charging about blindly and smashing in an instant, perhaps, what it has taken us years to build. Besides, he will serve a purpose. He will surely attract the attention of the Second Foundationers—always assuming they exist and are indeed concerning themselves with us. And while they are attracted to him, they will, perchance, ignore us. Perhaps we can gain even more than the good fortune of being ignored. They may, we can hope, unwittingly give themselves away to us in their concern with Trevize, and let us have an opportunity and time to devise countermeasures.”
“Trevize, then, draws the lightning.”
Branno’s lips twitched. “Ah, the metaphor I’ve been looking for. He is our lightning rod, absorbing the stroke and protecting us from harm.”
“And this Pelorat, who will also be in the path of the lightning bolt?”
“He may suffer, too. That can’t be helped.”
Kodell nodded. “Well, you know what Salvor Hardin used to say— ‘Never let your sense of morals keep you from doing what is right.’?”
“At the moment, I haven’t got a sense of morals,” muttered Branno. “I have a sense of boneweariness. And yet—I could name a number of people I would sooner lose than Golan Trevize. He is a handsome young man. — And, of course, he knows it.” Her last words slurred as she closed her eyes and fell into a light sleep.
3
HISTORIAN
1.
Janov Pelorat was white-haired and his face, in repose, looked rather empty. It was rarely in anything but repose. He was of average height and weight and tended to move without haste and to speak with deliberation. He seemed considerably older than his fifty-two years.
He had never left Terminus, something that was most unusual, especially for one of his profession. He himself wasn’t sure whether his sedentary ways were because of—or in spite of—his obsession with history.
The obsession had come upon him quite suddenly at the age of fifteen when, during some indisposition, he was given a book of early legends. In it, he found the repeated motif of a world that was alone and isolated—a world that was not even aware of its isolation, since it had never known anything else.
His indisposition began to clear up at once. Within two days, he had read the book three times and was out of bed. The day after that he was at his computer terminal, checking for any records that the Terminus University Library might have on similar legends.
It was precisely such legends that had occupied him ever since. The Terminus University Library had by no means been a great resource in this respect but, when he grew older, he discovered the joys of interlibrary loans. He had printouts in his possession which had been taken off hyperradiational signals from as far away as Ifnia.
He had become a professor of ancient history and was now beginning his first sabbatical—one for which he had applied with the idea of taking a trip through space (his first) to Trantor itself—thirty-seven years later.
Pelorat was quite aware that it was most unusual for a person of Terminus to have never been in space. It had never been his intention to be notable in this particular way. It was just that whenever he might have gone into space, some new book, some new study, some new analysis came his way. He would delay his projected trip until he had wrung the new matter dry and had added, if possible, one more item of fact, or speculation, or imagination to the mountain he had collected. In the end, his only regret was that the particular trip to Trantor had never been made.
Trantor had been the capital of the First Galactic Empire. It had been the seat of Emperors for twelve thousand years and, before that, the capital of one of the most important pre-Imperial kingdoms, which had, little by little, captured or otherwise absorbed the other kingdoms to establish the Empire.
Trantor had been a world-girdling city, a metal-coated city. Pelorat had read of it in the works of Gaal Dornick, who had visited it in the time of Hari Seldon himself. Dornick’s volume no longer circulated and the one Pelorat owned might have been sold for half the historian’s annual salary. A suggestion that he might part with it would have horrified the historian.
Of course, what Pelorat cared about, as far as Trantor was concerned, was the Galactic Library, which in Imperial times (when it was the Imperial Library) had been the largest in the Galaxy. Trantor was the capital of the largest and most populous Empire humanity had ever seen. It had been a single worldwide city with a population well in excess of forty billion, and its Library had been the gathered record of all the creative (and not-so-creative) work of humanity, the full summary of its knowledge. And it was all computerized in so complex a manner that it took experts to handle the computers.
What was more, the Library had survived. To Pelorat, that was the amazing thing about it. When Trantor had fallen and been sacked, nearly two and a half centuries before, it had undergone appalling destruction, and the tales of human misery and death would not bear repeating—yet the Library had survived, protected (it was said) by the University students, who used ingeniously devised weapons. (Some thought the defense by the students might well have been thoroughly romanticized.)
In any case, the Library had endured through the period of devastation. Ebling Mis had done his work in an intact Library in a ruined world when he had almost located the Second Foundation (according to the story which the people of the Foundation still believed, but which historians have always treated with reserve). The three generations of Darells—Bayta, Toran, and Arkady—had each, at one time or another, been on Trantor. However, Arkady had not visited the Library, and since her time the Library had not impinged on Galactic history.
No Foundationer had been on Trantor in a hundred and twenty years, but there was no reason to believe the Library was not still there. That it had made no impingement was the surest evidence in favor of its being there. Its destruction would surely have made a noise.
The Library was outmoded and archaic—it had been so even in Ebling Mis’s time—but that was all to the good. Pelorat always rubbed his hands with excitement when he thought of an
And now his dream would come true. The Mayor herself had assured him of that. How she had known of his work, he wasn’t quite sure. He had not succeeded in publishing many papers. Little of what he had done was solid enough to be acceptable for publication and what had appeared had left no mark. Still, they said Branno the Bronze knew all that went on in Terminus and had eyes at the end of every finger and toe. Pelorat could almost believe it, but if she knew of his work, why on Terminus didn’t she see its importance and give him a little financial support before this?
Somehow, he thought, with as much bitterness as he could generate, the Foundation had its eyes fixed firmly on the future. It was the Second Empire and their destiny that absorbed them. They had no time, no desire, to peer back into the past—and they were irritated by those who did.
The more fools they, of course, but he could not single-handedly wipe out folly. And it might be better so. He could hug the great pursuit to his own chest and the day would come when he would be remembered as the great Pioneer of the Important.
That meant, of course (and he was too intellectually honest to refuse to perceive it), that he, too, was absorbed in the future—a future in which he would be recognized, and in which he would be a hero on a par with Hari Seldon. In fact, he would be the greater, for how could the working out of a clearly visualized future a millennium long stand comparison with the working out of a lost past at least twenty-five millennia old.
And this was the day;
The Mayor had said it would be the day after Seldon’s image made its appearance. That was the only reason
