“Surely,” said Venabili, with the ghost of a smile playing at her lips, “you are attributing no such thing to your father.”

“Not really. In the ordinary course of life, there's no one straighter than you, Dad. But if you have to, you know you can stack the cards. Isn't that what you hope to do with Psychohistory?”

Seldon said sadly, “So far, I've done very little with Psychohistory.”

“Too bad. I keep thinking that there is some sort of psychohistorical solution to the problem of human bigotry.”

“Maybe there is, but, if so, I haven't found it.”

When dinner was over, Seldon said, “You and I, Raych, are going to have a little talk now.”

“Indeed?” said Venabili. “I take it I'm not invited.”

“Ministerial business, Dors.”

“Ministerial nonsense, Hari. You're going to ask the poor boy to do something I wouldn't want him to do.”

Seldon said firmly, “I'm certainly not going to ask him to do anything he doesn't want to do.”

Raych said, “It's all right, Mom. Let Dad and me have our talk. I promise I'll tell you all about it afterward.”

Venabili's eyes rolled upward. “You two will plead ‘state secrets.’ I know it.”

“As a matter of fact,” said Seldon firmly. “That's exactly what I must discuss. And of the first magnitude. I'm serious, Dors.”

Venabili rose, her lips tightening. She left the room with one final injunction. “Don't throw the boy to the wolves, Hari.”

And after she was gone, Seldon said quietly, “I'm afraid that throwing you to the wolves is exactly what I'll have to do, Raych.”

They faced each other in Seldon's private Ministerial office, his “thinking place” as he called it. There he had spent uncounted hours trying to think his way past and through the complexities of Trantorian and Imperial government.

He said, “Have you read much about the recent breakdowns we've been having in planetary services, Raych?”

“Yes,” said Raych, “but you know, Dad, we've got an old planet here. What we gotta do is get everyone off it, dig the whole thing up, replace everything, add the latest computerizations, and then bring everyone back, or at least half of everyone. Trantor would be much better off with only twenty billion people.”

“Which twenty billion?” asked Seldon, smiling.

“I wish I knew,” said Raych darkly. “The trouble is we can't redo the planet, so we just gotta keep patching.”

“I'm afraid so, Raych, but there are some peculiar things about it. Now I want you to check me out. I have some thoughts about this.”

He brought a small sphere out of his pocket.

“What's that?” asked Raych.

“It's a map of Trantor, carefully programmed. Do me a favor, Raych, and clear off this table top.”

Seldon placed the sphere more or less in the middle of the table and placed his hand on a keypad in the arm of his desk chair. He used his thumb to close a contact and the light in the room went out while the table top glowed with a soft ivory light that seemed about a centimeter deep. The sphere had flattened and expanded to the edges of the table.

The light slowly darkened in spots and took on a pattern. After some thirty seconds, Raych said, in surprise, “It is a map of Trantor.”

“Of course. I told you it was. You can't buy anything like this at a sector mall, though. This is one of those gadgets the armed forces play with. It could present Trantor as a sphere, but a planar projection would more clearly show what I want to show.”

“And what is it you want to show, Dad?”

“Well, in the last year or two, there have been breakdowns. As you say, it's an old planet and we've got to expect breakdowns, but they've been coming more frequently and they would seem, almost uniformly, to be the result of human error.”

“Isn't that reasonable?”

“Yes, of course. Within limits. This is true even where earthquakes are involved.”

“Earthquakes? On Trantor?”

“I admit Trantor is a fairly non-seismic planet, and a good thing, too, because enclosing a world in a dome when the world is going to shake itself badly several times a year and smash a section of the dome would be highly impractical. Your mother says that one of the reasons Trantor, rather than some other world, became the Imperial capital is that it was geologically moribund-that's her unflattering expression. Still, it might be moribund, but it's not dead. There are occasional minor earthquakes, three of them in the last two years.”

“I wasn't aware of that, Dad.”

“Hardly anyone is. The dome isn't a single object. It exists in hundreds of sections, each one of which can be lifted and set ajar to relieve tensions and compressions in case of an earthquake. Since an earthquake, when one does occur, lasts for only ten seconds to a minute, the opening endures only briefly. It comes and goes so rapidly that the Trantorians beneath are not even aware of it. They are much more aware of a mild tremor, and a faint rattling of crockery, than of the opening and closing of the dome overhead and the slight intrusion of the outside weather, whatever it is.”

“That's good, isn't it?”

“It should be. It's computerized, of course. The coming of an earthquake anywhere sets off the key controls for the opening and closing of that section of the dome, so that it opens just before the vibration becomes strong enough to do damage.”

“Still good.”

“But in the case of the three minor earthquakes over the last two years, the dome controls failed in each case. The dome never opened, and in each case repairs were required. It took some time, it took some money, and the weather controls were less than optimum for a considerable time. Now what, Raych, are the chances that the equipment would have failed in all three cases?”

“Not high?”

“Not high at all. Less than one in a hundred. One can suppose that someone had gimmicked the controls in advance of an earthquake. Now once a century, we have a magma leak, which is far more difficult to control, and I'd hate to think of the results if it went unnoticed till it was too late. Fortunately that hasn't happened, and isn't likely to, but consider- Here on this map you will find the location of the breakdowns that have plagued us over the past two years and that seem to be attributable to human error, though we haven't once been able to tell to whom it might be attributed.”

“That's because everyone is busy protecting his back.”

“I'm afraid you're right. That's a characteristic of any bureaucracy and Trantor's is the largest in history. -But what do you think of the locations?”

The map had lit up with bright little red markings that looked like small pustules covering the land surface of Trantor.

“Well,” said Raych cautiously. “They seem to be evenly spread.”

“Exactly, and that's what's interesting. One would expect that the older sections of Trantor, the sections longest domed, would have the most decayed infrastructure and would be more liable to events requiring quick human decision and laying the groundwork for possible human error. -I'll superimpose the older sections of Trantor on the map in a bluish color, and you'll notice that the breakdowns don't seem to be taking place on the blue any oftener than on the white.”

“And?”

“And what I think it means, Raych, is that the breakdowns are not of natural origin, but are deliberately caused, and spread out in this fashion to affect as many people as possible, thus creating a dissatisfaction that is as wide-spread as possible.”

“It don't seem likely.”

“No? Then let's look at the breakdowns as spread through time rather than through space.”

The blue areas and the red spots disappeared and, for a time, the map of Trantor was blank, and then the markings began to appear and disappear one at a time, here and there.