Sinter had never had brain fever, himself; had somehow escaped it, despite having an
above-normal intelligence. He was eternally curious.
And completely human. Farad Sinter had x-ray images taken at least twice a year to prove
that fact to himself.
The largest inhabited world in the Galaxy was Nak, a gas-giant circling a star in the
Hallidon Province. It was four million kilometers wide.
Now he had other matters to consider. He stood before his desk-he never sat while
working-and scrolled through the briefs supplied to him by the informer. There was a stink
rising over reassignment of ships to Sarossa, following the probable loss of the Spear of
Glory. He could almost smell Linge Chen behind the growing public indignation. Yet that
had actually been Klayus's doing, almost entirely. Sinter had gone along to allow the boy
some sense of purpose.
Chen was a very intelligent man.
Sinter wondered if Chen had ever had brain fever...
Lost in thought, he sat for five minutes as the briefs filed past, ignoring them. He had
more than enough time to deal with Commissioner Chen.
Mors Planch, in his fifty years of service to the Empire (and to his own ends), had
watched things go from bad to worse with grim calm. Not much upset him, on the surface; he
was quiet
and soft-spoken and used to carrying out extraordinary missions, but he never thought he
would be called upon-by Linge Chen, no less-to do something so mundane as go looking for a
lost starship. And a survey vessel, at that!
He stood on the steel balcony suspended above the Central Trantor spaceport docks, looking
down the long rows of bullet-shaped bronze-and-ivory Imperial ships, all gleaming and
brightly polished on the surface, and all run by crews who performed their duties more and
more by ritual and rote, not even beginning to understand the mechanics and electronics,
much less the physics, behind their miraculous Jumps from one end of the Galaxy to the
other.
Spit and polish and a shadow of ignorance, like an eclipse at noon...
He smelled the perfumery on his lapel to put him in a better mood. The pleasant aromas of
a thousand worlds had been programmed into the tiny button, an extraordinary antique given
to him by Linge Chen seven years ago. Chen was a remarkable man, able to understand the
emotions and needs of others, while having none of his own-other than the lust for power.
Planch knew his master well enough, and knew what he was capable of, but he did not have
to like him. Still, Chen paid very well, and if the Empire was going to rank growth and
bad seed, Planch had no qualms about avoiding the worst of the discomforts and misfortunes.
A tall, spidery woman with corn yellow hair seemed to appear by his elbow, towering over
him by a good ten centimeters. He looked up and met her onyx eyes.
“More Planch?”
“Yes. ” He turned and extended his hand. The woman stepped back and shook her head; on her
world, Huylen, physical contact was considered rude in simple greetings. “And you're
Tritch, I presume?”
“Presumptuous of you, ” she said, "but accurate. I have three ships we can use, and I've
chosen the best. Private, and
fully licensed for travel anywhere the Empire might care to trade. "
“You'll be carrying only me, and I'll need to inspect your hyperdrive, do some
modifications. ”
“Oh?” Tritch's humor faded fast. “I don't even like experts doing such work. If it ain't
broke, don't fix it. ”
“I'm more than an expert, ” Planch said. “And with what you're being paid, you could
replace your whole ship three times over. ”
Tritch moved her head from side to side in a gesture Planch could not read. So many social
customs and physical nuances! A quadrillion human beings could be remarkably difficult to
encompass, especially at the Center, where so many of them crossed paths.
They walked toward the gate to the dock aisle where Tritch's ships were berthed. “You told
me we were going on a search, ” she said. “You said it would be dangerous. For that amount
of money, I accept great risks, but-”
“We're going into a supernova shock front, ” Planch said, keeping his eyes straight ahead.
“Oh. ” This news gave her pause, but only for a second. “Sarossa?”
He nodded. They took a pedway to the berth itself, sliding past three kilometers of other
vessels, most of them Imperial, a few belonging to the Palace upper crust, the rest to
licensed traders like Tritch.
