Hari Seldon’s desksec chimed and announced, “Margetta Moonrose desires a conversation.”

Hari looked up at the 3D image of a striking woman hovering before him. “Urn? Oh. Who’s she?” His sec would not interrupt him amid his calculations unless this were somebody important.

“Cross-check reveals that she is the leading interviewer and political maven in the multimedia complex-”

“Sure, sure, but why is she consequential?”

“She is considered by all cross-cultural monitors to be among the fifty most influential figures on Trantor. I suggest-”

“Never heard of her.” Hari sat up, brushed at his hair. “I suppose I should. Full filter, though.”

“I fear my filters are down for recalibration. If-”

“Damn it, they’ve been out for a week.”

“I fear the mechanical in charge of the new calibrations has been defective.”

Mechs, which were advanced tiktoks, were failing often these days. Since the Junin riots, some had even been attacked. Hari swallowed and said, “Put her through anyway.”

He had used filters on holophones for so long, he could not now disguise his feelings. Cleon’s staff had installed software to render the fitting, preselected body language for him. With some sprucing up by the Imperial Advisors, it now modulated his acoustic signature for a full, confident, resonant tone. And if he wanted, it edited his vocabulary; he was always lapsing into technospeak when he should be explaining simply.

“Academician!” Moonrose said brightly. “I would so much like to have a little talk with you.”

“About mathematics?” he said blandly.

She laughed merrily. “No no!-that would be far over my head. I represent billions of inquiring minds who would like to know your thoughts on the Empire, the Quathanan questions, the-”

“The what?”

“Quathanan-the dispute over Zonal alignment.”

“Never heard of it.”

“But-you’re to be First Minister.” She seemed genuinely surprised, though Hari reminded himself that this was probably a superbly adept filter-face.

“So I am-perhaps. Until then, I will not bother.”

“When the High Council selects, they must know the views of the candidates,” she said rather primly.

“Tell your viewers that I do my homework only just before it’s due.”

She looked charmed, which made him certain that she was filtered. He had learned from many collisions with them that media mavens were easily irked when brushed aside. They seemed to feel it quite natural that, since an immense audience saw through their eyes, they carried all the moral heft of that audience.

“What about a subject you certainly must know-the Junin disaster? And the loss-some say escape- of the Voltaire and Joan of Arc sims?”

“Not my department,” Hari said. Cleon had advised him to keep his distance from the entire sim issue.

“Rumors suggest that they came from your department.”

“Certainly, one of our research mathists found them. We leased rights to those people-what was their name…?”

“Artifice Associates, as I am sure you know.”

“Um, yes.”

“This distracted professor role is not convincing, sir.”

“You’d rather I spent my time running for office-and then, presumably, running for cover?”

“The world, the whole Empire, has a right to know-”

“So I should stand only for what the people will fall for?”

Her mouth twisted, coming through her filters, so apparently she had decided to play this interview as a contest of wills. “You’re hiding the peoples’ business from-”

“My research is my own business.”

She waved this aside. “What do you say, as a mathematician, to those who feel that deep sims of real people are immoral?”

Hari wished fervently for his own face filters. He was sure he was giving away something, so he forced his face to stay blank. Best to deflect the argument. “How real were those sims? Can anybody know?”

“They certainly seemed real and human to the audience,” Moonrose said, raising her eyebrows.

“I’m afraid I didn’t watch the performance,” Hari said. “I was busy.” Strictly true, at least.

Moonrose leaned forward, scowling. “With your mathematics? Well, then, tell us about psychohistory.”

He was still keeping his face wooden-which gave the wrong signal. He made himself smile. “A rumor.”

“I have it on good authority that you are favored by the Emperor because of this theory of history.”

“What authority?”

“Now sir, I should ask the questions here-”

“Who says? I’m still a public servant, a professor. And you, madam, are taking up time I could be devoting to my students.”

With a wave Hari cut off the link. He had learned, since bandying words with Lamurk in clear view of an unsuspected 3D snout, to chop off talk when it was going the wrong way.

Dors came through the door as he leaned back into his airchair. “I got a hail, said somebody important was grilling you.”

“She’s gone. Poked at me about psychohistory.”

“Well, it was bound to get out. It’s an exciting synthesis of terms. Appeals to the imagination.”

“Maybe if I’d called it ‘sociohistory’ people would think it more boring and leave me alone.”

“You could never live with so ugly a word.”

The electroshield sparkled and snapped as Yugo Amaryl came through. “Am I interrupting anything?”

“Not at all.” Hari leapt up and helped him to a chair. He was still limping. “How’s the leg?”

He shrugged. “Decent.”

Three thuggos had come to Yugo on the street a week ago and explained the situation very calmly. They had been commissioned to do him damage, a warning he would not forget. Some bones had to be broken; that was the specification, nothing he could do about it. The leader explained how they could do this the hard way. If he fought, he would get messed up. The easy way, they would break his shin bone in one clean snap.

Describing it afterward, Yugo had said, “I thought about it some, y’know, and sat down on the sidewalk and stuck my left leg out straight. Braced it against the curb, below the knee. The leader kicked me there. A good job; it broke clean and straight.”

Hari had been horrified. The media latched onto the story, of course. His only wry statement to them was, “Violence is the diplomacy of the incompetent.”

“Medtech tells me it’ll heal up in another week,” Yugo said as Hari helped him stretch out, the airchair shaping itself subtly.

“The Imperials still haven’t a clue who did it,” Dors said, pacing restlessly around the office.

“Plenty of people will do a job like this.” Yugo grinned, an effect somewhat offset by the big bruise on his jaw. The incident had not been quite as gentlemanly as he described it. “They kinda liked doing it to a Dahlite, too.”

Dors paced angrily. “If I’d been there…”

“You can’t be everywhere,” Hari said kindly. “The Imperials think it wasn’t really about you, anyway, Yugo.”

Yugo’s mouth twisted ruefully at Hari. “I figured. You right?”

Hari nodded. “A ‘signal,’ one of them said.”

Dors turned sharply from her pacing. “Of what?”

“A warning,” Yugo said. “Politics.”

“I see,” she said quickly. “Lamurk cannot strike at you directly, but he leaves-”

“An unsubtle calling card,” Yugo finished for her. Dors smacked her hands together. “We should tell the Emperor!”

Hari had to chuckle. “And you, a historian.

Violence has always played a role in issues of succession. It can never be far from Cleon’s mind.”

“For emperors, yes,” she countered. “But in a contest for First Minister-”

“Power is get tin’ scarce ‘round here,” Yugo drawled sarcastically. “Pesky Dahlites makin’ trouble, Empire itself slowin’ down, too. Or spinnin’ off into loony ‘renaissances.’ Probably a Dahlite plot, that, righto?”

Hari said, “When food gets scarce, table manners change.”