“Rely on your security forces to find them again, Highness. ”
The Emperor had sniffed. “You have a confidence in Imperial Security's abilities that I
don't, I'm afraid. Such monsters as these are like cancers-their talent is for bringing
together tumorous organizations and subverting all to their own ends! Truthfully, Hari,
what do you hope to accomplish?”
“It's far more than simply being curious, my Emperor. These people can change the flow of
human events just as earthquakes can change the beds of rivers. ”
“Not on Trantor, they can't. ”
“Actually, sire, just the other day-”
“I know about that, and we're having it fixed. But these men and women are aberrations,
Hari!”
“Common enough in human history-”
“And well enough understood that we can profile them and eliminate them from all Imperial
positions. Most of the time. ”
“Yes, sire, but not always. I need to fill in those gaps. ”
“Purely for psychohistory, Hari?”
“I will see if I can improve your profiles, Highness, and perhaps make tyrants even more
rare among your worlds. ”
Cleon had considered for a few seconds, finger on chin, then had lifted his finger away
from his face, twirled it in a small circle, and said, “All right, First Minister. We have
our political excuse, if we need it. Five?”
“All I could study in the time allowed, sire. ”
“The very worst?”
“You are familiar with the names I've requested. ”
“I never met with any of them, nor did I personally give them their Imperial imprimaturs,
Hari. ”
“I know, sire. ”
“I won't be blamed for them in your psychohistorical textbooks, will I?”
“Of course not!”
And so, Hari had had his way. The five tyrants had been brought to Trantor and installed
in the highest security prison in the Imperial Sector, the Rikerian.
The first meetings had occurred in-
Hari was deep in this reverie when the apartment announced that his granddaughter was
outside the front door and wished to see him. Hari was always glad to see his
granddaughter, especially in the limited time they had left together- but now! When he was
on the track of something important!
Even so, he had not seen Wanda in weeks. She and her husband, Stettin Palver, had been
assembling a core group of mentalics from Trantor's eight hundred Sectors, and there had
been no time for socializing. In weeks, as soon after the trial as possible, the mentalics
would leave for Star's End, to begin the work of the proposed secret Second Foundation.
Hari got up and let his legs gather strength before he put on his robe and told the door
to open. Wanda entered, bringing with her a draft of cold air and the smells of the halls
outside- cooking yeast (and not delicacies from Mycogen, either!), ozone, something like
fresh paint.
“Grandfather, have you heard? The Emperor is hunting us down!”
“Whom, Wanda? Hunting whom?”
“Mentalics! They've subverted one of our party and she's confessed to all sorts of
incredible stories, lies, to save her own skin. How could that boy do this? It's totally
illegal to hunt citizens and assassinate them!”
Hari held up his hands and implored her to slow down. “Tell me about it, from the
beginning, ” he said.
“The beginning is a woman named Liso, Vara Liso. She was one of the people we'd picked out
for the Second Foundation. I thought she was unstable to start with-Stettin agreed with
me, but she was very skillfull, very persuasive and sensitive. We thought we could use her
to speed up our hunt for other mentalics, if we didn't trust her to go with us... on the
flight. ”
“Yes, I met her at the last meeting, ” Hari said. “A small woman, nervous-looking. ”
“Like a little mouse, I thought, ” Wanda confirmed. “She went to the Palace last month,
without our knowing-”
“Whom did she talk to?”
“Farad Sinter!” Wanda fairly spat out the name.
“And what did she tell him?”
“We don't know, but whatever it was, Sinter has secret police hunting for certain
mentalics, and if he finds them, they die... Of a bullet in the head!”
“Ours? The ones chosen for the Project?”
“No, amazingly enough. There's no one-to-one correlation. But he has killed candidates we
haven't yet approached. ”
“Without even taking them in for questioning?”
“No such amenities. Murder, pure and simple. Grandfather, we're never going to fill our
quotas at this rate! Our type of person is not common!”
