THE MULE Less is known of “The Mule” than of any character of comparable significance to Galactic history. Even the period of his greatest renown is known to us chiefly through the eyes of his antagonists and, principally, through those of a young bride....
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
Bayta’s first sight of Haven was entirely the contrary of spectacular. Her husband pointed it out - a dull star lost in the emptiness of the Galaxy’s edge. It was past the last sparse clusters, to where straggling points of light gleamed lonely. And even among these it was poor and inconspicuous.
Toran was quite aware that as the earliest prelude to married life, the Red Dwarf lacked impressiveness and his lips curled self-consciously. “I know, Bay - It isn’t exactly a proper change, is it? I mean from the Foundation to this.”
“A horrible change, Toran. I should never have married you.”
And when his face looked momentarily hurt, before he caught himself, she said with her special “cozy” tone, “All right, silly. Now let your lower lip droop and give me that special dying-duck look - the one just before you’re supposed to bury your head on my shoulder, while I stroke your hair full of static electricity. You were fishing for some drivel, weren’t you? You were expecting me to say ‘I’d be happy anywhere with you, Toran!’ or ‘The interstellar depths themselves would be home, my sweet, were you but with me!’ Now you admit it.”
She pointed a finger at him and snatched it away an instant before his teeth closed upon it.
He said, “If I surrender, and admit you’re right, will you prepare dinner?”
She nodded contentedly. He smiled, and just looked at her.
She wasn’t beautiful on the grand scale to others - he admitted that - even if everybody did look twice. Her hair was dark and glossy, though straight, her mouth a bit wide - but her meticulous, close-textured eyebrows separated a white, unlined forehead from the warmest mahogany eyes ever filled with smiles.
And behind a very sturdily-built and staunchly-defended facade of practical, unromantic, hard-headedness towards life, there was just that little pool of softness that would never show if you poked for it, but could be reached if you knew just how - and never let on that you were looking for it.
Toran adjusted the controls unnecessarily and decided to relax. He was one interstellar jump, and then several milli-microparsecs “on the straight” before manipulation by hand was necessary. He leaned over backwards to look into the storeroom, where Bayta was juggling appropriate containers.
There was quite a bit of smugness about his attitude towards Bayta - the satisfied awe that marks the triumph of someone who has been hovering at the edge of an inferiority complex for three years.
After all he was a provincial - and not merely a provincial, but the son of a renegade Trader. And she was of the Foundation itself - and not merely that, but she could trace her ancestry back to Mallow.
And with all that, a tiny quiver underneath. To take her back to Haven, with its rock-world and cave-cities was bad enough. To have her face the traditional hostility of Trader for Foundation - nomad for city dweller - was worse.
Still - After supper, the last jump!
Haven was an angry crimson blaze, and the second planet was a ruddy patch of light with atmosphere-blurred rim and a half-sphere of darkness. Bayta leaned over the large view table with its spidering of crisscross lines that centered Haven II neatly.
She said gravely, “I wish I had met your father first. If he takes a dislike to me-”
“Then,” said Toran matter-of-factly, “you would be the first pretty girl to inspire that in him. Before he lost his arm and stopped roving around the Galaxy, he - Well, if you ask him about it, he’ll talk to you about it till your ears wear down to a nubbin. After a while I got to thinking that he was embroidering; because he never told the same story twice the same way-”
Haven II was rushing up at them now. The landlocked sea wheeled ponderously below them, slate-gray in the lowering dimness and lost to sight, here and there, among the wispy clouds. Mountains jutted raggedly along the coast.
The sea became wrinkled with nearness and, as it veered off past the horizon just at the end, there was one vanishing glimpse of shore-hugging ice fields.
Toran grunted under the fierce deceleration, “Is your suit locked?”
Bayta’s plump face was round and ruddy in the incasing sponge-foam of the internally-heated, skin-clinging costume.
The ship lowered crunchingly on the open field just short of the lifting of the plateau.
They climbed out awkwardly into the solid darkness of the outer-galactic night, and Bayta gasped as the sudden cold bit, and the thin wind swirled emptily. Toran seized her elbow and nudged her into an awkward run over the smooth, packed ground towards the sparking of artificial light in the distance.
