A. (firmly) The Empire will vanish and all its good with it. Its accumulated knowledge will decay and the order it has imposed will vanish. Interstellar wars will be endless; interstellar trade will decay; population will decline; worlds will lose touch with the main body of the Galaxy and so matters will remain.
Q. (a small voice in the middle of a vast silence) For ever?
A. Psychohistory, which can predict the fall, can make statements concerning the succeeding dark ages. The Empire, gentlemen, as has just been said, has stood twelve thousand years. The dark ages to come will endure not twelve, but thirty thousand years. A Second Empire will rise, but between it and our civilization will be one thousand generations of suffering humanity. We must fight that.
Q. (recovering somewhat) You contradict yourself. You said earlier that you could not prevent the destruction of Trantor; hence, presumably, the fall the so-called fall of the Empire.
A. I do not say now that we can prevent the fall. But it is not yet too late to shorten the interregnum which will follow. It is possible, gentlemen, to reduce the duration of anarchy to a single millennium, if my group is allowed to act now. We are at a delicate moment in history. The huge, onrushing mass of events must be deflected just a little just a little It cannot be much, but it may be enough to remove twenty-nine thousand years of misery from human history.
Q. How do you propose to do this?
A. By saving the knowledge of the race. The sum of human knowing is beyond any one man; any thousand men. With the destruction of our social fabric, science will be broken into a million pieces. Individuals will know much of the exceedingly tiny facets of which there is to know. They will be helpless and useless by themselves. The bits of lore, meaningless, will not be passed on. They will be lost through the generations. But, if we now prepare a giant summary of all knowledge, it will never be lost. Coming generations will build on it, and will not have to rediscover it for themselves. One millennium will do the work of thirty thousand.
Q. All this
A. All my project; my thirty thousand men with their wives and children, are devoting themselves to the preparation of an Encyclopedia Galactica. They will not complete it in their lifetimes. I will not even live to see it fairly begun. But by the time Trantor falls, it will be complete and copies will exist in every major library in the Galaxy.
The Chief Commissioners gavel
rose and fell. Hari Seldon left the stand and quietly took his seat next to Gaal.
He smiled and said, How did you like the show?
Gaal said, You stole it. But what will happen now?
Theyll adjourn the trial and try to come to a private agreement with me.
How do you know?
Seldon said, Ill be honest. I dont know. It depends on the Chief Commissioner. I have studied him for years. I have tried to analyse his workings, but you know how risky it is to introduce the vagaries of an individual in the psychohistoric equations. Yet I have hopes.
7
The next days hearings were entirely different. Hari Seldon and Gaal Dornick were alone with the Commission. They were seated at a table together, with scarcely a separation between the five judges and the two accused. They were even offered cigars from a box of iridescent plastic which had the appearance of water, endlessly flowing. The eyes were fooled into seeing the motion although the fingers reported it to be hard and dry.
Seldon accepted one; Gaal refused.
Seldon said, My lawyer is not present.
A Commissioner replied, This is no longer a trial, Dr Seldon. We are here to discuss the safety of the State.
Linge Chen said, I will speak, and the other Commissioners sat back in their chairs, prepared to listen. A silence formed about Chen into which he might drop his words.
Gaal held his breath. Chen, lean and hard, older in looks than in fact, was the actual Emperor of all the Galaxy. The child who bore the title itself was only a symbol manufactured by Chen, and not the first such, either.
Chen said, Dr Seldon, you disturb the peace of the Emperors realm. None of the quadrillions living now among all the stars of the Galaxy will be living a century from now. Why, then, should we concern ourselves with events of five centuries distance?
I shall not be alive half a decade hence, said Seldon, and yet it is of overpowering concern to me. Call it idealism. Call it an identification of myself with that of mystical generalization to which we refer by the term, man.
I do not wish to take the trouble to understand mysticism. Can you tell me why I may not rid myself of yourself and of an uncomfortable and unneccessary five-century future which I will never see by having you executed tonight?
A week ago, said Seldon, lightly, you might have done so and perhaps retained a one in ten probability of yourself remaining alive at years end. Today, the one in ten probability is scarcely one in ten thousand.
There were expired breaths in the gathering and uneasy stirrings. Gaal felt the short hairs prickle on the back of his neck. Chens upper eyelids dropped a little.