“I've never met Sinter personally, ” Hari mused, “though some of his people interviewed me
last year. Wanted to know about Mycogenian legends, as I recall. ”
“They're tearing up Dahl now, looking for a young woman! We don't even know her name yet,
but some of our people in Dahl have felt her... almost found her... An extraordinarily
powerful talent. We're sure she must be the one they're looking for. I hope she can
survive long enough for us to find her first. ”
Hari gestured for Wanda to sit at his small table and offered her a cup of tea. “Sinter
seems to have no interest in me or in the Project, and I'm certain none of them know about
our interest in mentalics. I wonder what he's up to?”
“It's madness!” Wanda said. “The Emperor won't rein him in, and Linge Chen does nothing!”
“Madness is its own end, and its own reward, ” Hari said softly. He had followed the
popular discontent with Sinter's handling of the Sarossan problem. “Chen may know what
he's doing-and in the meantime, we have to survive and keep the Project on track. ”
Even the seriousness of Wanda's news did not stop Hari
from being irritated by the intrusion. If anything, it made the intrusion worse. He wanted
very badly simply to be left alone to think about the tyrants and his interviews.
Something important lurked in those memories, though he could not pin it down... However,
he asked Wanda to stay for dinner with him, to calm her and see if she knew anything more.
And in the course of their dinner, Hari suddenly put the memories and equations together,
and had the link he sought. The link was his vague sensation that he had encountered
Daneel. When? Where? Then came the suggestion, and he had little doubt the meeting had
occurred, and that Daneel had told him something ridiculous and potentially damaging...
About Farad Sinter.
“I'm going to request an audience, ” Hari said to Wanda, as they brought out dessert
together. She set the cups of cold pudding on the table and added a coco-ice for herself,
a taste she had acquired from her father, Raych.
“With who?” she asked. “Sinter?”
“Not him, not yet, ” Hari said. “With the Emperor. ”
“He's a monster, a terrible infant! Grandfather, I won't allow ft. ”
Hari laughed sharply. “Dear Wanda, I've been wandering into the jaws of lions since long
before you were born. ” He looked at her seriously for a moment, then asked, quietly,
“Why, do you sense something going wrong?”
Wanda looked away, then turned back to him. “You know why we've continued looking for
mentalics, Grandfather. ”
"Yes. You and Stettin have discovered that your abilities wax and wane, for unknown
reasons. You're looking for a more stable core group whose opposed strengths and
weaknesses will cancel each other out and produce a steady influ-
Vara Liso had not slept through the night in years, for fear of what she might hear while
asleep or on the edge of sleep. It was at these times that she could feel her net spread
out over her neighborhood like a cloud, and when it came back, reeling itself in as it
were, stuck to it were the emotional colors and desires and worries of her fellow humans
for kilometers around, like fish she could not help but consume.
When young, this unwanted talent for night-fishing had come only once or twice a month,
and she had never been sure whether she was simply mad or really could learn what she
seemed to learn, from parents and brother, from neighbors, from lovers, the few she had
attracted, for there was something spooky about her manner and appearance even then.
Now, the net swept wide every single night, and she could no longer absorb what it brought
back, nor could she discard the bits and pieces of other people's lives. She felt like a
strip of insect-gathering paper left to hang in a garbage dump.
It was when she had been approached by other mentalics- that was what they called
themselves, though she had never given her talent a name-that she realized what she could
do might be valuable to some. And it was when she spent one night in training at Streeling
University, with other mentalics, that she caught a bit of dream that shook her to her
core.
It was a dream of mechanical men. Not tiktoks, those funny little worker machines that had
so worried the workers of Trantor and other worlds in their heyday, now gone, not tiktoks,
but robots who looked like men, who could move unnoticed among men.
And there were even mechanical women, so this dream showed, capable of amazing feats,
capable even of murder and of provoking love.
Vara Liso thought about this dream for weeks before
requesting an audience with the Emperor. This half-mad request-how could she hope to have
an audience with such a lofty personage!-had been answered, and she had met not with the
Emperor, but with another, his self-anointed Voice of Imperial Conscience, Imperial
Councilor Farad Sinter.