The advancing guards met them halfway, and after a whispered exchange of words, they were taken onward. The wind and the cold disappeared when the gate of rock opened and then closed behind them. The warm interior, white with wall-light, was filled with an incongruous humming bustle. Men looked up from their desks, and Toran produced documents.
They were waved onward after a short glance and Toran whispered to his wife, “Dad must have fixed up the preliminaries. The usual lapse here is about five hours.”
They burst into the open and Bayta said suddenly, “Oh, my-”
The cave city was in daylight - the white daylight of a young sun. Not that there was a sun, of course. What should have been the sky was lost in the unfocused glow of an over-all brilliance. And the warm air was properly thick and fragrant with greenery.
Bayta said, “Why, Toran, it’s beautiful.”
Toran grinned with anxious delight. “Well, now, Bay, it isn’t like anything on the Foundation, of course, but it’s the biggest city on Haven II - twenty thousand people, you know - and you’ll get to like it. No amusement palaces, I’m afraid, but no secret police either.”
“Oh, Torie, it’s just like a toy city. It’s all white and pink - and so clean.”
“Well-” Toran looked at the city with her. The houses were two stories high for the most part, and of the smooth vein rock indigenous to the region. The spires of the Foundation were missing, and the colossal community houses of the Old Kingdoms - but the smallness was there and the individuality; a relic of personal initiative in a Galaxy of mass life.
He snapped to sudden attention. “Bay - There’s Dad! Right there - where I’m pointing, silly. Don’t you see him?”
She did. It was just the impression of a large man, waving frantically, fingers spread wide as though groping wildly in air. The deep thunder of a drawn-out shout reached them. Bayta trailed her husband, rushing downwards over the close-cropped lawn. She caught sight of a smaller man, white-haired, almost lost to view behind the robust One-arm, who still waved and still shouted.
Toran cried over his shoulder, “It’s my father’s half-brother. The one who’s been to the Foundation. You know.”
They met in the grass, laughing and incoherent, and Toran’s father let out a final whoop for sheer joy. He hitched at his short jacket and adjusted the metal-chased belt that was his one concession to luxury.
His eyes shifted from one of the youngsters to the other, and then he said, a little out of breath, “You picked a rotten day to return home, boy!”
“What? Oh, it is Seldon’s birthday, isn’t it?”
“It is. I had to rent a car to make the trip here, and dragoon Randu to drive it. Not a public vehicle to be had at gun’s point.”
His eyes were on Bayta now, and didn’t leave. He spoke to her more softly, “I have the crystal of you right here - and it’s good, but I can see the fellow who took it was an amateur.”
He had the small cube of transparency out of his jacket pocket and in the light the laughing little face within sprang to vivid colored life as a miniature Bayta.
“That one!” said Bayta. “Now I wonder why Toran should send that caricature. I’m surprised you let me come near you, sir.”
“Are you now? Call me Fran. I’ll have none of this fancy mess. For that, I think you can take my arm, and we’ll go on to the car. Till now I never did think my boy knew what he was ever up to. I think I’ll change that opinion. I think I’ll have to change that opinion.”
Toran said to his half uncle softly, “How is the old man these days? Does he still hound the women?”
Randu puckered up all over his face when he smiled. “When he can, Toran, when he can. There are times when he remembers that his next birthday will be his sixtieth, and that disheartens him. But he shouts it down, this evil thought, and then he is himself. He is a Trader of the ancient type. But you, Toran. Where did you find such a pretty wife?”
The young man chuckled and linked arms. “Do you want a three years’ history at a gasp, uncle?”
It was in the small living room of the home that Bayta struggled out of her traveling cloak and hood and shook her hair loose. She sat down, crossing her knees, and returned the appreciative stare of this large, ruddy man.
She said, “I know what you’re trying to estimate, and I’ll help you; Age, twenty-four, height, five-four, weight, one-ten, educational specialty, history.” She noticed that he always crooked his stand so as to hide the missing arm. But now Fran leaned close and said, “Since you mention it - weight, one-twenty.”
He laughed loudly at her flush. Then he said to the company in general, “You can always tell a woman’s weight by her upper arm - with due experience, of course. Do you want a drink, Bay?”
“Among other things,” she said, and they left together, while Toran busied himself at the book shelves to check for new additions.
Fran returned alone and said, “She’ll be down later.”
He lowered himself heavily into the large comer chair and placed his stiff-jointed left leg on the stool before it. The laughter had left his red face, and Toran turned to face him.
