"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. I was not beyond it. You don't recognize me? Come, you were on Kalgan, so you have seen me. I wore a monocle, a fur-lined scarlet robe, a high-crowned hat–"

 

 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 menuor 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 lock step. 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 through by the quick swaths of ships reeling across emptiness in deadly battle. The voice continued through the soundless thunder

 

 "The most striking action of the battle was the subsidiary combat of the heavy cruiserCluster against three enemy ships of the 'Nova' class–"

 

 The screen's view veered and closed in. A great ship sparked and one of the frantic attackers glowed angrily, twisted out of focus, swung back and rammed. TheCluster bowed wildly and survived the glancing blow that drove the attacker off in twisting reflection.

 

 The newsman's smooth unimpassioned delivery continued to the last blow and the last hulk.

 

 Then a pause, and a large similar voice-and-picture of the fight off Mnemon, to which the novelty was added of a lengthy description of a hit-and-run landing – the picture of a blasted city – huddled and weary prisoners – and off again.

 

 Mnemon had not long to live.

 

 The pause again – and this time the raucous sound of the expected brasses. The screen faded into the long, impressively soldier-lined corridor up which the government spokesman in councilor's uniform strode quickly.

 

 The silence was oppressive.

 

 The voice that came at last was solemn, slow and hard: "By order of our sovereign, it is announced that the planet, Haven, hitherto in warlike opposition to his will, has submitted to the acceptance of defeat. At this moment, the forces of our sovereign are occupying the planet. Opposition was scattered, unco-ordinated, and speedily crushed."

 

 The scene faded out, the original newsman returned to state importantly that other developments would be transmitted as they occurred.

 

 Then there was dance music, and Ebling Mis threw the shield that cut the power.

 

 Toran rose and walked unsteadily away, without a word. The psychologist made no move to stop him.

 

 When Bayta stepped out of the kitchen, Mis motioned silence.

 

 He said, "They've taken Haven."

 

 And Bayta said, "Already?" Her eyes were round, and sick with disbelief.

 

 "Without a fight. Without an unprin–" He stopped and swallowed. "You'd better leave Toran alone. It's not pleasant for him. Suppose we eat without him this once."

 

 Bayta looked once toward the pilot room, then turned hopelessly. "Very well!"

 

 Magnifico sat unnoticed at the table. He neither spoke nor ate but stared ahead with a concentrated fear that seemed to drain all the vitality out of his thread of a body.

 

 Ebling Mis pushed absently at his iced-fruit dessert and said, harshly, "Two Trading worlds fight. They fight, and bleed, and die and don't surrender. Only at Haven – Just as at the Foundation–"

 

 "But why? Why?"

 

 The psychologist shook his head. "It's of a piece with all the problem. Every queer facet is a hint at the nature of the Mule. First, the problem of how he could conquer the Foundation, with little blood, and at a single blow essentially – while the Independent Trading Worlds held out. The blanket on nuclear reactions was a puny weapon – we've discussed that back and forth till I'm sick of it – and it did not work on any but the Foundation.

 

 "Randu suggested," and Ebling's grizzly eyebrows pulled together, "it might have been a radiant Will-Depresser. It's what might have done the work on Haven. But then why wasn't it used on Mnemon and Iss – which even now fight with such demonic intensity that it is taking half the Foundation fleet in addition to the Mule's forces to beat them down. Yes, I recognized Foundation ships in the attack."

 

 Bayta whispered, "The Foundation, then Haven. Disaster seems to follow us, without touching. We always seem to get out by a hair. Will it last forever?"

 

 Ebling Mis was not listening. To himself, he was making a point. "But there's another problem – another problem. Bayta, you remember the news item that the Mule's clown was not found on Terminus; that it was suspected he had fled to Haven, or been carried there by his original kidnappers. There is an importance attached to him, Bayta, that doesn't fade, and we have not located it yet. Magnifico must know something that is fatal to the Mule. I'm sure of it. "

 

 Magnifico, white and stuttering, protested, "Sire ... noble lord ... indeed, I swear it is past my poor reckoning to penetrate your wants. I have told what I know to the utter limits, and with your probe, you have drawn out of my meager wit that which I knew, but knew not that I knew."

 

 "I know ... I know. It is something small. A hint so small that neither you nor I recognize it for what it is. Yet I must find it – for Mnemon and Iss will go soon, and when they do, we are the last remnants, the last droplets of the independent Foundation."

 

 The stars begin to cluster closely when the core of the Galaxy is penetrated. Gravitational fields begin to overlap at intensities sufficient to introduce perturbations in an interstellar jump that can not be overlooked.

 

 Toran became aware of that when a jump landed their ship in the full glare of a red giant which clutched viciously, and whose grip was loosed, then wrenched apart, only after twelve sleepless, soul-battering hours.

 

 With charts limited in scope, and an experience not at all fully developed, either operationally or mathematically, Toran resigned himself to days of careful plotting between jumps.

 

 It became a community project of a sort. Ebling Mis checked Toran's mathematics and Bayta tested possible routes, by the various generalized methods, for the presence of real solutions. Even Magnifico was put to work on the calculating machine for routine computations, a type of work, which, once explained, was a source of great amusement to him and at which he was surprisingly proficient.

 

 So at the end of a month, or nearly, Bayta was able to survey the red line that wormed its way through the ship's trimensional model of the Galactic Lens halfway to its center, and say with Satiric relish, "You know what it looks like. It looks like a ten-foot earth-worm with a terrific case of indigestion. Eventually, you'll land us back in Haven."

 

 "I will," growled Toran, with a fierce rustle of his chart, "if you don't shut up."

 

 "And at that," continued Bayta, "there is probably a route fight through, straight as a meridian of longitude."

 

 "Yeah? Well, in the first place, dimwit, it probably took five hundred ships five hundred years to work out that route by hit-and-miss, and my lousy half-credit charts don't give it. Besides, maybe those straight routes are a good thing to avoid. They're probably choked up with ships. And besides–"

 

 "Oh, for Galaxy's sake, stop driveling and slavering so much righteous indignation." Her hands were in his hair.

 

 He yowled, "Ouch! Let go!" seized her wrists and whipped downward, whereupon Toran, Bayta, and chair formed a tangled threesome on the floor. It degenerated into a panting wrestling match, composed mostly of choking laughter and various foul blows.

 

 Toran broke loose at Magnifico's breathless entrance.

 

 "What is it?"

 

 The lines of anxiety puckered the clown's face and tightened the skin whitely over the enormous bridge of his nose. "The instruments are behaving queerly, sir. I have not, in the knowledge of my ignorance, touched anything–"

 

 In two seconds, Toran was in the pilot room. He said quietly to Magnifico, "Wake up Ebling Mis. Have him come down here."

 

 He said to Bayta, who was trying to get a basic order back to her hair by use of her fingers, "We've been detected, Bay."

 

 "Detected?" And Bayta's arms dropped. "By whom?"

 

 "Galaxy knows," muttered Toran, "but I imagine by someone with blasters already ranged and trained."

 

 He sat down and in a low voice was already sending into the sub-ether the ship's identification code.

 

 And when Ebling Mis entered, bathrobed and blear-eyed, Toran said with a desperate calm, "It seems we're inside the borders of a local Inner Kingdom which is called the Autarchy of Filia."

 

 "Never heard of it," said Mis, abruptly.

 

 "Well, neither did I," replied Toran, "but we're being stopped by a Filian ship just the same, and I don't know what it will involve."

 

 The captain-inspector of the Filian ship crowded aboard with six armed men following him. He was short, thin-haired, thin-lipped, and dry-skinned. He coughed a sharp cough as he sat down and threw open the folio under his arm to a blank page.

 

 "Your passports and ship's clearance, please."

 

 "We have none," said Toran.

 

 "None, hey?" he snatched up a microphone suspended from his belt and spoke into it quickly, "Three men and one woman. Papers not in order." He made an accompanying notation in the folio.

 

 He said, "Where are you from?"

 

 "Siwenna," said Toran warily.

 

 "Where is that?"

 

 "Thirty thousand parsecs, eighty degrees west Trantor, forty degrees–"

 

 "Never mind, never mind!" Toran could see that his inquisitor had written down: "Point of origin – Periphery."

 

 The Filian continued, "Where are you going?"

 

 Toran said, "Trantor sector."

 

 "Purpose?"

 

 "Pleasure trip."

 

 "Carrying any cargo?"

 

 "No."

 

 "Hm-m-m. We'll check on that." He nodded and two men jumped to activity. Toran made no move to interfere.

 

 "What brings you into Filian territory?" The Filian's eyes gleamed unamiably.

 

 "We didn't know we were. I lack a proper chart."

 

 "You will be required to pay a hundred credits for that lack – and, of course, the usual fees required for tariff duties, et cetera."

 

 He spoke again into the microphone – but listened more than he spoke. Then, to Toran, "Know anything about nuclear technology?"

 

 "A little," replied Toran, guardedly.

 

 "Yes?" The Filian closed his folio, and added, "The men of the Periphery have a knowledgeable reputation that way. Put on a suit and come with me."

 

 Bayta stepped forward, "What are you going to do with him?"

 

 Toran put her aside gently, and asked coldly, "Where do you want me to come?"

 

 "Our power plant needs minor adjustments. He'll come with you." His pointing finger aimed directly at Magnifico, whose brown eyes opened wide in a blubbery dismay.

 

 "What's he got to do with it?" demanded Toran fiercely.

 

 The official looked up coldly. "I am informed of pirate activities in this vicinity. A description of one of the known thugs tallies roughly. It is a purely routine matter of identification. "

 

 Toran hesitated, but six men and six blasters are eloquent arguments. He reached into the cupboard for the suits.

 

 An hour later, he rose upright in the bowels of the Filian ship and raged, "There's not a thing wrong with the motors that I can see. The busbars are true, the L-tubes are feeding properly and the reaction analysis checks. Who's in charge here?"

 

 The head engineer said quietly, "I am."

 

 "Well, get me out of here–"

 

 He was led to the officers' level and the small anteroom held only an indifferent ensign.

 

 "Where's the man who came with me?"

 

 "Please wait," said the ensign.

 

 It was fifteen minutes later that Magnifico was brought in.

 

 "What did they do to you?" asked Toran quickly.

 

 "Nothing. Nothing at all." Magnifico's head shook a slow negative.

 

 It took two hundred and fifty credits to fulfill the demands of Filia – fifty credits of it for instant release – and they were in free space again.

 

 Bayta said with a forced laugh, "Don't we rate an escort? Don't we get the usual figurative boot over the border?"

 

 And Toran replied, grimly, "That was no Filian ship – and we're not leaving for a while. Come in here."

 

 They gathered about him.

 

 He said, whitely, "That was a Foundation ship, and those were the Mule's men aboard."

 

 Ebling bent to pick up the cigar he had dropped. He said, "Here? We're fifteen thousand parsecs from the Foundation. "

 

 "Andwe're here. What's to prevent them from making the same trip. Galaxy, Ebling, don't you think I can tell ships apart? I saw their engines, and that's enough for me. I tell you it was a Foundation engine in a Foundation ship."

 

 "And how did they get here?" asked Bayta, logically. "What are the chances of a random meeting of two given ships in space?"

 

 "What's that to do with it?" demanded Toran, hotly. "It would only show we've been followed."

 

 "Followed?" hooted Bayta. "Through hyperspace?"

 

 Ebling Mis interposed wearily, "That can be done – given a good ship and a great pilot. But the possibility doesn't impress me."

 

 "I haven't been masking my trail," insisted Toran. "I've been building up take-off speed on the straight. A blind man could have calculated our route."

