Only Clowzia hesitated. She paused just before she put hers on, then offered it to Seldon.

Seldon shook his head. “I can’t take your hat, Clowzia.”

“Go ahead. I have long hair and it’s pretty thick. Yours is short and a little… thin.”

Seldon would have liked to deny that firmly and at another time he would have. Now, however, he took the hat and mumbled, “Thank you. If your head gets cold, I’ll give it back.”

Maybe she wasn’t so young. It was her round face, almost a baby face. And now that she had called attention to her hair, he could see that it was a charming russet shade. He had never seen hair quite like that on Helicon.

Outside it was cloudy, as it had been the time he was taken across open country to the Palace. It was considerably colder than it had been then, but he assumed that was because they were six weeks farther into winter. The clouds were thicker than they had been on the earlier occasion and the day was distinctly darker and threatening-or was it just closer to night? Surely, they wouldn’t come up to do important work without leaving themselves an ample period of daylight to do it in. Or did they expect to take very little time? He would have liked to have asked, but it occurred to him that they might not like questions at this time. All of them seemed to be in states varying from excitement to anger.

Seldon inspected his surroundings.

He was standing on something that he thought might be dull metal from the sound it made when he surreptitiously thumped his foot down on it. It was not bare metal, however. When he walked, he left footprints. The surface was clearly covered by dust or fine sand or clay. Well, why not? There could scarcely be anyone coming up here to dust the place. He bent down to pinch up some of the matter out of curiosity.

Clowzia had come up to him. She noticed what he was doing and said, with the air of a housewife caught at an embarrassing negligence, “We do sweep hereabouts for the sake of the instruments. It’s much worse most places Upperside, but it really doesn’t matter. It makes for insulation, you know.”

Seldon grunted and continued to look about. There was no chance of understanding the instruments that looked as though they were growing out of the thin soil (if one could call it that). He hadn’t the faintest idea of what they were or what they measured.

Leggen was walking toward him. He was picking up his feet and putting them down gingerly and it occurred to Seldon that he was doing so to avoid jarring the instruments. He made a mental note to walk that way himself.

“You! Seldon!”

Seldon didn’t quite like the tone of voice. He replied coolly, “Yes, Dr. Leggen?”

“Well, Dr. Seldon, then.” He said it impatiently. “That little fellow Randa told me you are a mathematician.”

“That’s right.”

“A good one?”

“I’d like to think so, but it’s a hard thing to guarantee.”

“And you’re interested in intractable problems?”

Seldon said feelingly, “I’m stuck with one.”

“I’m stuck with another. You’re free to look about. If you have any questions, our intern, Clowzia, will help out. You might be able to help us.”

“I would be delighted to, but I know nothing about meteorology.”

“That’s all right, Seldon. I just want you to get a feel for this thing and then I’d like to discuss my mathematics, such as it is.”

“I’m at your service.”

Leggen turned away, his long scowling face looking grim. Then he turned back. “If you get cold-too cold-the elevator door is open. You just step in and touch the spot marked; UNIVERSITY BASE. It will take you down and the elevator will then return to us automatically. Clowzia will show you-if you forget.”

“I won’t forget.”

This time he did leave and Seldon looked after him, feeling the cold wind knife through his sweater. Clowzia came back over to him, her face slightly reddened by that wind.

Seldon said, “Dr. Leggen seems annoyed. Or is that just his ordinary outlook on life?”

She giggled. “He does look annoyed most of the time, but right now he really is.”

Seldon said very naturally, “Why?”

Clowzia looked over her shoulder, her long hair swirling. Then she said, “I’m not supposed to know, but I do just the same. Dr. Leggen had it all figured out that today, just at this time, there was going to be a break in the clouds and he’d been planning to make special measurements in sunlight. Only… well, look at the weather.”

Seldon nodded.

“We have holovision receivers up here, so he knew it was cloudy worse than usual-and I guess he was hoping there would be something wrong with the instruments so that it would be their fault and not that of his theory. So far, though, they haven’t found anything out of the way.”

“And that’s why he looks so unhappy.”

“Well, he never looks happy.”

Seldon looked about, squinting. Despite the clouds, the light was harsh. He became aware that the surface under his feet was not quite horizontal. He was standing on a shallow dome and as he looked outward there were other domes in all directions, with different widths and heights. “Upperside seems to be irregular,” he said.

“Mostly, I think. That’s the way it worked out.”

“Any reason for it?”

“Not really. The way I’ve heard it explained-I looked around and asked, just as you did, you know-was that originally the people on Trantor domed in places, shopping malls, sports arenas, things like that, then whole towns, so that (here were lots of domes here and there, with different heights and different widths. When they all came together, it was all uneven, but by that time, people decided that’s the way it ought to be.”

“You mean that something quite accidental came to be viewed as a tradition?”

“I suppose so-if you want to put it that way.”

(If something quite accidental can easily become viewed as a tradition and be made unbreakable or nearly so, thought Seldon, would that be a law of psychohistory? It sounded trivial, but how many other laws, equally trivial, might there be? A million? A billion? Were there a relatively few general laws from which these trivial ones could be derived as corollaries? How could he say? For a while, lost in thought, he almost forgot the biting wind.)

Clowzia was aware of that wind, however, for she shuddered and said, “It’s very nasty. It’s much better under the dome.”

“Are you a Trantorian?” asked Seldon.

“That’s right.”

Seldon remembered Ranch’s dismissal of Trantorians as agoraphobic and said, “Do you mind being up here?”

“I hate it,” said Clowzia, “but I want my degree and my specialty and status and Dr. Leggen says I can’t get it without some field work. So here I am, hating it, especially when it’s so cold. When it’s this cold, by the way, you wouldn’t dream that vegetation actually grows on these domes, would you?”

“It does?” He looked at Clowzia sharply, suspecting some sort of practical joke designed to make him look foolish. She looked totally innocent, but how much of that was real and how much was just her baby face?

“Oh sure. Even here, when it’s warmer. You notice the soil here? We keep it swept away because of our work, as I said, but in other places it accumulates here and there and is especially deep in the low places where the domes meet. Plants grow in it.”

“But where does the soil come from?”

“When the dome covered just part of the planet, the wind deposited soil on them, little by little. Then, when Trantor was all covered and the living levels were dug deeper and deeper, some of the material dug up, if suitable, would be spread over the top.”

“Surely, it would break down the domes.”

“Oh no. The domes are very strong and they’re supported almost everywhere. The idea was, according to a book-film I viewed, that they were going to grow crops Upperside, but it turned out to be much more practical to do it inside the dome. Yeast and algae could be cultivated within the domes too, taking the pressure off the usual crops, so it was decided to let Upperside go wild. There are animals on Upperside too-butterflies, bees, mice, rabbits. Lots of them.”