Hummin hurried off, his hand gripping Seldon’s upper arm. Seldon found the grip impossible to shake and, feeling like a child in the hands of an impetuous nurse, followed.

They plunged into an arcade and, before Seldon’s eyes grew accustomed to the dimmer light, they heard the burring sound of a ground-car’s brakes.

“There they are,” muttered Hummin. “Faster, Seldon.” They hopped onto a moving corridor and lost themselves in the crowd.

Seldon had tried to persuade Hummin to take him to his hotel room, but Hummin would have none of that.

“Are you mad?” he half-whispered. “They’ll be waiting for you there.”

“But all my belongings are waiting for me there too.”

“They’ll just have to wait.”

And now they were in a small room in a pleasant apartment structure that might be anywhere for all that Seldon could tell. He looked about the one-room unit. Most of it was taken up by a desk and chair, a bed, and a computer outlet. There were no dining facilities or washstand of any kind, though Hummin had directed him to a communal washroom down the hall. Someone had entered before Seldon was quite through. He had cast one brief and curious look at Seldon’s clothes, rather than at Seldon himself, and had then looked away. Seldon mentioned this to Hummin, who shook his head and said, “We’ll have to get rid of your clothes. Too bad Helicon is so far out of fashion-”

Seldon said impatiently, “How much of this might just be your imagination, Hummin? You’ve got me half-convinced and yet it may be merely a kind of… of-”

“Are you groping for the word ‘paranoia’?”

“All right, I am. This may be some strange paranoid notion of yours.” Hummin said, “Think about it, will you? I can’t argue it out mathematically, but you’ve seen the Emperor. Don’t deny it. He wanted something from you and you didn’t give it to him. Don’t deny that either. I suspect that details of the future are what he wants and you refused. Perhaps Demerzel thinks you’re only pretending not to have the details-that you’re holding out for a higher price or that someone else is bidding for it too. Who knows? I told you that if Demerzel wants you, he’ll get you wherever you are. I told you that before those two splitheads ever appeared on the scene. I’m a journalist and a Trantorian. I know how these things go. At one point, Alem said, ‘He’s the one we want.’ Do you remember that?”

“As it happens,” said Seldon. “I do.”

“To him I was only the ‘other motherlackey’ to be kept off, while he went about the real job of assaulting you.”

Hummin sat down in the chair and pointed to the bed. “Stretch out, Seldon. Make yourself comfortable. Whoever sent those two-it must have been Demerzel, in my opinion-can send others, so we’ll have to get rid of those clothes of yours. I think any other Heliconian in this sector caught in his own world’s garb is going to have trouble until he can prove he isn’t you.”

“Oh come on.”

“I mean it. You’ll have to take off the clothes and we’ll have to atomize them-if we can get close enough to a disposal unit without being seen. And before we can do that I’ll have to get you a Trantorian outfit. You’re smaller than I am and I’ll take that into account. It won’t matter if it doesn’t fit exactly-”

Seldon shook his head. “I don’t have the credits to pay for it. Not on me. What credits I have-and they aren’t much-are in my hotel safe.”

“We’ll worry about that another time. You’ll have to stay here for an hour or two while I go out in search of the necessary clothing.”

Seldon spread his hands and sighed resignedly. “All right. If it’s that important, I’ll stay.”

“You won’t try to get back to your hotel? Word of honor?”

“My word as a mathematician. But I’m really embarrassed by all the trouble you’re taking for me. And expense too. After all, despite all this talk about Demerzel, they weren’t really out to hurt me or carry me off. All I was threatened with was the removal of my clothes.”

“Not all. They were also going to take you to the spaceport and put you on a hypership to Helicon.”

“That was a silly threat-not to be taken seriously.”

“Why not?”

“I’m going to Helicon. I told them so. I’m going tomorrow.”

“And you still plan to go tomorrow?” asked Hummin.

“Certainly. Why not?”

“There are enormous reasons why not.”

Seldon suddenly felt angry. “Come on, Hummin, I can’t play this game any further. I’m finished here and I want to go home. My tickets are in the hotel room. Otherwise I’d try to exchange them for a trip today. I mean it.”

“You can’t go back to Helicon.”

Seldon flushed. “Why not? Are they waiting for me there too?”

Hummin nodded. “Don’t fire up, Seldon. They would be waiting for you there too.

Listen to me. If you go to Helicon, you are as good as in Demerzel’s hands. Helicon is good, safe Imperial territory. Has Helicon ever rebelled, ever fallen into step behind the banner of an anti-Emperor?”

“No, it hasn’t-and for good reason. It’s surrounded by larger worlds. It depends on the Imperial peace for security.”

“Exactly! Imperial forces on Helicon can therefore count on the full cooperation of the local government. You would be under constant surveillance at all times. Any time Demerzel wants you, he will be able to have you. And, except for the fact that I am now warning you, you would have no knowledge of this and you would be working in the open, filled with a false security.”

“That’s ridiculous. If he wanted me in Helicon, why didn’t he simply leave me to myself? I was going there tomorrow. Why would he send those two hoodlums simply to hasten the matter by a few hours and risk putting me on my guard?”

“Why should he think you would be put on your guard? He didn’t know I’d be with you, immersing you in what you call my paranoia.”

“Even without the question of warning me, why all the fuss to hurry me by a few hours?”

“Perhaps because he was afraid you would change your mind.”

“And go where, if not home? If he could pick me up on Helicon, he could pick me up anywhere. He could pick me up on… on Anacreon, a good ten thousand parsecs away-if it should fall into my head to go there. What’s distance to hyperspatial ships? Even if I find a world that’s not quite as subservient to the Imperial forces as Helicon is, what world is in actual rebellion? The Empire is at peace. Even if some worlds are still resentful of injustices in the past, none are going to defy the Imperial armed forces to protect me. Moreover, anywhere but on Helicon I won’t be a local citizen and there won’t even be that matter of principle to help keep the Empire at bay.”

Hummin listened patiently, nodding slightly, but looking as grave and as imperturbable as ever. He said, “You’re right, as far as you go, but there’s one world that is not really under the Emperor’s control. That, I think, is what must be disturbing Demerzel.”

Seldon thought a while, reviewing recent history and finding himself unable to choose a world on which the Imperial forces might be helpless. He said at last, “What world is that?”

Hummin said, “You’re on it, which is what makes the matter so dangerous in Demerzel’s eyes, I imagine. It is not so much that he is anxious to have you go to Helicon, as that he is anxious to have you leave Trantor before it occurs to you, for any reason-even if only tourist’s mania-to stay.”

The two men sat in silence until Seldon finally said sardonically, “Trantor! The capital of the Empire, with the home base of the fleet on a space station in orbit about it, with the best units of the army quartered here. If you believe that it is Trantor that is the safe world, you’re progressing from paranoia to outright fantasy.”

“No! You’re an Outworlder, Seldon. You don’t know what Trantor is like. It’s forty billion people and there are few other worlds with even a tenth of its population. It is of unimaginable technological and cultural complexity. Where we are now is the Imperial Sector-with the highest standard of living in the Galaxy and populated entirely by Imperial functionaries. Elsewhere on the planet, however, are over eight hundred other sectors, some of them with subcultures totally different from what we have here and most of them untouchable by Imperial forces.”