 

 "The blazes he could," cried Bayta. "With the cockeyed jumps you are making, observing our initial direction didn't mean a thing. We came out of the jump wrong-end forwards more than once."

 

 "We're wasting time," blazed Toran, with gritted teeth. "It's a Foundation ship under the Mule. It's stopped us. It's searched us. It's had Magnifico – alone – with me as hostage to keep the rest of you quiet, in case you suspected. And we're going to bum it out of space right now."

 

 "Hold on now," and Ebling Mis clutched at him. "Are you going to destroy us for one ship you think is an enemy? Think, man, would those scuppers chase us over an impossible route half through the bestinkered Galaxy, look us over, and thenlet us go? "

 

 "They're still interested in where we're going."

 

 "Then why stop us and put us on our guard? You can't have it both ways, you know."

 

 "I'll have it my way. Let go of me, Ebling, or I'll knock you down."

 

 Magnifico leaned forward from his balanced perch on his favorite chair back. His long nostrils flared with excitement. "I crave your pardon for my interruption, but my poor mind is of a sudden plagued with a queer thought."

 

 Bayta anticipated Toran's gesture of annoyance, and added her grip to Ebling's. "Go ahead and speak, Magnifico. We will all listen faithfully."

 

 Magnifico said, "In my stay in their ship what addled wits I have were bemazed and bemused by a chattering fear that befell men. Of a truth I have a lack of memory of most that happened. Many men staring at me, and talk I did not understand. But towards the last – as though a beam of sunlight had dashed through a cloud rift – there was a face I knew. A glimpse, the merest glimmer – and yet it glows in my memory ever stronger and brighter."

 

 Toran said, "Who was it?"

 

 "That captain who was with us so long a time ago, when first you saved me from slavery."

 

 It had obviously been Magnifico's intention to create a sensation, and the delighted smile that curled broadly in the shadow of his proboscis, attested to his realization of the intention's success.

 

 "Captain ... Han ... Pritcher?" demanded Mis, sternly. "You're sure of that? Certain sure now?"

 

 "Sir, I swear," and he laid a bone-thin hand upon his narrow chest. "I would uphold the truth of it before the Mule and swear it in his teeth, though all his power were behind him to deny it."

 

 Bayta said in pure wonder, "Then what's it all about?" The clown faced her eagerly, "My lady, I have a theory. It came upon me, ready made, as though the Galactic Spirit had gently laid it in my mind." He actually raised his voice above Toran's interrupting objection.

 

 "My lady," he addressed himself exclusively to Bayta, "if this captain had, like us, escaped with a ship; if he, like us, were on a trip for a purpose of his own devising; if he blundered upon us – he would suspect us of following and waylaying him, aswe suspecthim of the like. What wonder he played this comedy to enter our ship?"

 

 "Why would he want us inhis ship, then?" demanded Toran. "That doesn't fit."

 

 "Why, yes, it does," clamored the clown, with a flowing inspiration. "He sent an underling who knew us not, but who described us into his microphone. The listening captain would be struck at my own poor likeness – for, of a truth there are not many in this great Galaxy who bear a resemblance to my scantiness. I was the proof of the identity of the rest of you."

 

 "And so he leaves us?"

 

 "What do we know of his mission, and the secrecy thereof? lie has spied us out for not an enemy and having it done so, must he needs think it wise to risk his plan by widening the knowledge thereof?"

 

 Bayta said slowly, "Don't be stubborn, Torie. Itdoes explain things."

 

 "It could be," agreed Mis.

 

 Toran seemed helpless in the face of united resistance. Something in the clown's fluent explanations bothered him. Something was wrong. Yet he was bewildered and, in spite of himself, his anger ebbed.

 

 "For a while," he whispered, "I thought we might have hadone of the Mule's ships."

 

 And his eyes were dark with the pain of Haven's loss.

 

 The others understood.

 

 

 22. DEATH ON NEOTRANTOR

 

 NEOTRANTOR The small planet of Delicass, renamed after the Great Sack, was for nearly a century, the seat of the last dynasty of the First Empire. It was a shadow world and a shadow Empire and its existence is only of legalistic importance. Under the first of the Neotrantorian dynasty....

 

 ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA

 

 Neotrantor was the name! New Trantor! And when you have said the name you have exhausted at a stroke all the resemblances of the new Trantor to the great original. Two parsecs away, the sun of Old Trantor still shone and the Galaxy's Imperial Capital of the previous century still cut through space in the silent and eternal repetition of its orbit.

 

 Men even inhabited Old Trantor. Not many – a hundred million, perhaps, where fifty years before, forty billions had swarmed. The huge, metal world was in jagged splinters. The towering thrusts of the multi-towers from the single world-girdling base were torn and empty – still bearing the original blastholes and firegut – shards of the Great Sack of forty years earlier.

 

 It was strange that a world which had been the center of a Galaxy for two thousand years – that had ruled limitless space and been home to legislators and rulers whose whims spanned the parsecs – could die in a month. It was strange that a world which had been untouched through the vast conquering sweeps and retreats of a millennia, and equally untouched by the civil wars and palace revolutions of other millennia – should lie dead at last. It was strange that the Glory of the Galaxy should be a rotting corpse.

 

 And pathetic!

 

 For centuries would yet pass before the mighty works of fifty generations of humans would decay past use. Only the declining powers of men, themselves, rendered them useless now.

 

 The millions left after the billions had died tore up the gleaming metal base of the planet and exposed soil that had not felt the touch of sun in a thousand years.

 

 Surrounded by the mechanical perfections of human efforts, encircled by the industrial marvels of mankind freed of the tyranny of environment – they returned to the land. In the huge traffic clearings, wheat and corn grew. In the shadow of the towers, sheep grazed.

 

 But Neotrantor existed – an obscure village of a planet drowned in the shadow of mighty Trantor, until a heart-throttled royal family, racing before the fire and flame of the Great Sack sped to it as its last refuge – and held out there, barely, until the roaring wave of rebellion subsided. There it ruled in ghostly splendor over a cadaverous remnant of Imperium.

 

 Twenty agricultural worlds were a Galactic Empire!

 

 Dagobert IX, ruler of twenty worlds of refractory squires and sullen peasants, was Emperor of the Galaxy, Lord of the Universe.

 

 Dagobert IX had been twenty-five on the bloody day he arrived with his father upon Neotrantor. His eyes and mind were still alive with the glory and the power of the Empire that was. But his son, who might one day be Dagobert X, was born on Neotrantor.

 

 Twenty worlds were all he knew.

 

 Jord Commason's open air car was the finest vehicle of its type on all Neotrantor – and, after all, justly so. It did not end with the fact that Commason was the largest landowner on Neotrantor. It began there. For in earlier days he had been the companion and evil genius of a young crown prince, restive in the dominating grip of a middle-aged emperor. And now he was the companion and still the evil genius of a middle-aged crown prince who hated and dominated an old emperor.

 

 So Jord Commason, in his air car, which in mother-of-pearl finish and gold-and-lumetron ornamentation needed no coat of arms as owner's identification, surveyed the lands that were his, and the miles of rolling wheat that were his, and the huge threshers and harvesters that were his, and the tenant-farmers and machine-tenders that were his – and considered his problems cautiously.

 

 Beside him, his bent and withered chauffeur guided the ship gently through the upper winds and smiled.

 

 Jord Commason spoke to the wind, the air, and the sky, "You remember what I told you, Inchney?"

 

 Inchney's thin gray hair wisped lightly in the wind. His gap-toothed smile widened in its thin-lipped fashion and the vertical wrinkles of his cheeks deepened as though he were keeping an eternal secret from himself. The whisper of his voice whistled between his teeth.

 

 "I remember, sire, and I have thought."

 

 "And what have you thought, Inchney?" There was an impatience about the question.

 

 Inchney remembered that he had been young and handsome, and a lord on Old Trantor. Inchney remembered that he was a disfigured ancient on Neotrantor, who lived by grace of Squire Jord Commason, and paid for the grace by lending his subtlety on request. He sighed very softly.

 

 He whispered again, "Visitors from the Foundation, sire, are a convenient thing to have. Especially, sire, when they come with but a single ship, and but a single fighting man. How welcome they might be."

 

 "Welcome?" said Commason, gloomily. "Perhaps so. But those men are magicians and may be powerful."

 

 "Pugh," muttered Inchney, "the mistiness of distance hides the truth. The Foundation is but a world. Its citizens are but men. If you blast them, they die."

 

 Inchney held the ship on its course – A river was a winding sparkle below. He whispered, "And is there not a man they speak of now who stirs the worlds of the Periphery?"

 

 Commason was suddenly suspicious. "What do you know of this?"

 

 There was no smile on his chauffeur's face. "Nothing, sire. It was but an idle question."

 

 The squire's hesitation was short. He said, with brutal directness, "Nothing you ask is idle, and your method of acquiring knowledge will have your scrawny neck in a vise yet. But – I have it! This man is called the Mule, and a subject of his had been here some months ago on a ... matter of business. I await another ... now ... for its conclusion."

 

 "And these newcomers? They are not the ones you want, perhaps?"

 

 "They lack the identification they should have."

 

 "It has been reported that the Foundation has been captured–"

 

 "I did not tell you that."

 

 "It has been so reported," continued Inchney, coolly, "and if that is correct, then these may be refugees from the destruction, and may be held for the Mule's man out of honest friendship."

 

 "Yes?" Commason was uncertain.

 

 "And, sire, since it is well-known that the friend of a conqueror is but the last victim, it would be but a measure of honest self-defense. For there are such things as psychic probes, and here we have four Foundation brains. There is much about the Foundation it would be useful to know, much even about the Mule. And then the Mule's friendship would be a trifle the less overpowering."

 

 Commason, in the quiet of the upper air, returned with a shiver to his first thought. "But if the Foundation has not fallen. If the reports are lies. It is said that it has been foretold it can not fall."

 

 "We are past the age of soothsayers, sire."

 

 "And yet if it did not fall, Inchney. Think! If it did not fall. The Mule made me promises, indeed–" He had gone too far, and backtracked. "That is, he made boasts. But boasts are wind and deeds are hard."

 

 Inchney laughed noiselessly. "Deeds are hard indeed, until begun. One could scarcely find a further fear than a Galaxy-end Foundation."

 

 "There is still the prince," murmured Commason, almost to himself.

 

 "He deals with the Mule also, then, sire?"

 

 Commason could not quite choke down the complacent shift of features. "Not entirely. Not asI do. But he grows wilder, more uncontrollable. A demon is upon him. If I seize these people and he takes them away for his own use – for he does not lack a certain shrewdness – I am not yet ready to quarrel with him." He frowned and his heavy cheeks bent downwards with dislike.

 

 "I saw those strangers for a few moments yesterday," said the gray chauffeur, irrelevantly, "and it is a strange woman, that dark one. she walks with the freedom of a man and she is of a startling paleness against the dark luster of hair." There was almost a warmth in the husky whisper of the withered voice, so that Commason turned toward him in sudden surprise.

 

 Inchney continued, "The prince, I think, would not find his shrewdness proof against a reasonable compromise. You could have the rest, if you left him the girl–"

 

 A light broke upon Commason, "A thought! Indeed a thought! Inchney, turn back! And Inchney, if all turns well, we will discuss further this matter of your freedom."

 

 It was with an almost superstitious sense of symbolism that Commason found a Personal Capsule waiting for him in his private study when he returned. It had arrived by a wavelength known to few. Commason smiled a fat smile. The Mule's man was coming and the Foundation had indeed fallen.

