“Who's Gruber?”

“Mandell Gruber. A gardener.”

“Oh. The one who came running up with the rake to rescue you at the time of the assassination attempt.”

“Yes. I've always been grateful to him for that. He had only a rake against possibly other conspirators with blasters. That's loyalty. Anyhow, talking to him is like a breath of cool wind. I can't spend all my time talking to court officials and to Psychohistorians.”

“Thank you.”

“Come! You know what I mean. Gruber likes the open. He wants the wind and the rain and the biting cold and everything else that raw weather can bring to him. I miss it myself sometimes.”

“I don't. I wouldn't care if I never went out there.”

“You were brought up under the dome-but suppose the Empire consisted of simple unindustrialized worlds, living by herding and farming, with thin populations and empty spaces. Wouldn't we all be better off?”

“It sounds horrible to me.”

“I found some spare time to check it as best I could. It seems to me it's a case of unstable equilibrium. A thinly populated world of the type I describe either grows moribund and impoverished, falling off into an uncultured near-animal level; or it industrializes. It is standing on a narrow point and falls over in either direction, and, as it happens, almost every world in the galaxy has fallen over into industrialization.”

“Because that's better.”

“Maybe. But it can't continue forever. We're watching the results of the over-toppling now. The Empire cannot exist for much longer because it has-it has overheated. I can't think of any other expression. What will follow we don't know. If, through Psychohistory, we manage to prevent the fall or, more likely, force a recovery after the fall, is that merely to insure another period of overheating? Is that the only future humanity has, to push the boulder, like Sisyphus, up to the top of a hill only in order to see it roll to the bottom again?”

“Who's Sisyphus?”

“A character in a primitive myth. Amaryl, you must do more reading.”

Amaryl shrugged. “So I can learn about Sisyphus? Not important. Perhaps Psychohistory will show us a path to an entirely new society, one altogether different from anything we have seen, one that would be stable and desirable.”

“I hope so,” sighed Seldon. “I hope so, but there's no sign of it yet. For the near future, we will just have to labor to let the Periphery go. That will mark the beginning of the Fall of the Galactic Empire.”

“And so I said,” said Hari Seldon. “That will mark the beginning of the Fall of the Galactic Empire. And so it will, Dors.”

Dors listened, tight-lipped. She accepted Seldon's First Ministership as she accepted everything-calmly. Her only mission was to protect him and his Psychohistory, but that task, she well knew, was made harder by his position. The best security was to go unnoticed and as long as the sun of office shone down upon Seldon, not all the physical barriers in existence would be satisfactory, or sufficient.

The luxury in which they now lived; the careful shielding from spy-beams, as well as from physical interference; the advantages to her own historical research of being able to make use of nearly unlimited funds, did not satisfy her. She would gladly have exchanged it all for their old quarters at Streeling University. Or better yet, for a nameless apartment in a nameless sector where no one knew them.

“That's all very well, Hari dear,” she said, “but it's not enough.”

“What's not enough?”

“The information you're giving me. You say we might lose the Periphery. How? Why?”

Seldon smiled briefly. “How nice it would be to know, Dors, but Psychohistory is not yet at the stage where it could tell us.”

“In your opinion, then. Is it the ambition of local, faraway governors to declare themselves independent?”

“That's a factor, certainly. It's happened in past history, as you know better than I, but never for long. Maybe this time, it will be permanent.”

“Because the Empire is weaker?”

“Yes, because trade flows less freely than it once did, because communications are stiffer than they once were, because the governors in the Periphery are, in actual fact, closer to independence than they have ever been. If one of them arises with particular ambitions-”

“Can you tell which one it might be?”

“Not in the least. All we can force out of Psychohistory at this stage is the definite knowledge that if a governor of unusual ability and ambition arises, he would find conditions more suitable for his purposes than he would have in the past. It could be other things, too, some great natural disaster, or sudden civil war between two distant world coalitions. None of that can be precisely predicted as of now, but we can tell that anything of the sort that happens will have more serious consequences than it would have had a century ago.”

“But if you don't know a little more precisely what will happen in the Periphery, how can you so guide actions as to make sure the Periphery goes, rather than Trantor?”

“By keeping a close eye on both and trying to stabilize Trantor and not trying to stabilize the Periphery. We can't expect Psychohistory to order events automatically without much greater knowledge of its workings, so we have to make use of constant manual controls, so to speak. In days to come, the technique will be refined and the need for manual control will decrease.”

“But that,” said Dors, “is in days to come. Right?”

“Right. And even that is only a hope.”

“And just what kind of instabilities threaten Trantor, if we hang on to the Periphery?”

“The same possibilities-economic and social factors, natural disasters, ambitious rivalries among high officials. And something more. I have described the Empire to Yugo as being overheated-and Trantor is the most overheated portion of all. It seems to be breaking down. The infrastructure-water supply, heating, waste disposal, fuel lines, everything-seems to be having unusual problems, and that's something I've been turning my attention to more and more lately.”

“What about the death of the Emperor?”

Seldon spread his hands. “That happens inevitably, but Cleon is in good health. He's only my age, which I wish was younger, but isn't too old. His two sons are totally inadequate for the succession but there will be enough claimants. More than enough to cause trouble and make his death distressing, but it might not prove a total catastrophe-in the historic sense.”

“Let's say his assassination, then.”

Seldon looked up nervously. “Don't say that. Even if we're shielded, don't use the word.”

“Hari, don't be foolish. It's an eventuality that must be reckoned with. There was a time when the Joranumites might have taken power and, if they had, the Emperor, one way or another-”

“Probably not. He would have been more useful as a figurehead. And in any case, forget it. Joranum died last year in Nishaya, a rather pathetic figure.”

“He had followers.”

“Of course. Everyone has followers. Did you ever come across the Globalist party on my native world of Helicon in your studies of the early history of the Empire and of the Kingdom of Trantor?”

“No, I haven't. I don't want to hurt your feelings, Hari, but I don't recall coming across any piece of history in which Helicon played a role.”

“I'm not hurt, Dors. Happy the world without a history, I always say. -In any case, about twenty-four hundred years ago, there arose a group of people on Helicon who were quite convinced that Helicon was the only inhabited globe in the universe. Helicon was the universe and beyond it there was only a solid sphere of sky speckled with tiny stars.”

“How could they believe that?” said Dors. “They were part of the Empire, I presume.”