Sinter had received her with politeness, a little cool at first, but as she had expanded
upon her evidence, he had begun to burrow down with his questions, digging underneath her
confusion to find the gems of evidence she herself had missed. Farad Sinter had taken a
dream fetched raw and alive from anonymous night and given it political authority, a
logical weight and structure she herself could not have pieced together in a million years.
In her way, Vara Liso had come first to respect Sinter, then to admire him, and finally to
love him. He was so like her in many ways, sensitive and nervous, tuned to frequencies of
thought no others could see... or so he convinced her.
She wanted to become his lover, but Farad Sinter convinced her that such physical pursuits
were beneath them. They had loftier intimacies to satisfy them.
So she went this morning to his complex of private rooms in the Palace, escorted as always
by a frosty pair of female security guards, convinced she was going to deliver to him that
which he most sought. Yet Vara Liso kept something to herself, something that did not fit
somehow.
“Good morning, Vara!” Sinter greeted. He sat at a small breakfast table on wheels, still
wearing an ornately quilted golden robe, and his small, piercing eyes crinkled with
something like amused welcome. “What do you have for me today?”
“Nothing more, Farad. ” She slumped into a couch in front of him, tired and discouraged.
“It's all so jumbled. I swear I get so cluttered!”
Sinter tsk-tsked and shook his finger at her. “Don't disparage your particular talent,
lovely Vara. ”
Her eyes widened with hungry need, which Sinter pre-
tended he had not seen. “Have you learned who started you on this? With his dream of
mechanical men?”
“I don't know whether it was a man or a woman, and no, I still don't know. I remember
faces of those in the dream, but recognize none of them. Have you caught her?”
Sinter shook his head. “Not yet. I haven't given up, though. Any other clues, other
candidates?”
Vara Liso blushed slightly and shook her head. Soon enough she would have to reveal how
this had all begun, that she had once worked to become part of a group of low-level
mentalics, much weaker than she, and weaker by far than the young woman she had sensed
just two weeks before, whose mind had blazed in the night. But they had treated her well,
and she had kept this back from Sinter for two reasons: because quite clearly these people
were not robots, and because she had at least some sense of honor and loyalty. She tried
to guide his vision this much, that he would not go off searching for every little petty
mental persuader; she was sure he was wrong there, though of course she would not tell him
so.
She suspected Sinter would not react well to being told he was wrong, even in some small
detail.
Sinter had sent her to Dahl because of an unexplained hunch that there were more
candidates there than elsewhere on Tranter, and that was where Vara Liso had tossed and
turned one night in a dingy hotel room, gathering in her web, and bringing back the
biggest catch ever.
She had hated Dahl, with its miasma of resentment and neglect and anger. She hoped never
to return.
“I think you'll have to return and help the Specials personally, ” Farad Sinter said
lightly. “They're not having much luck. ”
She stared at him, and tears welled up in her eyes.
“Oh, Vara, so sensitive! It's not as bad as all that. We need you there, to help us find
this particular needle in the straw. If she's as talented as you say, well... ”
“I will go if you wish me to, ” she murmured. “I had hoped you would have enough to go on.
”
“Well, we don't. I don't. I doubt I'll be given much more time to come up with hard
evidence. ”
She forced herself to brighten, and asked the first question that came into her head.
“What will these robots do if they know we know?”
Sinter's face stiffened. “That is our greatest danger, ” he said darkly. He lowered his
gaze for a few seconds. “Sometimes I think they will replace us with replicas of
ourselves, and we will go on doing everything we have ever done, just as we used to do it.
But without spirit, nothing inside. ” He dug for the ancient word that sounded so
mysterious and alien when spoken. “No soul. ”
“I don't understand what that means, ” Vara said.
Sinter shook his head briskly. “Nor do I, but it would be terrible to lose it!”
For a moment, they enjoyed this grisly prospect together, savoring the sense of shared and
secret danger.