 

 Bayta's misty visions, when she had them, of an Imperial palace, did not jibe with the reality, and inside her, there was a vague sense of disappointment. The room was small, almost plain, almost ordinary. The palace did not even match the mayor's residence back at the Foundation – and Dagobert IX –

 

 Bayta haddefinite ideas of what an emperor ought to look like. He oughtnot look like somebody's benevolent grandfather. He ought not be thin and white and faded – or serving cups of tea with his own hand in an expressed anxiety for the comfort of his visitors.

 

 But so it was.

 

 Dagobert IX chuckled as he poured tea into her stiffly outheld cup.

 

 "This is a great pleasure for me, my dear. It is a moment away from ceremony and courtiers. I have not had the opportunity for welcoming visitors from my outer provinces for a time now. My son takes care of these details now that I'm older. You haven't met my son? A fine boy. Headstrong, perhaps. But then he's young. Do you care for a flavor capsule? No?"

 

 Toran attempted an interruption, "Your imperial majesty–"

 

 "Yes?"

 

 "Your imperial majesty, it has not been our intention to intrude upon you–"

 

 "Nonsense, there is no intrusion. Tonight there will be the official reception, but until then, we are free. Let's see, where did you say you were from? It seems a long time since we had an official reception. You said you were from the Province of Anacreon?"

 

 "From the Foundation, your imperial majesty!"

 

 "Yes, the Foundation. I remember now. I had it located. It is in the Province of Anacreon. I have never been there. My doctor forbids extensive traveling. I don't recall any recent reports from my viceroy at Anacreon. How are conditions there?" he concluded anxiously.

 

 "Sire," mumbled Toran, "I bring no complaints."

 

 "That is gratifying. I will commend my viceroy."

 

 Toran looked helplessly at Ebling Mis, whose brusque voice rose. "Sire, we have been told that it will require your permission for us to visit the Imperial University Library on Trantor."

 

 "Trantor?" questioned the emperor, mildly, "Trantor?"

 

 Then a look of puzzled pain crossed his thin face. "Trantor?" he whispered. "I remember now. I am making plans now to return there with a flood of ships at my back. You shall come with me. Together we will destroy the rebel, Gilmer. Together we shall restore the empire!"

 

 His bent back had straightened. His voice had strengthened. For a moment his eyes were hard. Then, he blinked and said softly, "But Gilmer is dead. I seem to remember – Yes. Yes! Gilmer is dead! Trantor is dead – For a moment, it seemed – Where was it you said you came from?"

 

 Magnifico whispered to Bayta, "Is this really an emperor? For somehow I thought emperors were greater and wiser than ordinary men."

 

 Bayta motioned him quiet. She said, "If your imperial majesty would but sign an order permitting us to go to Trantor, it would avail greatly the common cause."

 

 "To Trantor?" The emperor was blank and uncomprehending.

 

 "Sire, the Viceroy of Anacreon, in whose name we speak, sends word that Gilmer is yet alive–"

 

 "Alive! Alive!" thundered Dagobert. "Where? It will be war!"

 

 "Your imperial majesty, it must not yet be known. His whereabouts are uncertain. The viceroy sends us to acquaint you of the fact, and it is only on Trantor that we may find his hiding place. Once discovered–"

 

 "Yes, yes – He must be found–" The old emperor doddered to the wall and touched the little photocell with a trembling finger. He muttered, after an ineffectual pause, "My servants do not come. I can not wait for them."

 

 He was scribbling on a blank sheet, and ended with a flourished "D." He said, "Gilmer will yet learn the power of his emperor. Where was it you came from? Anacreon? What are the conditions there? Is the name of the emperor powerful?"

 

 Bayta took the paper from his loose fingers, "Your imperial majesty is beloved by the people. Your love for them is widely known."

 

 "I shall have to visit my good people of Anacreon, but my doctor says ... I don't remember what he says, but–" He looked up, his old gray eyes sharp, "Were you saying something of Gilmer?"

 

 "No, your imperial majesty."

 

 "He shall not advance further. Go back and tell your people that. Trantor shall hold! My father leads the fleet now, and the rebel vermin Gilmer shall freeze in space with his regicidal rabble."

 

 He staggered into a seat and his eyes were blank once more. "What was I saying?"

 

 Toran rose and bowed low, "Your imperial majesty has been kind to us, but the time allotted us for an audience is over. "

 

 For a moment, Dagobert IX looked like an emperor indeed as he rose and stood stiff-backed while, one by one, his visitors retreated backward through the door

 

 –to where twenty armed men intervened and locked a circle about them.

 

 A hand-weapon flashed–

 

 To Bayta, consciousness returned sluggishly, but without the "Where am I?" sensation. She remembered clearly the odd old man who called himself emperor, and the other men who waited outside. The arthritic tingle in her finger joints meant a stun pistol.

 

 She kept her eyes closed, and listened with painful attention to the voices.

 

 There were two of them. One was slow and cautious, with a slyness beneath the surface obsequity. The other was hoarse and thick, almost sodden, and blurted out in viscous spurts. Bayta liked neither.

 

 The thick voice was predominant.

 

 Bayta caught the last words, "He will live forever, that old madman. It wearies me. It annoys me. Commason, I will have it. I grow older, too."

 

 "Your highness, let us first see of what use these people are. It may be we shall have sources of strength other than your father still provides."

 

 The thick voice was lost in a bubbling whisper. Bayta caught only the phrase, " –the girl–" but the other, fawning voice was a nasty, low, running chuckle followed by a comradely, near-patronizing, "Dagobert, you do not age. They lie who say you are not a youth of twenty."

 

 They laughed together, and Bayta's blood was an icy trickle. Dagobert – your highness – The old emperor had spoken of a headstrong son, and the implication of the whispers now beat dully upon her. But such things didn't happen to people in real life–

 

 Toran's voice broke upon her in a slow, hard current of cursing.

 

 She opened her eyes, and Toran's, which were upon her, showed open relief. He said, fiercely, "This banditry will be answered by the emperor. Release us."

 

 It dawned upon Bayta that her wrists and ankles were fastened to wall and floor by a tight attraction field.

 

 Thick Voice approached Toran. He was paunchy, his lower eyelids puffed darkly, and his hair was thinning out. There was a gay feather in his peaked hat, and the edging of his doublet was embroidered with silvery metal-foam.

 

 He sneered with a heavy amusement. "The emperor? The poor, mad emperor?"

 

 "I have his pass. No subject may hinder our freedom."

 

 "But I am no subject, space-garbage. I am the regent and crown prince and am to be addressed as such. As for my poor silly father, it amuses him to see visitors occasionally. And we humor him. It tickles his mock-imperial fancy. But, of course, it has no other meaning."

 

 And then he was before Bayta, and she looked up at him contemptuously. He leaned close and his breath was overpoweringly minted.

 

 He said, "Her eyes suit well, Commason – she is even prettier with them open. I think she'll do. It will be an exotic dish for a jaded taste, eh?"

 

 There was a futile surge upwards on Toran's part, which the crown prince ignored and Bayta felt the iciness travel outward to the skin. Ebling Mis was still out; head lolling weakly upon his chest, but, with a sensation of surprise, Bayta noted that Magnifico's eyes were open, sharply open, as though awake for many minutes. Those large brown eyes swiveled towards Bayta and stared at her out of a doughy face.

 

 He whimpered, and nodded with his head towards the crown prince, "That one has my Visi-Sonor."

 

 The crown prince turned sharply toward the new voice, "This is yours, monster?" He swung the instrument from his shoulder where it had hung, suspended by its green strap, unnoticed by Bayta.

 

 He fingered it clumsily, tried to sound a chord and got nothing for his pains, "Can you play it, monster?"

 

 Magnifico nodded once.

 

 Toran said suddenly, "You've rifled a ship of the Foundation. If the emperor will not avenge, the Foundation will."

 

 It was the other, Commason, who answered slowly, "WhatFoundation? Or is the Mule no longer the Mule?"

 

 There was no answer to that. The prince's grin showed large uneven teeth. The clown's binding field was broken and he was nudged ungently to his feet. The Visi-Sonor was thrust into his hand.

 

 "Play for us, monster," said the prince. "Play us a serenade of love and beauty for our foreign lady here. Tell her that my father's country prison is no palace, but that I can take her to one where she can swim in rose water – and know what a prince's love is. Sing of a prince's love, monster."

 

 He placed one thick thigh upon a marble table and swung a leg idly, while his fatuous smiling stare swept Bayta into a silent rage. Toran's sinews strained against the field, in painful, perspiring effort. Ebling Mis stirred and moaned.

 

 Magnifico gasped, "My fingers are of useless stiffness–"

 

 "Play, monster!" roared the prince. The lights dimmed at a gesture to Commason and in the dimness he crossed his arms and waited.

 

 Magnifico drew his fingers in rapid, rhythmic jumps from end to end of the multikeyed instrument – and a sharp, gliding rainbow of light jumped across the room. A low, soft tone sounded – throbbing, tearful. It lifted in sad laughter, and underneath it there sounded a dull tolling.

 

 The darkness seemed to intensify and grow thick. Music reached Bayta through the muffled folds of invisible blankets. Gleaming light reached her from the depths as though a single candle glowed at the bottom of a pit.

 

 Automatically, her eyes strained. The light brightened, but remained blurred. It moved fuzzily, in confused color, and the music was suddenly brassy, evil – flourishing in high crescendo. The light flickered quickly, in swift motion to the wicked rhythm. Something writhed within the light. Something with poisonous metallic scales writhed and yawned. And the music writhed and yawned with it.

 

 Bayta struggled with a strange emotion and then caught herself in a mental gasp. Almost, it reminded her of the time in the Time Vault, of those last days on Haven. It was that horrible, cloying, clinging spiderweb of horror and despair. She shrunk beneath it oppressed.

 

 The music dinned upon her, laughing horribly, and the writhing terror at the wrong end of the telescope in the small circle of light was lost as she turned feverishly away. Her forehead was wet and cold.

 

 The music died. It must have lasted fifteen minutes, and a vast pleasure at its absence flooded Bayta. Light glared, and Magnifico's face was close to hers, sweaty, wild-eyed, lugubrious.

 

 "My lady," he gasped, "how fare you?"

 

 "Well enough," she whispered, "but why did you play like that?"

 

 She became aware of the others in the room. Toran and Mis were limp and helpless against the wall, but her eyes skimmed over them. There was the prince, lying strangely still at the foot of the table. There was Commason, moaning wildly through an open, drooling mouth.

 

 Commason flinched, and yelled mindlessly, as Magnifico took a step towards him.

 

 Magnifico turned, and with a leap, turned the others loose.

 

 Toran lunged upwards and with eager, taut fists seized the landowner by the neck, "You come with us. We'll want you – to make sure we get to our ship."

 

 Two hours later, in the ship's kitchen, Bayta served a walloping homemade pie, and Magnifico celebrated the return to space by attacking it with a magnificent disregard of table manners.

 

 "Good, Magnifico?"

 

 "Um-m-m-m!"

 

 "Magnifico?"

 

 "Yes, my lady?"

 

 "What was it you played back there?"

 

 The clown writhed, "I ... I'd rather not say. I learned it once, and the Visi-Sonor is of an effect upon the nervous system most profound. Surely, it was an evil thing, and not for your sweet innocence, my lady."

 

 "Oh, now, come, Magnifico. I'm not as innocent as that. Don't flatter so. Did I see anything like whatthey saw?"

 

 "I hope not. I played it for them only. If you saw, it was but the rim of it – from afar."

 

 "And that was enough. Do you know you knocked the prince out?"

 

 Magnifico spoke grimly through a large, muffling piece of pie. "Ikilled him, my lady."

 

 "What?" She swallowed, painfully.

 

 "He was dead when I stopped, or I would have continued. I cared not for Commason. His greatest threat was death or torture. But, my lady, this prince looked upon you wickedly, and–" he choked in a mixture of indignation and embarrassment.

