Seldon said, “Am I really going to be safe wherever it is you are taking me?”

Hummin said, “Quite safe from any open movement on the part of the Imperial forces. Of course, when it comes to the individual operator-the spy, the agent, the hired assassin-one must always be careful. Naturally, I will supply you with a bodyguard.”

Seldon felt uneasy. “The hired assassin? Are you serious? Would they really want to kill me?”

Hummin said, “I’m sure Demerzel doesn’t. I suspect he wants to use you rather than kill you. Still, other enemies may turn up or there may be unfortunate concatenations of events. You can’t go through life sleepwalking.”

Seldon shook his head and turned his face away. To think, only forty-eight hours ago he had been just an insignificant, virtually unknown Outworld mathematician, content only to spend his remaining time on Trantor sight-seeing, gazing at the enormity of the great world with his provincial eye. And now, it was finally sinking in: He was a wanted man, hunted by Imperial forces. The enormity of the situation seized him and he shuddered.

“And what about you and what you’re doing right now?”

Hummin said thoughtfully, “Well, they won’t feel kindly toward me, I suppose. I might have my head laid open or my chest exploded by some mysterious and never-found assailant.”

Hummin said it without a tremor in his voice or a change in his calm appearance, but Seldon winced.

Seldon said, “I rather thought you would assume that might be in store for you. You don’t seem to be… bothered by it.”

“I’m an old Trantorian. I know the planet as well as anybody can. I know many people and many of them are under obligation to me. I like to think that I am shrewd and not easy to outwit. In short, Seldon, I am quite confident that I can take care of myself.”

“I’m glad you feel that way and I hope you’re justified in thinking so, Hummin, but I can’t get it through my head why you’re taking this chance at all. What am I to you? Why should you take even the smallest risk for someone who is a stranger to you?”

Hummin checked the controls in a preoccupied manner and then he faced Seldon squarely, eyes steady and serious.

“I want to save you for the same reason that the Emperor wants to use you-for your predictive powers.”

Seldon felt a deep pang of disappointment. This was not after all a question of being saved. He was merely the helpless and disputed prey of competing predators. He said angrily, “I will never live down that presentation at the Decennial Convention. I have ruined my life.”

“No. Don’t rush to conclusions, mathematician. The Emperor and his officers want you for one reason only, to make their own lives more secure. They are interested in your abilities only so far as they might be used to save the Emperor’s rule, preserve that rule for his young son, maintain the positions, status, and power of his officials. I, on the other hand, want your powers for the good of the Galaxy.”

“Is there a distinction?” spat Seldon acidly.

And Hummin replied with the stern beginning of a frown, “If you do not see the distinction, then that is to your shame. The human occupants of the Galaxy existed before this Emperor who now rules, before the dynasty he represents, before the Empire itself. Humanity is far older than the Empire. It may even be far older than the twenty-five million worlds of the Galaxy. There are legends of a time when humanity inhabited a single world.”

“Legends!” said Seldon, shrugging his shoulders.

“Yes, legends, but I see no reason why that may not have been so in fact, twenty thousand years ago or more. I presume that humanity did not come into existence complete with knowledge of hyperspatial travel. Surely, there must have been a time when people could not travel at superluminal velocities and they must then have been imprisoned in a single planetary system. And if we look forward in time, the human beings of the worlds of the Galaxy will surely continue to exist after you and the Emperor are dead, after his whole line comes to an end, and after the institutions of the Empire itself unravel. In that case, it is not important to worry overmuch about individuals, about the Emperor and the young Prince Imperial. It is not important to worry even about the mechanics of Empire. What of the quadrillions of people that exist in the Galaxy? What of them?”

Seldon said, “Worlds and people would continue, I presume.”

“Don’t you feel any serious need of probing the possible conditions under which they would continue to exist.”

“One would assume they would exist much as they do now.”

“One would assume. But could one know by this art of prediction that you speak of?”

“Psychohistory is what I call it. In theory, one could.”

“And you feel no pressure to turn that theory into practice.”

“I would love to, Hummin, but the desire to do so doesn’t automatically manufacture the ability to do so. I told the Emperor that psychohistory could not be turned into a practical technique and I am forced to tell you the same thing.”

“And you have no intention of even trying to find the technique?”

“No, I don’t, any more than I would feel I ought to try to tackle a pile of pebbles the size of Trantor, count them one by one, and arrange them in order of decreasing mass. I would know it was not something I could accomplish in a lifetime and I would not be fool enough to make a pretense of trying.”

“Would you try if you knew the truth about humanity’s situation?”

“That’s an impossible question. What is the truth about humanity’s situation? Do you claim to know it?”

“Yes, I do. And in five words.” Hummin’s eyes faced forward again, turning briefly toward the blank changelessness of the tunnel as it pushed toward them, expanding until it passed and then dwindling as it slipped away. He then spoke those five words grimly.

He said, “The Galactic Empire is dying.”

Hari Seldon remained uncomfortably silent for a while after Hummin’s quiet statement. He shrank within himself in sudden recognition of his own deficiencies.

He had invented a new science: psychohistory. He had extended the laws of probability in a very subtle manner to take into account new complexities and uncertainties and had ended up with elegant equations in innumerable unknowns.

Possibly an infinite number; he couldn’t tell.

But it was a mathematical game and nothing more. He had psychohistory-or at least the basis of psychohistory but only as a mathematical curiosity. Where was the historical knowledge that could perhaps give some meaning to the empty equations?

He had none. He had never been interested in history. He knew the outline of Heliconian history. Courses in that small fragment of the human story had, of course, been compulsory in the Heliconian schools. But what was there beyond that? Surely what else he had picked up was merely the bare skeletons that everyone gathered-half legend, the other half surely distorted. Still, how could one say that the Galactic Empire was dying? It had existed for ten thousand years as an accepted Empire and even before that, Trantor, as the capital of the dominating kingdom, had held what was a virtual empire for two thousand years. The Empire had survived the early centuries when whole sections of the Galaxy would now and then refuse to accept the end of their local independence. It had survived the vicissitudes that went with the occasional rebellions, the dynastic wars, some serious periods of breakdown. Most worlds had scarcely been troubled by such things and Trantor itself had grown steadily until it was the worldwide human habitation that now called itself the Eternal World.