“Who’s controlling?” Dors asked.

Yugo looked embarrassed. “Oh, we…dunno.”

“Don’t know? But this is a theory of all history.”

Hari said quietly, “There are elements, interplays, in the equations that we don’t grasp. Damping forces.”

“How can you not understand?”

Both men looked ill at ease. “We don’t know how the terms interact. New features,” Hari said, “leading to…emergent order.”

She said primly, “Then you don’t really have a theory, do you?”

Hari nodded ruefully. “Not in the sense of a deep understanding, no.”

Models followed the gritty, experienced world, he reflected. They echoed their times. Clockwork planetary mechanics came after clocks. The idea of the whole universe as a computation came after computers. A worldview of stable change came after nonlinear dynamics…

He had a glimmering of a metamodel, which would look at him and describe how he would then select among models for psychohistory. Peering down from above, it could see which was likely to be favored by Hari Seldon…

“Who plans this control?” Dors persisted.

Hari caught at the idea he had, but it slipped away. He knew how to coax it back: ease up. “Remember that joke?” he said. “How do you make God laugh?”

She smiled. “You tell him your plans.”

“Right. We will study this result, sniff out an answer.”

She smiled. “Don’t ask you for predictions about the progress of your own predictions?”

“Embarrassing, but yes.”

His desksec chimed. “An Imperial summons,” it announced.

“Damn!” Hari slapped his chair. “Fun’s over.”

Not quite time for the Specials to arrive, Hari thought. But getting any work done was impossible while he was on edge.

He jiggled coins in his pocket, distracted, then fished one out. A five cred piece, amber alloy, a handsome Cleon I head on one side-treasuries always flattered emperors-and the disk of the Galaxy seen from above on the other. He held it on edge and thought.

Let the coin’s width represent the disk’s typical scale height. To be correct, the coin would have to bulge at its center to depict the hub, but overall it was a good geometric replica.

In the disk was a flaw, a minute blister in an outer spiral arm. He did the ratio in his head, allowing that the galaxy was about 100,000 light-years across, and…blinked. The speck portrayed a volume about a thousand light years across. In the outer arms, that would contain ten million stars.

To see so many worlds as a fleck adrift in immensity made him feel as though Trantor’s solidity had opened and he had plunged helplessly into an abyss.

Could humanity matter on such a scale? So many billions of souls, packed into a grainy dot.

Yet they had spanned the whole incomprehensible expanse of that disk in a twinkling.

Humanity had spread through the spiral arms, spilling through the wormholes, wrapping itself around the hub in a mere few thousand years. In that time the spiral arms themselves had not revolved a perceptible angle in their own gravid gavotte; that would take half a billion years. Human hankering for far horizons had sent them swarming through the wormhole webbing, popping out into spaces near suns of swelling red, virulent blue, smoldering ruby.

The speck stood for a volume a single human brain, with its primate capacities, could not grasp, except as mathematical notation. But that same brain led humans outward, until they now strode the Galaxy, mastering the starlit abyss…without truly knowing themselves.

So a single human could not fathom even a dot in the disk. But the sum of humanity could, incrementally, one mind at a time, knowing its own immediate starry territory.

And what did he desire? To comprehend all of that humanity, its deepest impulses, its shadowy mechanisms, its past, present, and future. He wanted to know the vagrant species that had managed to scoop up this disk, and to make it a plaything.

So maybe one single human mind could indeed grasp the disk, by going one level higher-and fathoming the collective effects, hidden in the intricacies of the Equations.

Describing Trantor, in this proportion, was child’s play. For the Empire, he needed a far grander comprehension.

Mathematics might rule the galaxy. Invisible, gossamer symbols could govern.

So a single man or woman could matter.

Maybe. He shook his head. A single human head.

Getting a little ahead of ourselves, aren’t we? Dreams of godhood….

Back to work.

Only he couldn’t work. He had to wait. To his relief, the Imperial Specials arrived and escorted him across Streeling University. By now he was used to the gawkers, the embarrassment of plowing through the crowds which now accumulated everywhere, it seemed, that he might frequent.

“Busy today,” he said to the Specials captain.

“Got to expect it, sir.”

“You get extra duty pay for this, I hope.”

“Yessir. ‘Digs,’ we call them.”

“For extra risk, correct? Dangerous duty.”

The captain looked flustered. “Well, yessir…”

“If someone starts shooting, what are your orders?”

“Uh, if they can penetrate the engaging perimeter, we’re to get between them and you. Sir.”

“And you’d do that? Take a gauss pulse or a flechette?”

He seemed surprised. “Of course.”

“Truly?”

“Our duty, y’know.”

Hari was humbled by the man’s simple loyalty. Not to Hari Seldon, but to the idea of Empire. Order. Civilization.

And Hari realized that he, too, was devoted to that idea. The Empire had to be saved, or at least its decline mitigated. Only by fathoming its deep structure could he do that.

Which was why he disliked the First Minister business. It robbed him of time, concentration.

In the Specials’ armored pods he salved his discontent by pulling out his tablet and working on some equations. The captain had to remind him when they reached the palace grounds. Hari got out and there was the usual security ritual, the Specials spreading out and airborne sensors going aloft to sniff out the far perimeter. They reminded him of golden bees, buzzing with vigilance.

He walked by a wall leading into the palace gardens and a tan, round sheet the size of his fingernail popped off the wall. It stuck to his neck. He reached up and plucked it off.

He recognized it as a promotional trinket, a slap-on patch which gave you a pleasant rush by diffusing endorphins into your bloodstream. It also subtly predisposed you to coherent signals in corridor advertisements.

He pitched it aside. A Special grabbed at the patch and suddenly there was shouting and movement all around him. The Special turned to throw the patch away.

An orange spike shot through the guard’s hand, hissing hot, flaring and gone in a second. The man cried, “Ah!” and another Special grabbed him and pushed him down. Then five Specials blocked Hari from all sides and he saw no more.

The Special screamed horribly. Something cut off the wail of pain. The captain shouted, “Move!” and Hari had to trot with the Specials around him into the gardens and down several lanes.

It took a while to straighten out the incident. The patch was untraceable, of course, and there was no way of knowing for sure whether it was targeted on Hari at all.

“Could be part of some Palace plot,” the captain said. “Just waiting for the next’ passerby with a scent-signature like yours.”

“Not aimed for me at all?”

“Could be. That tab took couple extra seconds tryin’ to figure out if it wanted you or not.”

“And it did.”

“Body odor, skin smells-they’re not exact, sir.”

“I’ll have to start wearing perfume.”

The captain grinned. “That won’t stop a smart tab.”

Other protection specialists rushed in and there was evidence to measure and opinions and a lot of talk. Hari insisted on walking back to see the Special who had taken the tab. He was gone, already off to emergency care; they said he would lose his hand. No, sorry, Hari could not see him. Security, y’know.