 

 Bayta felt strange thoughts come and repressed them sternly. "Magnifico, you've got a gallant soul."

 

 "Oh, my lady." He bent a red nose into his pie, but, somehow did not eat.

 

 Ebling Mis stared out the port. Trantor was near – its metallic shine fearfully bright. Toran was standing there, too.

 

 He said with dull bitterness, "We've come for nothing, Ebling. The Mule's man precedes us."

 

 Ebling Mis rubbed his forehead with a hand that seemed shriveled out of its former plumpness. His voice was an abstracted mutter.

 

 Toran was annoyed. "I say those people know the Foundation has fallen. I say–"

 

 "Eh?" Mis looked up, puzzled. Then, he placed a gentle hand upon Toran's wrist, in complete oblivion of any previous conversation, "Toran, I ... I've been looking at Trantor. Do you know ... I have the queerest feeling ... ever since we arrived on Neotrantor. It's an urge, a driving urge that's pushing and pushing inside. Toran, I can do it; I know I can do it. Things are becoming clear in my mind – they have never been so clear."

 

 Toran stared – and shrugged. The words brought him no confidence.

 

 He said, tentatively, "Mis?"

 

 "Yes?"

 

 "You didn't see a ship come down on Neotrantor as we left?"

 

 Consideration was brief. "No."

 

 "I did. Imagination, I suppose, but it could have been that Filian ship."

 

 "The one with Captain Han Pritcher on it?"

 

 "The one with space knows who upon it. Magnifico's information – It followed us here, Mis."

 

 Ebling Mis said nothing,

 

 Toran said strenuously, "is there anything wrong with you? Aren't you well?"

 

 Mis's eyes were thoughtful, luminous, and strange. He did not answer.

 

 

 23. THE RUINS OF TRANTOR

 

 The location of an objective upon the great world of Trantor presents a problem unique in the Galaxy. There are no continents or oceans to locate from a thousand miles distance. There are no rivers, lakes, and islands to catch sight of through the cloud rifts.

 

 The metal-covered world was – had been – one colossal city, and only the old Imperial palace could be identified readily from outer space by a stranger. TheBayta circled the world at almost air-car height in repeated painful search.

 

 From polar regions, where the icy coating of the metal spires were somber evidence of the breakdown or neglect of the weather-conditioning machinery, they worked southwards. Occasionally they could experiment with the correlations –(or presumable correlations)– between what they saw and what the inadequate map obtained at Neotrantor showed.

 

 But it was unmistakable when it came. The gap in the metal coat of the planet was fifty miles. The unusual greenery spread over hundreds of square miles, inclosing the mighty grace of the ancient Imperial residences.

 

 TheBayta hovered and slowly oriented itself. There were only the huge supercauseways to guide them. Long straight arrows on the map, smooth, gleaming ribbons there below them.

 

 What the map indicated to be the University area was reached by dead reckoning, and upon the flat area of what once must have been a busy landing-field, the ship lowered itself.

 

 It was only as they submerged into the welter of metal that the smooth beauty apparent from the air dissolved into the broken, twisted near-wreckage that had been left in the wake of the Sack. Spires were truncated, smooth walls gouted and twisted, and just for an instant there was the glimpse of a shaven area of earth – perhaps several hundred acres in extent – dark and plowed.

 

 Lee Senter waited as the ship settled downward cautiously. It was a strange ship, not from Neotrantor, and inwardly he sighed. Strange ships and confused dealings with the men of outer space could mean the end of the short days of peace, a return to the old grandiose times of death and battle. Senter was leader of the group; the old books were in his charge and he had read of those old days. He did not want them.

 

 Perhaps ten minutes spent themselves as the strange ship came down to nestle upon the flatness, but long memories telescoped themselves in that time. There was first the great farm of his childhood – that remained in his mind merely as busy crowds of people. Then there was the trek of the young families to new lands. He was ten, then; an only child, puzzled, and frightened.

 

 Then the new buildings; the great metal slabs to be uprooted and tom aside; the exposed soil to be turned, and freshened, and invigorated; neighboring buildings to be tom down and leveled; others to be transformed to living quarters.

 

 There were crops to be grown and harvested; peaceful relations with neighboring farms to be established–

 

 There was growth and expansion, and the quiet efficiency of self-rule. There was the coming of a new generation of hard, little youngsters born to the soil. There was the great day when he was chosen leader of the Group and for the first time since his eighteenth birthday he did not shave and saw the first stubble of his Leader's Beard appear.

 

 And now the Galaxy might intrude and put an end to the brief idyll of isolation–

 

 The ship landed. He watched wordlessly as the port opened. Four emerged, cautious and watchful. There were three men, varied, old, young, thin and beaked. And a woman striding among them like an equal. His hand left the two glassy black tufts of his beard as he stepped forward.

 

 He gave the universal gesture of peace. Both hands were before him; hard, calloused palms upward.

 

 The young man approached two steps and duplicated the gesture. "I come in peace."

 

 The accent was strange, but the words were understandable, and welcome. He replied, deeply, "In peace be it. You are welcome to the hospitality of the Group. Are you hungry? You shall eat. Are you thirsty? You shall drink."

 

 Slowly, the reply came, "We thank you for your kindness, and shall bear good report of your Group when we return to our world."

 

 A queer answer, but good. Behind him, the men of the Group were smiling, and from the recesses of the surrounding structures, the women emerged.

 

 In his own quarters, he removed the locked, mirror-walled box from its hidden place, and offered each of the guests the long, plump cigars that were reserved for great occasions. Before the woman, he hesitated. She had taken a seat among the men. The strangers evidently allowed, even expected, such effrontery. Stiffly, he offered the box.

 

 She accepted one with a smile, and drew in its aromatic smoke, with all the relish one could expect. Lee Senter repressed a scandalized emotion.

 

 The stiff conversation, in advance of the meal, touched politely upon the subject of fanning on Trantor.

 

 It was the old man who asked, "What about hydroponics? Surely, for such a world as Trantor, hydroponics would be the answer."

 

 Senter shook his head slowly. He felt uncertain. His knowledge was the unfamiliar matter of the books he had read, "Artificial fanning in chemicals, I think? No, not on Trantor. This hydroponics requires a world of industy – for instance, a great chemical industry. And in war or disaster, when industry breaks down, the people starve. Nor can all foods be grown artificially. Some lose their food value. The soil is cheaper, still better – always more dependable."

 

 "And your food supply is sufficient?"

 

 "Sufficient; perhaps monotonous. We have fowl that supply eggs, and milk-yielders for our dairy products – but our meat supply rests upon our foreign trade."

 

 "Trade." The young man seemed roused to sudden interest. "You trade then. But what do you export?"

 

 "Metal," was the curt answer. "Look for yourself. We have an infinite supply, ready processed. They come from Neotrantor with ships, demolish an indicated area-increasing our growing space – and leave us in exchange meat, canned fruit, food concentrates, farm machinery and so on. They carry off the metal and both sides profit."

 

 They feasted on bread and cheese, and a vegetable stew that was unreservedly delicious. It was over the dessert of frosted fruit, the only imported item on the menu, that, for the first time, the Outlanders became other than mere guests. The young man produced a map of Trantor.

 

 Calmly, Lee Senter studied it. He listened – and said gravely, "The University Grounds are a static area. We farmers do not grow crops on it. We do not, by preference, even enter it. It is one of our few relics of another time we would keep undisturbed. "

 

 "We are seekers after knowledge. We would disturb nothing. Our ship would be our hostage." The old man offered this – eagerly, feverishly.

 

 "I can take you there then," said Senter.

 

 That night the strangers slept, and that night Lee Senter sent a message to Neotrantor.

 

 

 24. CONVERT

 

 The thin life of Trantor trickled to nothing when they entered among the wide-spaced buildings of the University grounds. There was a solemn and lonely silence over it.

 

 The strangers of the Foundation knew nothing of the swirling days and nights of the bloody Sack that had left the University untouched. They knew nothing of the time after the collapse of the Imperial power, when the students, with their borrowed weapons, and their pale-faced inexperienced bravery, formed a protective volunteer army to protect the central shrine of the science of the Galaxy. They knew nothing of the Seven Days Fight, and the armistice that kept the University free, when even the Imperial palace clanged with the boots of Gilmer and his soldiers, during the short interval of their rule.

 

 Those of the Foundation, approaching for the first time, realized only that in a world of transition from a gutted old to a strenuous new this area was a quiet, graceful museum-piece of ancient greatness.

 

 They were intruders in a sense. The brooding emptiness rejected them. The academic atmosphere seemed still to live and to stir angrily at the disturbance.

 

 The library was a deceptively small building which broadened out vastly underground into a mammoth volume of silence and reverie. Ebling Mis paused before the elaborate murals of the reception room.

 

 He whispered – one had to whisper here: "I think we passed the catalog rooms back a way. I'll stop there."

 

 His forehead was flushed, his hand trembling, "I mustn't be disturbed, Toran. Will you bring my meals down to me?"

 

 "Anything you say. We'll do all we can to help. Do you want us to work under you–"

 

 "No. I must be alone–"

 

 "You think you will get what you want."

 

 And Ebling Mis replied with a soft certainty, "I know I will!"

 

 Toran and Bayta came closer to "setting up housekeeping" in normal fashion than at any time in their year of married life. It was a strange sort of "housekeeping." They lived in the middle of grandeur with an inappropriate simplicity. Their food was drawn largely from Lee Senter's farm and was paid for in the little nuclear gadgets that may be found on any Trader's ship.

 

 Magnifico taught himself how to use the projectors in the library reading room, and sat over adventure novels and romances to the point where he was almost as forgetful of meals and sleep as was Ebling Mis.

 

 Ebling himself was completely buried. He had insisted on a hammock being slung up for him in the Psychology Reference Room. His face grew thin and white. His vigor of speech was lost and his favorite curses had died a mild death. There were times when the recognition of either Toran or Bayta seemed a struggle.

 

 He was more himself with Magnifico who brought him his meals and often sat watching him for hours at a time, with a queer, fascinated absorption, as the aging psychologist transcribed endless equations, cross-referred to endless book-films, scurried endlessly about in a wild mental effort towards an end he alone saw.

 

 Toran came upon her in the darkened room, and said sharply, "Bayta!"

 

 Bayta started guiltily. "Yes? You want me, Torie?"

 

 "Sure I want you. What in Space are you sitting there for? You've been acting all wrong since we got to Trantor. What's the matter with you?"

 

 "Oh, Torie, stop," she said, wearily.

 

 And "Oh, Torie, stop!" he mimicked impatiently. Then, with sudden softness, "Won't you tell me what's wrong, Bay? Something's bothering you."

 

 "No! Nothing is, Torie. If you keep on just nagging and nagging, you'll have me mad. I'm just – thinking."

 

 "Thinking about what?"

 

 "About nothing. Well, about the Mule, and Haven, and the Foundation, and everything. About Ebling Mis and whether he'll find anything about the Second Foundation, and whether it will help us when he does find it – and a million other things. Are you satisfied?" Her voice was agitated.

 

 "If you're just brooding, do you mind stopping? It isn't pleasant and it doesn't help the situation."

 

 Bayta got to her feet and smiled weakly. "All right. I'm happy. See, I'm smiling and jolly. "

 

 Magnifico's voice was an agitated cry outside. "My lady–"

 

 "What is it? Come–"

 

 Bayta's voice choked off sharply when the opening door framed the large, hard-faced–

 

 "Pritcher," cried Toran.

 

 Bayta gasped, "Captain! How did you find us?"