“I turned down four requests from local folks to go there and rescue their families. ”
“As well you should have, ” Planch said. “I'm your job today, not them. ”
“How high up does this go?” Tritch asked with a sniff. “Or perhaps I should ask, how much
influence do you have?”
“No influence at all. I do what I'm told, and don't talk much about my orders. ”
Tritch undulated in polite dubiousness, walked ahead to
the gangway, and ordered the ship's loading doors to open. The ship was a clean-looking
craft, about two hundred years old, with self-repairing drives; but who knew if the
self-repair units were in good working order? People trusted their machines too much these
days, because by and large they had to.
Planch noted the ship's name: Flower of Evil. “When do we leave?”
“Now, ” Planch said.
“You know, ” Tritch said, “your name sounds familiar... Are you from Huylens?”
“Me?” He shook his head and laughed as they walked into the cavernous, almost empty hold.
“I'm far too short for your kind, Tritch. But my people provided the seed colony that
settled your world, a thousand years ago. ”
“That explains it!” Tritch said, and gave another sort of wriggle, signifying-he
presumed-pleasure at their possible historical connection. Huylenians were a clannish
bunch who loved depth history and genealogy. “I'm honored to have you aboard! What's your
poison, Planch?” She indicated boxes filled with exotic liquors, constrained by a security
field in one corner of the hold.
“For now, nothing, ” Planch said, but he looked over the labels appreciatively. Then he
stopped, seeing a label on ten cases that made his pulse race. “Tight little spaces, ” he
swore, “is that Trillian water of life?”
“Two hundred bottles, ” she said. “After we get our work done, you can have two bottles,
on the house. ”
“You're generous, Tritch. ”
“More than you know, Planch. ” She winked. Planch inclined his head gallantly. He had
forgotten how open and childlike Huylenians could be, just as he had forgotten many of
their gestures. At the same time, they were among the toughest traders in the Galaxy.
The lock door closed, and Tritch led Planch into the engine room, to examine and tinker
with her ship's most private parts.
As evening fell beneath the domes and the light outside his office windows dimmed, Chen
sat in his favorite chair and called up the Imperial Library's news service, the finest
and most comprehensive in the Galaxy. Words and pictures flitted around him, all relating
to the Sarossan disaster and the loss of the Spear of Glory. There was no sign of the
ship, and not likely to be; the best experts said it was very likely swallowed by a
discontinuity within its final Jump, a hazard associated with supernova explosions but
rarely seen, for the simple reason that supernovas were rare on human time scales. In all
the Galaxy, less than one or two occurred each year, more often than not in uninhabited
regions.
Already the popular journals were calling on the Emperor (respectfully, of course) and on
Councilor Sinter, more acer-bically, to rethink the transfer of rescue ships. Chen smiled
grimly; let Sinter chew on that for a while.
Of course, if he heard nothing from Mors Planch, he would need to replace Lodovik, and
soon; he had four candidates, none of them as qualified as Lodovik, but all worthy of
service in the Commission of Public Safety. He would choose one as his assistant, and put
the other three in apprenticeship programs, saying that the Commission should never again
be caught with no immediate backups for the loss of important personnel.
There were three Commissioners who owed Chen for a few choice and private favors, and Chen
could use this as a pretense for putting loyal men and women into their offices.
He shut off the news-service report with a flick of his hand and stood, smoothing his
robes. Then he went out on the balcony to enjoy the sunset. There was no real sun visible
here, of course, but he had mandated the repair of the Imperial Sector dome displays on a
regular basis, and the sunsets were
as reliable here as they had been everywhere in Trantor in his youth. He watched the
highly artistic interpretation with some satisfaction, then put away all these masks of
pleasure and considered the future.
Chen rarely slept more than an hour a day, usually at noon, which gave him the entire
evening to do his research and make preparations for the work of the next morning. During
his hour of sleep, he usually dreamed for about thirty minutes, and this afternoon, he had
dreamed of his childhood, for the first rime in years. Dreams, in his experience, seldom
directly reflected the day-to-day affairs of life, but they could point to personal
problems and weaknesses. Chen had great respect for those mental processes below conscious
awareness. He knew that was where much of his most important work was done.
