot yourself, one of my own men would have advanced something of much the same sort for you. The result is quite dramatic, and rather grimly humorous.”
The captain’s eyes were hard. “I find it so, too. Is it all over now?”
“Just begun. Come, captain, sit down. Let us leave heroics for the fools who are impressed by it. Captain, you are a capable man. According to the information I have, you were the first on the Foundation to recognize the power of the Mule. Since then you have interested yourself, rather daringly, in the Mule’s early life. You have been one of those who carried off his clown, who, incidentally, has not yet been found, and for which there will yet be full payment. Naturally, your ability is recognized and the Mule is not of those who fear the ability of his enemies as long as he can convert it into the ability of a new friend.”
“Is that what you’re hedging up to? Oh, no!”
“Oh, yes! It was the purpose of tonight’s comedy. You are an intelligent man, yet your little conspiracies against the Mule fail humorously. You can scarcely dignify it with the name of conspiracy. Is it part of your military training to waste ships in hopeless actions?”
“One must first admit them to be hopeless.”
“One will,” the viceroy assured him, gently. “The Mule has conquered the Foundation. It is rapidly being turned into an arsenal for accomplishment of his greater aims.”
“What greater aims?”
“The conquest of the entire Galaxy. The reunion of all the torn worlds into a new Empire. The fulfillment, you dull-witted patriot, of your own Seldon’s dream seven hundred years before he hoped to see it. And in the fulfillment, you can help us.”
“I can, undoubtedly. But I won’t, undoubtedly.”
“I understand,” reasoned the viceroy, “that only three of the Independent Trading Worlds yet resist. They will not last much longer. It will be the last of all Foundation forces. You still hold out.”
“Yes.”
“Yet you won’t. A voluntary recruit is the most efficient. But the other kind will do. Unfortunately, the Mule is absent. He leads the fight, as always, against the resisting Traders. But he is in continual contact with us. You will not have to wait long.”
“For what?”
“For your conversion.”
“The Mule,” said the captain, frigidly, “will find that beyond his ability.”
“But he won’t.
The captain stiffened in dismay. “You were the warlord of Kalgan.”
“Yes. And now I am the loyal viceroy of the Mule. You see, he is persuasive.”
21
INTERLUDE IN SPACE
The blockade was run successfully. In the vast volume of space, not all the navies ever in existence could keep their watch in tight proximity. Given a single ship, a skillful pilot, and a moderate degree of luck, and there are holes and to spare.
With cold-eyed calm, Toran drove a protesting vessel from the vicinity of one star to that of another. If the neighborhood of great mass made an interstellar jump erratic and difficult, it also made the enemy detection devices useless or nearly so.
And once the girdle of ships had been passed, the inner sphere of dead space, through whose blockaded sub-ether no message could be driven, was passed as well. For the first time in over three months Toran felt unisolated.
A week passed before the enemy news programs dealt with anything more than the dull, self-laudatory details of growing control over the Foundation. It was a week in which Toran’s armored trading ship fled inward from the Periphery in hasty jumps.
Ebling Mis called out to the pilot room and Toran rose blink-eyed from his charts.
“What’s the matter?” Toran stepped down into the small central chamber which Bayta had inevitably devised into a living room.
Mis shook his head, “Bescuppered if I know. The Mule’s newsmen are announcing a special bulletin. Thought you might want to get in on it.”
“Might as well. Where’s Bayta?”
“Setting the table in the diner and picking out a menu—or some such frippery.”
Toran sat down upon the cot that served as Magnifico’s bed, and waited. The propaganda routine of the Mule’s “special bulletins” were monotonously similar. First the martial music, and then the buttery slickness of the announcer. The minor news items would come, following one another in patient lockstep. Then the pause. Then the trumpets and the rising excitement and the climax.
Toran endured it. Mis muttered to himself.
The newscaster spilled out, in conventional war-correspondent phraseology, the unctuous words that translated into sound the molten metal and blasted flesh of a battle in space.
“Rapid cruiser squadrons under Lieutenant General Sammin hit back hard today at the task force striking out from Iss—” The carefully expressionless face of the speaker upon the screen faded into the blackness of a space cut