 

 Han Pritcher stepped inside. His voice was clear and level, and utterly dead of feeling, "My rank is colonel now – under the Mule."

 

 "Under the ... Mule!" Toran's voice trailed off. They formed a tableau there, the three.

 

 Magnifico stared wildly and shrank behind Toran. Nobody stopped to notice him.

 

 Bayta said, her hands trembling in each other's tight grasp, "You are arresting us? You have really gone over to them?"

 

 The colonel replied quickly, "I have not come to arrest you. My instructions make no mention of you. With regard to you, I am free, and I choose to exercise our old friendship, if you will let me."

 

 Toran's face was a twisted suppression of fury, "How did you find us? You were in the Filian ship, then? You followed us?"

 

 The wooden lack of expression on Pritcher's face might have flickered in embarrassment. "Iwas on the Filian ship! I met you in the first place ... well ... by chance."

 

 "It is a chance that is mathematically impossible."

 

 "No. Simply rather improbable, so my statement will have to stand. In any case, you admitted to the. Filians – there is, of course, no such nation as Filia actually – that you were heading for the Trantor sector, and since the Mule already had his contacts upon Neotrantor, it was easy to have you detained there. Unfortunately, you got away before I arrived, but not long before. I had time to have the farms on Trantor ordered to report your arrival. It was done and I am here. May I sit down? I come in friendliness, believe me.

 

 He sat. Toran bent his head and thought futilely. With a numbed lack of emotion, Bayta prepared tea.

 

 Toran looked up harshly. "Well, what are you waiting for– colonel? What's your friendship? If it's not arrest, what is it then? Protective custody? Call in your men and give your orders."

 

 Patiently, Pritcher shook his head. "No, Toran. I come of my own will to speak to you, to persuade you of the uselessness of what you are doing. If I fail I shall leave. That is all."

 

 "That is all? Well, then peddle your propaganda, give us your speech, and leave. I don't want any tea, Bayta."

 

 Pritcher accepted a cup, with a grave word of thanks. He looked at Toran with a clear strength as he sipped lightly. Then he said, "The Muleis a mutant. He can not be beaten in the very nature of the mutation–"

 

 "Why? What is the mutation?" asked Toran, with sour humor. "I suppose you'll tell us now, eh?"

 

 "Yes, I will. Your knowledge won't hurt him. You see – he is capable of adjusting the emotional balance of human beings. It sounds like a little trick, but it's quite unbeatable."

 

 Bayta broke in, "The emotional balance?" She frowned, "Won't you explain that? I don't quite understand."

 

 "I mean that it is an easy matter for him to instill into a capable general, say, the emotion of utter loyalty to the Mule and complete belief in the Mule's victory. His generals are emotionally controlled. They can not betray him; they can not weaken – and the control is permanent. His most capable enemies become his most faithful subordinates, The warlord of Kalgan surrenders his planet and becomes his viceroy for the Foundation."

 

 "And you," added Bayta, bitterly, "betray your cause and become Mule's envoy to Trantor. I see!"

 

 "I haven't finished. The Mule's gift works in reverse even more effectively. Despair is an emotion! At the crucial moment, keymen on the Foundation – keymen on Haven – despaired. Their worlds fell without too much struggle."

 

 "Do you mean to say," demanded Bayta, tensely, "that the feeling I had in the Time Vault was the Mule juggling my emotional control."

 

 "Mine, too. Everyone's. How was it on Haven towards the end?"

 

 Bayta turned away.

 

 Colonel Pritcher continued earnestly, "As it works for worlds, so it works for individuals. Can you fight a force which can make you surrender willingly when it so desires; can make you a faithful servant when it so desires?"

 

 Toran said slowly, "How do I know this is the truth?"

 

 "Can you explain the fall of the Foundation and of Haven otherwise? Can you explain my conversion otherwise? Think, man! What have you – or I – or the whole Galaxy accomplished against the Mule in all this time? What one little thing?"

 

 Toran felt the challenge, "By the Galaxy, I can!" With a sudden touch of fierce satisfaction, he shouted, "Your wonderful Mule had contacts with Neotrantor you say that were to have detained us, eh? Those contacts are dead or worse. We killed the crown prince and left the other a whimpering idiot. The Mule did not stop us there, and that much has been undone."

 

 "Why, no, not at all. Those weren't our men. The crown prince was a wine-soaked mediocrity. The other man, Commason, is phenomenally stupid. He was a power on his world but that didn't prevent him from being vicious, evil, and completely incompetent. We had nothing really to do with them. They were, in a sense, merely feints–"

 

 "It was they who detained us, or tried."

 

 "Again, no. Commason had a personal slave – a man called Inchney. Detention washis policy. He is old, but will serve our temporary purpose. You would not have killed him, you see."

 

 Bayta whirled on him. She had not touched her own tea. "But, by your very statement, your own emotions have been tampered with. You've got faith and belief in the Mule, an unnatural, adiseased faith in the Mule. Of what value are your opinions? You've lost all power of objective thought."

 

 "You are wrong." Slowly, the colonel shook his head. "Only my emotions are fixed. My reason is as it always was. It may be influenced in a certain direction by my conditioned emotions, but it is notforced. And there are some things I can see more clearly now that I am freed of my earlier emotional trend.

 

 "I can see that the Mule's program is an intelligent and worthy one. In the time since I have been – converted, I have followed his career from its start seven years ago. With his mutant mental power, he began by winning over a condottiere and his band. With that – and his power – he won a planet. With that – and his power – he extended his grip until he could tackle the warlord of Kalgan. Each step followed the other logically. With Kalgan in his pocket, he had a first-class fleet, and with that – and his power – he could attack the Foundation.

 

 "The Foundation is the key. It is the greatest area of industrial concentration in the Galaxy, and now that the nuclear techniques of the Foundation are in his hands, he is the actual master of the Galaxy. With those techniques – and his power – he can force the remnants of the Empire to acknowledge his rule, and eventually – with the death of the old emperor, who is mad and not long for this world – to crown him emperor. He will then have the name as well as the fact. With that – and his power – where is the world in the Galaxy that can oppose him?

 

 "In these last seven years, he has established a new Empire. In seven years, in other words, he will have accomplished what all Seldon's psychohistory could not have done in less than an additional seven hundred. The Galaxy will have peace and order at last.

 

 "And you could not stop it – any more than you could stop a planet's rush with your shoulders."

 

 A long silence followed Pritcher's speech. What remained of his tea had grown cold. He emptied his cup, filled it again, and drained it slowly. Toran bit viciously at a thumbnail. Bayta's face was cold, and distant, and white.

 

 Then Bayta said in a thin voice, "We are not convinced. If the Mule wishes us to be, let him come here and condition us himself. You fought him until the last moment of your conversion, I imagine, didn't you?"

 

 "I did," said Colonel Pritcher, solemnly.

 

 "Then allow us the same privilege."

 

 Colonel Pritcher arose. With a crisp air of finality, he said, "Then I leave. As I said earlier, my mission at present concerns you in no way. Therefore, I don't think it will be necessary to report your presence here. That is not too great a kindness. If the Mule wishes you stopped, he no doubt has other men assigned to the job, and you will be stopped. But, for what it is worth, I shall not contribute more than my requirement."

 

 "Thank you," said Bayta faintly.

 

 "As for Magnifico. Where is he? Come out, Magnifico, I won't hurt you–"

 

 "What about him?" demanded Bayta, with sudden animation.

 

 "Nothing. My instructions make no mention of him, either. I have heard that he is searched for, but the Mule will find him when the time suits him. I shall say nothing. Will you shake hands?"

 

 Bayta shook her head. Toran glared his frustrated contempt.

 

 There was the slightest lowering of the colonel's iron shoulders. He strode to the door, turned and said:

 

 "One last thing. Don't think I am not aware of the source of your stubbornness. It is known that you search for the Second Foundation. The Mule, in his time, will take his measures. Nothing will help you – But I knew you in other times; perhaps there is something in my conscience that urged me to this; at any rate, I tried to help you and remove you from the final danger before it was too late. Good-by."

 

 He saluted sharply – and was gone.

 

 Bayta turned to a silent Toran, and whispered, "They even know about the Second Foundation."

 

 In the recesses of the library, Ebling Mis, unaware of all, crouched under the one spark of light amid the murky spaces and mumbled triumphantly to himself.

 

 

 25. DEATH OF A PSYCHOLOGIST

 

 After that there were only two weeks left to the life of Ebling Mis.

 

 And in those two weeks, Bayta was with him three times. The first time was on the night after the evening upon which they saw Colonel Pritcher. The second was one week later. And the third was again a week later – on the last day – the day Mis died.

 

 First, there was the night of Colonel Pritcher's evening, the first hour of which was spent by a stricken pair in a brooding, unmerry merry-go-round.

 

 Bayta said, "Torie, let's tell Ebling."

 

 Toran said dully, "Think he can help?"

 

 "We're only two. We've got to take some of the weight off. Maybe hecan help."

 

 Toran said, "He's changed. He's lost weight. He's a little feathery; a little woolly." His fingers groped in air, metaphorically. "Sometimes, I don't think he'll help us muchever. Sometimes, I don't think anything will help."

 

 "Don't!" Bayta's voice caught and escaped a break, "Torie, don't! When you say that, I think the Mule's getting us. Let's tell Ebling, Torie – now!"

 

 Ebling Mis raised his head from the long desk, and bleared at them as they approached. His thinning hair was scuffed up, his lips made sleepy, smacking sounds.

 

 "Eh?" he said. "Someone want me?"

 

 Bayta bent to her knees, "Did we wake you? Shall we leave?"

 

 "Leave? Who is it? Bayta? No, no, stay! Aren't there chairs? I saw them–" His finger pointed vaguely.

 

 Toran pushed two ahead of him. Bayta sat down and took one of the psychologist's flaccid hands in hers. "May we talk to you, Doctor?" She rarely used the title.

 

 "Is something wrong?" A little sparkle returned to his abstracted eyes. His sagging cheeks regained a touch of color. "Is something wrong?"

 

 Bayta said, "Captain Pritcher has been here. Letme talk, Torie. You remember Captain Pritcher, Doctor?"

 

 "Yes– Yes–" His fingers pinched his lips and released them. "Tall man. Democrat."

 

 "Yes, he. He's discovered the Mule's mutation. He was here, Doctor, and told us."

 

 "But that is nothing new. The Mule's mutation is straightened out." In honest astonishment, "Haven't I told you? Have I forgotten to tell you?"

 

 "Forgotten to tell us what?" put in Toran, quickly.

 

 "About the Mule's mutation, of course. He tampers with emotions. Emotional control! I haven't told you? Now what made me forget?" Slowly, he sucked in his under lip and considered.

 

 Then, slowly, life crept into his voice and his eyelids lifted wide, as though his sluggish brain had slid onto a well-greased single track. He spoke in a dream, looking between the two listeners rather than at them. "It is really so simple. It requires no specialized knowledge. In the mathematics of psychohistory, of course, it works out promptly, in a third-level equation involving no more – Never mind that. It can be put into ordinary words – roughly – and have it make sense, which isn't usual with psychohistorical phenomena.

 

 "Ask yourselves – What can upset Hari Seldon's careful scheme of history, eh?" He peered from one to the other with a mild, questioning anxiety. "What were Seldon's original assumptions? First, that there would be no fundamental change in human society over the next thousand years.

 

 "For instance, suppose there were a major change in the Galaxy's technology, such as finding a new principle for the utilization of energy, or perfecting the study of electronic neurobiology. Social changes would render Seldon's original equations obsolete. But that hasn't happened, has it now?"