He imagined himself the captain of his own personal star-ship, with many excellent
crewmembers-representing subconscious thought processes. It was his task to keep them
alert and on duty, and for that reason, Chen performed special mental exercises for at
least twenty minutes each day.
He had a machine for that very purpose, designed for him by the greatest psychologist on
Trantor-perhaps in the Galaxy. The psychologist had disappeared five years ago, after an
Imperial Court scandal orchestrated by Farad Sinter.
So many interconnections, interweavings. Chen regarded his enemies as his most intimate
associates, and sometimes even felt a kind of sorrowful affection for them, as they fell
by the wayside, one by one, victims of their own peculiar limitations and blindness.
Or, in Sinter's case, of aggressive idiocy and madness.
Hari lived in simple quarters on the university grounds, in his third apartment since the
death of Dors Venabili. He could not
seem to find a place that felt like home; after a few months, or in this case ten years,
he would grow dissatisfied with the feel of a place, no matter how bland and characterless
the decor was, and move to another. Often he spent his nights in a room in the library,
explaining that he needed to get to work very early the next morning-which he did, but
that was not his main reason for staying.
Wherever he was, Hari felt so very alone.
He was not above using his rank in the university, and his standing in the Imperial
Library, to get new housing assignments. He allowed himself a few eccentricities, as one
might allow an old engine extra maintenance, hoping that he could finish his task without
breaking down. Coming to the end was difficult; he had so many memories of the beginnings,
and they were far more exciting, far more satisfying, then anything reality at this point
in his life could generate...
For that reason, he was almost looking forward to the trial, to a chance to confront Linge
Chen directly and force the Empire's hand, his last and grandest finesse. Then he would
know. It would be finished.
When he had been First Minister to Cleon I, he had also taken advantage of his position,
on rare occasions, to gather the information he most needed. One of the crucial problems
of psychohistory then had been the notion of unexpected cultural and genetic variability,
that is, how to factor in the possibility of extraordinary individuals.
At the time, he had not seriously considered the psychic powers of individuals such as his
granddaughter, or her father, Raych; he had not known about such things, other than in the
abstract, and he had not considered too rigorously the powers of Daneel in that regard.
All of them, of course, had peculiar talents for persuasion, and he had in the past few
years made sure that psychohistory took into account these particular talents, on the
level exercised by Wanda.
In the time of his First Ministry, however, he had been con-
cerned with the more familiar historical and political problem of ruthless ambition,
whether or not aided by personal charisma. There had been plenty of examples around the
Empire to study, and he had examined these political episodes as best he could from afar...
But that had not been enough. With the blind and unshakable determination Hari could bring
to bear when confronted with a psychohistorical problem, and against Dors' wishes, Hari
had appealed to Cleon to bring to Trantor five individuals of just that political breed,
the ruthless, charismatic tyrant. They had been removed from their worlds after either
rebelling against or subverting Imperial authority, which happened on about one in a
thousand worlds, every standard year. Most often they were secretly executed; sometimes
they were exiled to lonely rocks to live out lives empty of further victims.
Hari had asked Cleon to allow him to interview the five tyrants, and perform certain
reasonably non-intrusive psychological and medical procedures.
Hari could remember the day quite clearly, when Cleon had called him into his ornate
private rooms and shaken the paper on which his request was written in Hari's face.
“You're asking me to bring these vermin to Trantor? To subvert legal procedures and even
forestall executions, just so you can scratch a bump of curiosity?”
“It's a very important problem, Highness. I cannot predict anything if I do not have a
complete understanding of such extraordinary individuals, and when and how they appear in
human cultures. ”
“Huh! Why not study me, First Minister Seldon?” Hari had smiled. “You do not fit the
profile, Highness. ” “I'm not a raving psychopath, am I? Well, at least you think I might
be redeemable. But to bring some of these obscene monsters to my world... What would you
do if they escaped, Hari?”