Second Foundation. Айзек Азимов

opened—

      The man who had no name other than the Mule, and no title other than First Citizen looked out through the one-way transparency of the wall to the light and lofty city on the horizon.

      In the darkening twilight, the stars were emerging, and not one but owed allegiance to him.

      He smiled with fleeting bitterness at the thought. The allegiance they owed was to a personality few had ever seen.

      He was not a man to look at, the Mule – not a man to look at without derision. Not more than one hundred and twenty pounds was stretched out into his five-foot-eight length. His limbs were bony stalks that jutted out of his scrawniness in graceless angularity. And his thin face was nearly drowned out in the prominence of a fleshy beak that thrust three inches outward.

      Only his eyes played false with the general farce that was the Mule. In their softness – a strange softness for the Galaxy’s greatest conqueror – sadness was never entirely subdued.

      In the city was to be found all the gaiety of a luxurious capital on a luxurious world. He might have established his capital on the Foundation, the strongest of his now-conquered enemies, but it was far out on the very rim of the Galaxy. Kalgan, more centrally located, with a long tradition as aristocracy’s playground, suited him better – strategically.

      But in its traditional gaiety, enhanced by unheard-of prosperity, he found no peace.

      They feared him and obeyed him and, perhaps, even respected him – from a goodly distance. But who could look at him without contempt? Only those he had Converted. And of what value was their artificial loyalty? It lacked flavour. He might have adopted titles, and enforced ritual and invented elaborations, but even that would have changed nothing. Better – or at least, no worse – to be simply the First Citizen – and to hide himself.

      There was a sudden surge of rebellion within him – strong and brutal. Not a portion of the Galaxy must be denied him. For five years he had remained silent and buried here on Kalgan because of the eternal, misty, space-ridden menace of the unseen, unheard, unknown Second Foundation. He was thirty-two. Not old – but he felt old. His body, whatever its mutant mental powers, was physically weak.

      Every star! Every star he could see – and every star he couldn’t see. It must all be his!

      Revenge on all. On a humanity of which he wasn’t a part. On a Galaxy in which he didn’t fit.

      The cool, overhead warning light flickered. He could follow the progress of the man who had entered the palace, and simultaneously, as though his mutant sense had been enhanced and sensitized in the lonely twilight, he felt the wash of emotional content touch the fibres of his brain.

      He recognized the identity without an effort. It was Pritcher.

      Captain Pritcher of the one-time Foundation. The Captain Pritcher who had been ignored and passed over by the bureaucrats of that decaying government. The Captain Pritcher whose job as petty spy he had wiped out and whom he had lifted from its slime. The Captain Pritcher whom he had made first colonel and then general; whose scope of activity he had made Galaxy-wide.

      The now-General Pritcher who was, iron rebel though he began, completely loyal. And yet with all that, not loyal because of benefits gained, not loyal out of gratitude, not loyal as a fair return – but loyal only through the artifice of Conversion.

      The Mule was conscious of that strong unalterable surface layer of loyalty and love that coloured every swirl and eddy of the emotionality of Han Pritcher – the layer he had himself implanted five years before. Far underneath there were the original traces of stubborn individuality, impatience of rule, idealism – but even he, himself, could scarcely detect them any longer.

      The door behind him opened, and he turned. The transparency of the wall faded to opacity, and the purple evening light gave way to the whitely blazing glow of atomic power.

      Han Pritcher took the seat indicated. There was neither bowing, nor kneeling nor the use of honorifics in private audiences with the Mule. The Mule was merely ‘First Citizen.’ He was addressed as ‘sir.’ You sat in his presence, and you could turn your back on him if it so happened that you did.

      To Han Pritcher this was all evidence of the sure and confident power of the man. He was warmly satisfied with it.

      The Mule said: ‘Your final report reached me yesterday. I can’t deny that I find it somewhat depressing, Pritcher.’

      The general’s eyebrows closed upon each other: ‘Yes, I imagine so – but I don’t see to what other conclusions I could have come. There just isn’t any Second Foundation, sir.’

      And the Mule considered and then slowly shook his head, as he had done many a time before: ‘There’s the evidence of Ebling Mis. There is always the evidence of Ebling Mis.’

      It was not a new story. Pritcher said without qualification: ‘Mis may have been the greatest psychologist of the Foundation, but he was a baby compared to Hari Seldon. At the time he was investigating Seldon’s works, he was under the artificial stimulation of your own brain control. You may have pushed him too far. He might have been wrong. Sir, he must have been wrong.’

      The Mule sighed, his lugubrious face thrust forward on its thin stalk of a neck. ‘If only he had lived another minute. He was on the point of telling me where the Second Foundation was. He knew, I’m telling you. I need not have retreated. I need not have waited and waited. So much time lost. Five years gone for nothing.’

      Pritcher could not have been censorious over the weak longing of his ruler; his controlled mental make-up forbade that. He was disturbed instead; vaguely uneasy. He said: ‘But what alternative explanation can there possibly be, sir? Five times I’ve gone out. You yourself have plotted the routes. And I’ve left no asteroid unturned. It was three hundred years ago – that Hari Seldon of the old Empire supposedly established two Foundations to act as nuclei of a new Empire to replace the dying old one. One hundred years after Seldon, the First Foundation – the one we know so well – was known through all the Periphery. One hundred fifty years after Seldon – at the time of the last battle with the old Empire – it was known throughout the Galaxy. And now it’s three hundred years – and where should this mysterious Second be? In no eddy of the Galactic stream has it been heard of.’

      ‘Ebling Mis said it kept itself secret. Only secrecy can turn its weakness to strength.’

      ‘Secrecy as deep as this is past possibility without nonexistence as well.’

      The Mule looked up, large eyes sharp and wary. ‘No. It does exist.’ A bony finger pointed sharply. ‘There is going to be a slight change in tactics.’

      Pritcher frowned. ‘You plan to leave yourself? I would scarcely advise it.’

      ‘No, of course not. You will have to go out once again – one last time. But with another in joint command.’

      There was a silence, and Pritcher’s voice was hard, ‘Who, sir?’

      ‘There’s a young man here in Kalgan. Bail Channis.’

      ‘I’ve never heard of him, sir.’

      ‘No, I imagine not. But he’s got an agile mind, he’s ambitious – and he’s not Converted.’

      Pritcher’s long jaw trembled for a bare instant, ‘I fail to see the advantage in that.’

      ‘There is one, Pritcher. You’re a resourceful and experienced man. You have given me good service. But you are Converted. Your motivation is simply an enforced and helpless loyalty to myself. When you lost your native motivations, you lost something, some subtle drive, that I cannot possibly replace.’

      ‘I don’t feel that, sir,’ said Pritcher, grimly. ‘I recall myself quite well as I was in the days when I was an enemy of yours. I feel none the inferior.’

      ‘Naturally not,’ and the Mule’s mouth twitched into a smile. ‘Your judgement in this matter is scarcely objective.