 

 "Or suppose that a new weapon were to be invented by forces outside the Foundation, capable of withstanding all the Foundation's armaments.That might cause a ruinous deviation, though less certainly. But even that hasn't happened. The Mule's Nuclear Field-Depressor was a clumsy weapon and could be countered. And that was the only novelty he presented, poor as it was.

 

 "But there was a second assumption, a more subtle one! Seldon assumed that human reaction to stimuli would remain constant. Granted that the first assumption held true,then the second must have broken down! Some factor must be twisting and distorting the emotional responses of human beings or Seldon couldn't have failed and the Foundation couldn't have fallen. And what factor but the Mule?

 

 "Am I right? Is there a flaw in the reasoning?"

 

 Bayta's plump hand patted his gently. "No flaw, Ebling."

 

 Mis was joyful, like a child. "This and more comes so easily. I tell you I wonder sometimes what is going on inside me. I seem to recall the time when so much was a mystery to me and now things are so clear. Problems are absent. I come across what might be one, and somehow, inside me, I see and understand. And my guesses, my theories seem always to be borne out. There's a drive in me ... always onward ... so that I can't stop ... and I don't want to eat or sleep ... but always go on ... and on ... and on–"

 

 His voice was a whisper; his wasted, blue-veined hand rested tremblingly upon his forehead. There was a frenzy in his eyes that faded and went out.

 

 He said more quietly, "Then I never told you about the Mule's mutant powers, did I? But then ... did you say you knew about it?"

 

 "It was Captain Pritcher, Ebling," said Bayta. "Remember?"

 

 "He told you?" There was a tinge of outrage in his tone. "But how did he find out?"

 

 "He's been conditioned by the Mule. He's a colonel now, a Mule's man. He came to advise us to surrender to the Mule, and he told us – what you told us."

 

 "Then the Mule knows we're here? I must hurry – Where's Magnifico? Isn't he with you?"

 

 "Magnifico's sleeping," said Toran, impatiently. "It's past midnight, you know."

 

 "It is? Then – Was I sleeping when you came in?"

 

 "You were," said Bayta decisively, "and you're not going back to work, either. You're getting into bed. Come on, Torie, help me. And you stop pushing at me, Ebling, because it's just your luck I don't shove you under a shower first. Pull off his shoes, Torie, and tomorrow you come down here and drag him out into the open air before he fades completely away. Look at you, Ebling, you'll be growing cobwebs. Are you hungry?"

 

 Ebling Mis shook his head and looked up from his cot in a peevish confusion. "I want you to send Magnifico down tomorrow," he muttered.

 

 Bayta tucked the sheet around his neck. "You'll haveme down tomorrow, with washed clothes. You're going to take a good bath, and then get out and visit the farm and feel a little sun on you."

 

 "I won't do it," said Mis weakly. "You hear me? I'm too busy."

 

 His sparse hair spread out on the pillow like a silver fringe about his head. His voice was a confidential whisper. "You want that Second Foundation, don't you?"

 

 Toran turned quickly and squatted down on the cot beside him. "What about the Second Foundation, Ebling?"

 

 The psychologist freed an arm from beneath the sheet and his tired fingers clutched at Toran's sleeve. "The Foundations were established at a great Psychological Convention presided over by Hari Seldon. Toran, I have located the published minutes of that Convention. Twenty-five fat films. I have already looked through various summaries."

 

 "Well?"

 

 "Well, do you know that it is very easy to find from them the exact location of the First Foundation, if you know anything at all about psychohistory. It is frequently referred to, when you understand the equations. But Toran, nobody mentions the Second Foundation, There has been no reference to it anywhere."

 

 Toran's eyebrows pulled into a frown. "It doesn't exist?"

 

 "Of course it exists," cried Mis, angrily, "who said it didn't? But there's less talk of it. Its significance – and all about it – are better hidden, better obscured. Don't you see? It's the more important of the two. It's the critical one;the one that counts! And I've got the minutes of the Seldon Convention. The Mule hasn't won yet–"

 

 Quietly, Bayta turned the lights down. "Go to sleep!"

 

 Without speaking, Toran and Bayta made their way up to their own quarters.

 

 The next day, Ebling Mis bathed and dressed himself, saw the sun of Trantor and felt the wind of Trantor for the last time. At the end of the day he was once again submerged in the gigantic recesses of the library, and never emerged thereafter.

 

 In the week that followed, life settled again into its groove. The sun of Neotrantor was a calm, bright star in Trantor's night sky. The farm was busy with its spring planting. The University grounds were silent in their desertion. The Galaxy seemed empty. The Mule might never have existed.

 

 Bayta was thinking that as she watched Toran light his cigar carefully and look up at the sections of blue sky visible between the swarming metal spires that encircled the horizon.

 

 "It's a nice day," he said.

 

 "Yes, it is. Have you everything mentioned on the list, Torie?"

 

 "Sure. Half pound butter, dozen eggs, string beans – Got it all down here, Bay. I'll have it right."

 

 "Good. And make sure the vegetables are of the last harvest and not museum relics. Did you see Magnifico anywhere, by the way?"

 

 "Not since breakfast. Guess he's down with Ebling, watching a book-film."

 

 "All right. Don't waste any time, because I'll need the eggs for dinner."

 

 Toran left with a backward smile and a wave of the hand.

 

 Bayta turned away as Toran slid out of sight among the maze of metal. She hesitated before the kitchen door, about-faced slowly, and entered the colonnade leading to the elevator that burrowed down into the recesses.

 

 Ebling Mis was there, head bent down over the eyepieces of the projector, motionless, a frozen, questing body. Near him sat Magnifico, screwed up into a chair, eyes sharp and watching – a bundle of slatty limbs with a nose emphasizing his scrawny face.

 

 Bayta said softly, "Magnifico–"

 

 Magnifico scrambled to his feet. His voice was an eager whisper. "My lady!"

 

 "Magnifico," said Bayta, "Toran has left for the farm and won't be back for a while. Would you be a good boy and go out after him with a message that I'll write for you?"

 

 "Gladly, my lady. My small services are but too eagerly yours, for the tiny uses you can put them to."

 

 She was alone with Ebling Mis, who had not moved. Firmly, she placed her hand upon his shoulder. "Ebling–"

 

 The psychologist started, with a peevish cry, "What is it?" He wrinkled his eyes. "Is it you, Bayta? Where's Magnifico?"

 

 "I sent him away. I want to be alone with you for a while." She enunciated her words with exaggerated distinctness. "I want to talk to you, Ebling."

 

 The psychologist made a move to return to his projector, but her hand on his shoulder was firm. She felt the bone under the sleeve clearly. The flesh seemed to have fairly melted away since their arrival on Trantor. His face was thin, yellowish, and bore a half-week stubble. His shoulders were visibly stooped, even in a sitting position.

 

 Bayta said, "Magnifico isn't bothering you, is he, Ebling? He seems to be down here night and day."

 

 "No, no, no! Not at all. Why, I don't mind him. He is silent and never disturbs me. Sometimes he carries the films back and forth for me; seems to know what I want without my speaking. Just let him be."

 

 "Very well – but, Ebling, doesn't he make you wonder? Do you hear me, Ebling? Doesn't he make you wonder?"

 

 She jerked a chair close to his and stared at him as though to pull the answer out of his eyes.

 

 Ebling Mis shook his head. "No. What do you mean?"

 

 "I mean that Colonel Pritcher and you both say the Mule can condition the emotions of human beings. But are you sure of it? Isn't Magnifico himself a flaw in the theory?"

 

 There was silence.

 

 Bayta repressed a strong desire to shake the psychologist. "What'swrong with you, Ebling? Magnifico was the Mule's clown. Why wasn't he conditioned to love and faith? Why should he, of all those in contact with the Mule, hate him so.

 

 "But ... but he was conditioned. Certainly, Bay!" He seemed to gather certainty as he spoke. "Do you suppose that the Mule treats his clown the way he treats his generals? He needs faith and loyalty in the latter, but in his clown he needs only fear. Didn't you ever notice that Magnifico's continual state of panic is pathological in nature? Do you suppose it is natural for a human being to be as frightened as that all the time? Fear to such an extent becomes comic. It was probably comic to the Mule – and helpful, too, since it obscured what help we might have gotten earlier from Magnifico."

 

 Bayta said, "You mean Magnifico's information about the Mule was false?"

 

 "it was misleading. It was colored by pathological fear. The Mule is not the physical giant Magnifico thinks. He is more probably an ordinary man outside his mental powers. But if it amused him to appear a superman to poor Magnifico–" The psychologist shrugged. "In any case, Magnifico's information is no longer of importance."

 

 "What is, then?"

 

 But Mis shook himself loose and returned to his projector.

 

 "What is, then?" she repeated. "The Second Foundation?"

 

 The psychologist's eyes jerked towards her. "Have I told you anything about that? I don't remember telling you anything. I'm not ready yet. What have I told you?"

 

 "Nothing," said Bayta, intensely. "Oh, Galaxy, you've told me nothing, but I wish you would because I'm deathly tired. When will it be over?"

 

 Ebling Mis peered at her, vaguely rueful, "Well, now, my ... my dear, I did not mean to hurt you. I forget sometimes ... who my friends are. Sometimes it seems to me that I must not talk of all this. There's a need for secrecy – but from the Mule, not from you, my dear." He patted her shoulder with a weak amiability.

 

 She said, "What about the Second Foundation?"

 

 His voice was automatically a whisper, thin and sibilant. "Do you know the thoroughness with which Seldon covered his traces? The proceedings of the Seldon Convention would have been of no use to me at a as little as a month ago, before this strange insight came. Even now, it seems – tenuous. The papers put out by the Convention are often apparently unrelated; always obscure. More than once I wondered if the members of the Convention, themselves, knew all that was in Seldon's mind. Sometimes I think he used the Convention only as a gigantic front, and single-handed erected the structure–"

 

 "Of the Foundations?" urged Bayta.

 

 "Of the Second Foundation! Our Foundation was simple. But the Second Foundation was only a name. It was mentioned, but if there was any elaboration, it was hidden deep in the mathematics. There is still much I don't even begin to understand, but for seven days, the bits have been clumping together into a vague picture.

 

 "Foundation Number One was a world of physical scientists. It represented a concentration of the dying science of the Galaxy under the conditions necessary to make it live again. No psychologists were included. It was a peculiar distortion, and must have had a purpose. The usual explanation was that Seldon's psychohistory worked best where the individual working units – human beings – had no knowledge of what was coming, and could therefore react naturally to all situations. Do you follow me, my dear–"

 

 "Yes, doctor."

 

 "Then listen carefully. Foundation Number Two was a world of mental scientists. It was the mirror image of our world. Psychology, not physics, was king." Triumphantly. "You see?"

 

 "I don't."

 

 "But think, Bayta, use your head. Hari Seldon knew that his psychohistory could predict only probabilities, and not certainties. There was always a margin of error, and as time passed that margin increases in geometric progression. Seldon would naturally guard as well as he could against it. Our Foundation was scientifically vigorous. It could conquer armies and weapons. It could pit force against force. But what of the mental attack of a mutant such as the Mule?"

 

 "That would be for the psychologists of the Second Foundation!" Bayta felt excitement rising within her.

 

 "Yes, yes, yes! Certainly!"

 

 "But they have done nothing so far."

 

 "How do you know they haven't?"

 

 Bayta considered that, "I don't. Do you have evidence that they have?"

 

 "No. There are many factors I know nothing of. The Second Foundation could not have been established full-grown, any more than we were. We developed slowly and grew in strength; they must have also. The stars know at what stage their strength is now. Are they strong enough to fight the Mule? Are they aware of the danger in the first place? Have they capable leaders?"

 

 "But if they follow Seldon's plan, then the Mulemust be beaten by the Second Foundation."

 

 "Ah," and Ebling Mis's thin face wrinkled thoughtfully, "is it that again? But the Second Foundation was a more difficult job than the First. Its complexity is hugely greater; and consequently so is its possibility of error. And if the Second Foundation should not beat the Mule, it is bad – ultimately bad. It is the end, may be, of the human race as we know it."

 

 "No.

 

 "Yes. If the Mule's descendants inherit his mental powers – You see? Homo sapiens could not compete. There would be a new dominant race – a new aristocracy – with homo sapiens demoted to slave labor as an inferior race. Isn't that so?"

 

 "Yes, that is so."

 

 "And even if by some chance the Mule did not establish a dynasty, he would still establish a distorted new Empire upheld by his personal power only. It would die with his death; the Galaxy would be left where it was before he came, except that there would no longer be Foundations around which a real and healthy Second Empire could coalesce. It would mean thousands of years of barbarism. It would mean no end in sight."

 

 "What can we do? Can we warn the Second Foundation?"

 

 "We must, or they may go under through ignorance, which we can not risk. But there is no way of warning them."

 

 "No way?"

 

 "I don't know where they are located. They are 'at the other end of the Galaxy' but that is all, and there are millions of worlds to choose from."

 

 "But, Ebling, don't they say?" She pointed vaguely at the films that covered the table.

 

 "No, they don't. Not where I can find it – yet. The secrecy must mean something. There must be a reason–" A puzzled expression returned to his eyes. "But I wish you'd leave. I have wasted enough time, and it's growing short – it's growing short."

 

 He tore away, petulant and frowning.

 

 Magnifico's soft step approached. "Your husband is home, my lady."

 

 Ebling Mis did not greet the clown. He was back at his projector.

 

 That evening Toran, having listened, spoke, "And you think he's really right, Bay? You think he isn't–" He hesitated.

 

 "He is right, Torie. He's sick, I know that. The change that's come over him, the loss in weight, the way he speaks – he's sick. But as soon as the subject of the Mule or the Second Foundation, or anything he is working on, comes up, listen to him. He is lucid and clear as the sky of outer space. He knows what he's talking about. I believe him."

 

 "Then there's hope." It was half a question.

 

 "I ... I haven't worked it out. Maybe! Maybe not! I'm carrying a blaster from now on." The shiny-barreled weapon was in her hand as she spoke. "Just in case, Torie, just in case."

 

 "In case what?"

 

 Bayta laughed with a touch of hysteria, "Never mind. Maybe I'm a little crazy, too – like Ebling Mis."

 

 Ebling Mis at that time had seven days to live, and the seven days slipped by, one after the other, quietly.

 

 To Toran, there was a quality of stupor about them. The warming days and the dull silence covered him with lethargy. All life seemed to have lost its quality of action, and changed into an infinite sea of hibernation.

 

 Mis was a hidden entity whose burrowing work produced nothing and did not make itself known. He had barricaded himself. Neither Toran nor Bayta could see him. Only Magnifico's go-between characteristics were evidence of his existence. Magnifico, grown silent and thoughtful, with his tiptoed trays of food and his still, watchful witness in the gloom.

 

 Bayta was more and more a creature of herself. The vivacity died, the self-assured competence wavered. She, too, sought her own worried, absorbed company, and once Toran bad come upon her, fingering her blaster. She had put it away quickly, forced a smile.

 

 "What are you doing with it, Bay?"

 

 "Holding it. Is that a crime?"

 

 "You'll blow your fool head off."

 

 "Then I'll blow it off. Small loss!"

 

 Married life had taught Toran the futility of arguing with a female in a dark-brown mood. He shrugged, and left her.

 

 On the last day, Magnifico scampered breathless into their presence. He clutched at them, frightened. "The learned doctor calls for you. He is not well."

 

 And he wasn't well. He was in bed, his eyes unnaturally large, unnaturally bright. He was dirty, unrecognizable.

 

 "Ebling!" cried Bayta.

 

 "Let me speak," croaked the psychologist, lifting his weight to a thin elbow with an effort. "Let me speak. I am finished; the work I pass on to you. I have kept no notes; the scrap-figures I have destroyed. No other must know. All must remain in your minds."

 

 "Magnifico," said Bayta, with rough directness. "Go upstairs!"

 

 Reluctantly, the clown rose and took a backward step. His sad eyes were on Mis.

 

 Mis gestured weakly, "He won't matter; let him stay. Stay, Magnifico."

 

 The clown sat down quickly. Bayta gazed at the floor.

 

 Slowly, slowly, her lower lip caught in her teeth.

 

 Mis said, in a hoarse whisper, "I am convinced the Second Foundation can win, if it is not caught prematurely by the Mule. It has kept itself secret; the secrecy must be upheld; it has a purpose. You must go there; your information is vital ... may make all the difference. Do you hear me?"

 

 Toran cried in near-agony, "Yes, yes! Tell us how to get there, Ebling? Where is it?"

 

 "I can tell you," said the faint voice.

 

 He never did.

 

 Bayta, face frozen white, lifted her blaster and shot, with an echoing clap of noise. From the waist upward, Mis was not, and a ragged hole was in the wall behind. From numb fingers, Bayta's blaster dropped to the floor.

 

 

 26. END OF THE SEARCH

 

 There was not a word to be said. The echoes of the blast rolled away into the outer rooms and rumbled downward into a hoarse, dying whisper. Before its death, it had muffled the sharp clamor of Bayta's falling blaster, smothered Magnifico's high-pitched cry, drowned out Toran's inarticulate roar.

 

 There was a silence of agony.

 

 Bayta's head was bent into obscurity. A droplet caught the light as it fell. Bayta had never wept since her childhood.

 

 Toran's muscles almost cracked in their spasm, but he did not relax – he felt as if he would never unclench his teeth again. Magnifico's face was a faded, lifeless mask.

 

 Finally, from between teeth still tight, Toran choked out in an unrecognizable voice, "You're a Mule's woman, then. He got to you!"

 

 Bayta looked up, and her mouth twisted with a painful merriment, "I, a Mule's woman? That's ironic."

 

 She smiled – a brittle effort – and tossed her hair back. Slowly, her voice verged back to the normal, or something near it. "It's over, Toran; I can talk now. How much I will survive, I don't know. But I can start talking–"

 

 Toran's tension had broken of its own weight and faded into a flaccid dullness, "Talk about what, Bay? What's there to talk about?"

 

 "About the calamity that's followed us. We've remarked about it before, Torie. Don't you remember? How defeat has always bitten at our heels and never actually managed to nip us? We were on the Foundation, and it collapsed while the Independent Traders still fought – butwe got out in time to go to Haven. We were on Haven, and it collapsed while the others still fought – and again we got out in time. We went to Neotrantor, and by now it's undoubtedly joined the Mule."

 

 Toran listened and shook his head, "I don't understand."

 

 "Torie, such things don't happen in real life. You and I are insignificant people; we don't fall from one vortex of politics into another continuously for the space of a year – unless we carry the vortex with us.Unless we carry the source of infection with us! Now do you see?"

 

 Toran's lips tightened. His glance fixed horribly upon the bloody remnants of what had once been a human, and his eyes sickened.

 

 "Let's get out of here, Bay. Let's get out into the open."

 

 It was cloudy outside. The wind scudded about them in drab spurts and disordered Bayta's hair. Magnifico had crept after them and now he hovered at the edge of their conversation.

 

 Toran said tightly, "You killed Ebling Mis because you believedhim to be the focus of infection?" Something in her eyes struck him. He whispered, "He was the Mule?" He did not – could not – believe the implications of his own words.

 

 Bayta laughed sharply, "Poor Ebling the Mule? Galaxy, no! I couldn't have killed him if he were the Mule. He would have detected the emotion accompanying the move and changed it for me to love, devotion, adoration, terror, whatever he pleased. No, I killed Ebling because he wasnot the Mule. I killed him because he knew where the Second Foundation was, and in two seconds would have told the Mule the secret."

 

 "Would have told the Mule the secret," Toran repeated stupidly. "Told the Mule–"

 

 And then he emitted a sharp cry, and turned to stare in horror at the clown, who might have been crouching unconscious there for the apparent understanding he had of what he heard.

 

 "Not Magnifico?" Toran whispered the question.

 

 "Listen!" said Bayta. "Do you remember what happened on Neotrantor? Oh, think for yourself, Torie–"

 

 But he shook his head and mumbled at her.

 

 She went on, wearily, "A man died on Neotrantor. A man died with no one touching him. Isn't that true? Magnifico played on his Visi-Sonor and when he was finished, the crown prince was dead. Now isn't that strange? Isn't it queer that a creature afraid of everything, apparently helpless with terror, has the capacity to kill at will."

 

 "The music and the light-effects," said Toran, "have a profound emotional effect–"

 

 "Yes, anemotional effect. A pretty big one. Emotional effects happen to be the Mule's specialty. That, I suppose, can be considered a coincidence. And a creature who can kill by suggestion is so full of fright. Well, the Mule tampered with his mind, supposedly, so that can be explained. But, Toran, I caught a little of that Visi-Sonor selection that killed the crown prince. Just a little – but it was enough to give me that same feeling of despair I had in the Time Vault and on Haven. Toran, I can't mistake that particular feeling."

 

 Toran's face was darkening. "I ... felt it, too. I forgot. I never thought–"

 

 "It was then that it first occurred to me. It was just a vague feeling – intuition, if you like. I had nothing to go on. And then Pritcher told us of the Mule and his mutation, and it was clear in a moment. It was the Mule who had created the despair in the Time Vault; it was Magnifico who had created the despair on Neotrantor. It was the same emotion. Therefore, the Mule and Magnifico were the same person. Doesn't it work out nicely, Torie? Isn't it just like an axiom in geometry – things equal to the same thing are equal to each other?"

 

 She was at the edge of hysteria, but dragged herself back to sobriety by main force. She continued, "The discovery scared me to death. If Magnifico were the Mule, he could know my emotions – and cure them for his own purposes. I dared not let him know. I avoided him. Luckily, he avoided me also; he was too interested in Ebling Mis. I planned killing Mis before he could talk. I planned it secretly – as secretly as I could – so secretly I didn't dare tell it to myself.

 

 "If I could have killed the Mule himself – But I couldn't take the chance. He would have noticed, and I would have lost everything."

 

 She seemed drained of emotion.

 

 Toran said harshly and with finality, "It's impossible. Look at the miserable creature.He the Mule? He doesn't even hear what we're saying."

 

 But when his eyes followed his pointing finger, Magnifico was erect and alert, his eyes sharp and darkly bright. His voice was without a trace of an accent, "I hear her, my friend. It is merely that I have been sitting here and brooding on the fact that with all my cleverness and forethought I could make a mistake, and lose so much."

 

 Toran stumbled backward as if afraid the clown might touch him or that his breath might contaminate him.

 

 Magnifico nodded, and answered the unspoken question. "I am the Mule."

 

 He seemed no longer a grotesque; his pipestem limbs, his beak of a nose lost their humor-compelling qualities. His fear was gone; his bearing was firm.

 

 He was in command of the situation with an ease born of usage.

 

 He said, tolerantly, "Seat yourselves. Go ahead; you might as well sprawl out and make yourselves comfortable. The game's over, and I'd like to tell you a story. It's a weakness of mine – I want people to understand me."

 

 And his eyes as he looked at Bayta were still the old, soft sad brown ones of Magnifico, the clown.

 

 "There is nothing really to my childhood," he began, plunging bodily into quick, impatient speech, "that I care to remember. Perhaps you can understand that. My meagerness is glandular; my nose I was born with. It was not possible for me to lead a normal childhood. My mother died before she saw me. I do not know my father. I grew up haphazard, wounded and tortured in mind, full of self-pity and hatred of others. I was known then as a queer child. All avoided me; most out of dislike; some out of fear. Queer incidents occurred – Well, never mind! Enough happened to enable Captain Pritcher, in his investigation of my childhood to realize that I was a mutant, which was more thanI ever realized until I was in my twenties."

 

 Toran and Bayta listened distantly. The wash of his voice broke over them, seated on the ground as they were, unheeded almost. The clown – or the Mule – paced before them with little steps, speaking downward to his own folded arms.

 

 "The whole notion of my unusual power seems to have broken on me so slowly, in such sluggish steps. Even toward the end, I couldn't believe it. To me, men's minds are dials, with pointers that indicate the prevailing emotion. It is a poor picture, but how else can I explain it? Slowly, I learned that I could reach into those minds and turn the pointer to the spot I wished, that I could nail it there forever. And then it took even longer to realize that others couldn't.

 

 "But the consciousness of power came, and with it, the desire to make up for the miserable position of my earlier life. Maybe you can understand it. Maybe you can try to understand it. It isn't easy to be a freak – to have a mind and an understanding and be a freak. Laughter and cruelty! To be different! To be an outsider!

 

 "You've never been through it!"

 

 Magnifico looked up to the sky and teetered on the balls of his feet and reminisced stonily, "But I eventually did learn, and I decided that the Galaxy and I could take turns. Come, they had had their innings, and I had been patient about it – for twenty-two years. My turn! It would be up to the rest of you to take it! And the odds would be fair enough for the Galaxy. One of me! Quadrillions of them!"

 

 He paused to glance at Bayta swiftly. "But I had a weakness. I was nothing in myself. If I could gain power, it could only be by means of others. Success came to me through middlemen. Always! It was as Pritcher said. Through a pirate, I obtained my first asteroidal base of operations. Through an industrialist I got my first foothold on a planet. Through a variety of others ending with the warlord of Kalgan, I won Kalgan itself and got a navy. After that, it was the Foundation – and you two come into the story.

 

 "The Foundation," he said, softly, "was the most difficult task I had met. To beat it, I would have to win over, break down, or render useless an extraordinary proportion of its ruling class. I could have done it from scratch – but a short cut was possible, and I looked for it. After all, if a strong man can lift five hundred pounds, it does not mean that he is eager to do so continuously. My emotional control is not an easy task, I prefer not to use it, where not fully necessary. So I accepted allies in my first attack upon the Foundation.

 

 "As my clown, I looked for the agent, or agents, of the Foundation that must inevitably have been sent to Kalgan to investigate my humble self. I know now it was Han Pritcher I was looking for. By a stroke of fortune, I found you instead. Iam a telepath, but not a complete one, and, my lady, you were from the Foundation. I was led astray by that. It was not fatal for Pritcher joined us afterward, but it was the starting point of an error thatwas fatal."

 

 Toran stirred for the first time. He spoke in an outraged tone, "Hold on, now. You mean that when I outfaced that lieutenant on Kalgan with only a stun pistol, and rescued you – that you had emotionally-controlled me into it." He was spluttering. "You mean I've been tampered with all along."

 

 A thin smile played on Magnifico's face. "Why not? You don't think it's likely? Ask yourself then – Would you have risked death for a strange grotesque you had never seen before, if you had been in your right mind? I imagine you were surprised at events in cold after-blood."

 

 "Yes," said Bayta, distantly, "he was. It's quite plain."

 

 "As it was," continued the Mule, "Toran was in no danger. The lieutenant had his own strict instructions to let us go. So the three of us and Pritcher went to the Foundation – and see how my campaign shaped itself instantly. When Pritcher was court-martialed and we were present, I was busy. The military judges of that trial later commanded their squadrons in the war. They surrendered rather easily, and my Navy won the battle of Horleggor, and other lesser affairs.

 

 "Through Pritcher, I met Dr. Mis, who brought me a Visi-Sonor, entirely of his own accord, and simplified my task immensely. Only it wasn'tentirely of his own accord."

 

 Bayta interrupted, "Those concerts! I've been trying to fit them in. Now I see."

 

 "Yes," said Magnifico, "the Visi-Sonor acts as a focusing device. In a way, it is a primitive device for emotional control in itself. With it, I can handle people in quantity and single people more intensively. The concerts I gave on Terminus before it fell and Haven beforeit fell contributed to the general defeatism. I might have made the crown prince of Neotrantor very sick without the Visi-Sonor, but I could not have killed him. You see?

 

 "But it was Ebling Mis who was my most important find. He might have been–" Magnifico said it with chagrin, then hurried on, "There is a special facet to emotional control you do not know about. Intuition or insight or hunch-tendency, whatever you wish to call it, can be treated as an emotion. At least, I can treat it so. You don't understand it, do you?"

 

 He waited for no negative, "The human mind works at low efficiency. Twenty percent is the figure usually given. When, momentarily, there is a flash of greater power it is termed a hunch, or insight, or intuition. I found early that I could induce a continual use of high brain-efficiency. It is a killing process for the person affected, but it is useful. The nuclear field-depressor which I used in the war against the Foundation was the result of high-pressuring a Kalgan technician. Again I work through others.

 

 "Ebling Mis was the bull's-eye. His potentialities were high, and I needed him. Even before my war with the Foundation had opened, I had already sent delegates to negotiate with the Empire. It was at that time I began my search for the Second Foundation. Naturally, I didn't find it. Naturally, I knew that I must find it – and Ebling Mis was the answer. With his mind at high efficiency, he might possibly have duplicated the work of Hari Seldon.

 

 "Partly, he did. I drove him to the utter limit. The process was ruthless, but had to be completed. He was dying at the end, but he lived–" Again, his chagrin interrupted him. "Hewould have lived long enough. Together, we three could have gone onward to the Second Foundation. It would have been the last battle – but for my mistake."

 

 Toran stirred his voice to hardness, "Why do you stretch it out so? What was your mistake, and ... and have done with your speech."

 

 "Why, your wife was the mistake. Your wife was an unusual person. I had never met her like before in my life. I ... I–" Quite suddenly, Magnifico's voice broke. He recovered with difficulty. There was a grimness about him as he continued. "She liked me without my having to juggle her emotions. She was neither repelled by me nor amused by me. Sheliked me!

 

 "Don't you understand? Can't you see what that would mean to me? Never before had anyone – Well, I ... cherished that. My own emotions played me false, though I was master of all others. I stayed out of her mind, you see; I did not tamper with it. I cherished thenatural feeling too greatly. It was my mistake – the first.

 

 "You, Toran, were under control. You never suspected me; never questioned me; never saw anything peculiar or strange about me. As for instance, when the 'Filian' ship stopped us. They knew our location, by the way, because I was in communication with them, as I've remained in communication with my generals at all times. When they stopped us, I was taken aboard to adjust Han Pritcher, who was on it as a prisoner. When I left, he was a colonel, a Mule's man, and in command. The whole procedure was too open even for you, Toran. Yet you accepted my explanation of the matter, which was full of fallacies. See what I mean?"

 

 Toran grimaced, and challenged him, "How did you retain communications with your generals?"

 

 "There was no difficulty to it. Hyperwave transmitters are easy to handle and eminently portable. Nor could I be detected in a real sense! Anyone who did catch me in the act would leave me with a slice gapped out of his memory. It happened, on occasion.

 

 "On Neotrantor, my own foolish emotions betrayed me again. Bayta was not under my control, but even so might never have suspected me if I had kept my head about the crown prince. His intentions towards Bayta – annoyed me.

 

 "I killed him. It was a foolish gesture. An unobtrusive flight would have served as well.

 

 "And still your suspicions would not have been certainties, if I had stopped Pritcher in his well-intentioned babbling, or paid less attention to Mis and more to you–" He shrugged.

 

 "That's the end of it?" asked Bayta.

 

 "That's the end."

 

 "What now, then?"

 

 "I'll continue with my program. That I'll find another as adequately brained and trained as Ebling Mis in these degenerate days, I doubt. I shall have to search for the Second Foundation otherwise. In a sense you have defeated me."

 

 And now Bayta was upon her feet, triumphant. "In a sense? Only in a sense? We have defeated youentirely! All your victories outside the Foundation count for nothing, since the Galaxy is a barbarian vacuum now. The Foundation itself is only a minor victory, since it wasn't meant to stopyour variety of crisis. It's the Second Foundation you must beat –the Second Foundation – and it's the Second Foundation that will defeat you. Your only chance was to locate it and strike it before it was prepared. You won't do that now. Every minute from now on, they will be readier for you. At this moment,at this moment, the machinery may have started. You'll know – when it strikes you, and your short term of power will be over, and you'll be just another strutting conqueror, flashing quickly and meanly across the bloody face of history."

 

 She was breathing hard, nearly gasping in her vehemence, "And we've defeated you, Toran and I. I am satisfied to die."

 

 But the Mule's sad, brown eyes were the sad, brown, loving eyes of Magnifico. "I won't kill you or your husband. It is, after all, impossible for you two to hurt me further; and killing you won't bring back Ebling Mis. My mistakes were my own, and I take responsibility for them. Your husband and yourself may leave! Go in peace, for the sake of what I call – friendship."

 

 Then, with a sudden touch of pride, "And meanwhile I am still the Mule, the most powerful man in the Galaxy. I shallstill defeat the Second Foundation."

 

 And Bayta shot her last arrow with a firm, calm certitude, "You won't! I have faith in the wisdom of Seldon yet. You shall be the last ruler of your dynasty, as well as the first."

 

 Something caught Magnifico. "Of my dynasty? Yes, I had thought of that, often. That I might establish a dynasty. That I might have a suitable consort."

 

 Bayta suddenly caught the meaning of the look in his eyes and froze horribly.

 

 Magnifico shook his head. "I sense your revulsion, but that's silly. If things were otherwise, I could make you happy very easily. It would be an artificial ecstasy, but there would be no difference between it and the genuine emotion. But things are not otherwise. I call myself the Mule – but not because of my strength – obviously–"

 

 He left them, never looking back.

 

 

 

 ABOUT THE AUTHOR

 

 Isaac Asimov was born in the Soviet Union to his great surprise. He moved quickly to correct the situation. When his parents emigrated to the United States, Isaac (three years old at the time) stowed away in their baggage. He has been an American citizen since the age of eight.

 

 Brought up in Brooklyn, and educated in its public schools, he eventually found his way to Columbia University and, over the protests of the school administration, managed to annex a series of degrees in chemistry, up to and including a Ph.D. He then infiltrated Boston University and climbed the academic ladder, ignoring all cries of outrage, until he found himself Professor of Biochemistry.

 

 Meanwhile, at the age of nine, he found the love of his life (in the inanimate sense) when he discovered his first science-fiction magazine. By the time he was eleven, he began to write stories, and at eighteen, he actually worked up the nerve to submit one. It was rejected. After four long months of tribulation and suffering, he sold his first story and, thereafter, he never looked back.

 

 In 1941, when he was twenty-one years old, he wrote the classic short story "Nightfall" and his future was assured. Shortly before that he had begun writing his robot stories, and shortly after that he had begun his Foundation series.

 

 

 What was left except quantity? At the present time, he has published over 260 books, distributed through every major division of the Dewey system of library classification, and shows no signs of slowing up. He remains as youthful, as lively, and as lovable as ever, and grows more handsome with each year. You can be sure that this is so since he has written this little essay himself and his devotion to absolute objectivity is notorious.

 

 He is married to Janet Jeppson, psychiatrist and writer, has two children by a previous marriage, and lives in New York City.

 

 

 

 

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