Fran said, “Well, you’re home, boy, and I’m glad you are. I like your woman. She’s no whining ninny.”
“I married her,” said Toran simply.
“Well, that’s another thing altogether, boy.” His eyes darkened. “It’s a foolish way to tie up the future. In my longer life, and more experienced, I never did such a thing.”
Randu interrupted from the comer where he stood quietly. “Now Franssart, what comparisons are you making? Till your crash landing six years ago you were never in one spot long enough to establish residence requirements for marriage, And since then, who would have you?”
The one-armed man jerked erect in his seat and replied hotly, “Many, you snowy dotard-”
Toran said with hasty tact, “It’s largely a legal formality, Dad. The situation has its conveniences.”
“Mostly for the woman,” grumbled Fran.
“And even if so,” agreed Randu, “it’s up to the boy to decide. Marriage is an old custom among the Foundationers.”
“The Foundationers are not fit models for an honest Trader,” smoldered Fran.
Toran broke in again, “My wife is a Foundationer.” He looked from one to the other, and then said quietly, “She’s coming.”
The conversation took a general turn after the evening meal, which Fran had spiced with three tales of reminiscence composed of equal parts of blood, women, profits, and embroidery. The small televisor was on, and some classic drama was playing itself out in an unregarded whisper. Randu had hitched himself into a more comfortable position on the low couch and gazed past the slow smoke of his long pipe to where Bayta had knelt down upon the softness of the white fur mat brought back once long ago from a trade mission and now spread out only upon the most ceremonious occasions.
“You have studied history, my girl?” he asked, pleasantly.
Bayta nodded. “I was the despair of my teachers, but I learned a bit, eventually.”
“A citation for scholarship,” put in Toran, smugly, “that’s all!”
“And what did you learn?” proceeded Randu, smoothly.
“Everything? Now?” laughed the girl.
The old man smiled gently. “Well then, what do you think of the Galactic situation?”
“I think,” said Bayta, concisely, “that a Seldon crisis is pending - and that if it isn’t then away with the Seldon plan altogether. It is a failure.”
(“Whew,” muttered Fran, from his comer. “What a way to speak of Seldon.” But he said nothing aloud.)
Randu sucked at his pipe speculatively. “Indeed? Why do you say that? I was to the Foundation, you know, in my younger days, and I, too, once thought great dramatic thoughts. But, now, why do you say that?”
“Well,” Bayta’s eyes misted with thought as she curled her bare toes into the white softness of the rug and nestled her little chin in one plump hand, “it seems to me that the whole essence of Seldon’s plan was to create a world better than the ancient one of the Galactic Empire. It was failing apart, that world, three centuries ago, when Seldon first established the Foundation - and if history speaks truly, it was falling apart of the triple disease of inertia, despotism, and maldistribution of the goods of the universe.”
Randu nodded slowly, while Toran gazed with proud, luminous eyes at his wife, and Fran in the comer clucked his tongue and carefully refilled his glass.
Bayta said, “If the story of Seldon is true, he foresaw the complete collapse of the Empire through his Jaws of psychohistory, and was able to predict the necessary thirty thousand years of barbarism before the establishment of a new Second Empire to restore civilization and culture to humanity. It was the whole aim of his life-work to set up such conditions as would insure a speedier rejuvenation,”
The deep voice of Fran burst out, “And that’s why he established the two Foundations, honor be to his name.”
“And that’s why he established the two Foundations,” assented Bayta. “Our Foundation was a gathering of the scientists of the dying Empire intended to carry on the science and learning of man to new heights. And the Foundation was so situated in space and the historical environment was such that through the careful calculations of his genius, Seldon foresaw that in one thousand years, it would become a newer, greater Empire.”
There was a reverent silence.
The girl said softly, “It’s an old story. You all know it. For almost three centuries every human being of the Foundation has known it. But I thought it would be appropriate to go through it - just quickly. Today is Seldon’s birthday, you know, and even if I am of the Foundation, and you are of Haven, we have that in common-”
She lit a cigarette slowly, and watched the glowing tip absently. “The laws of history are as absolute as the laws of physics, and if the probabilities of error are greater, it is only because history does not deal with as many humans as physics does atoms, so that individual variations count for more. Seldon predicted a series of crises through the thousand years of growth, each of which would force a new turning of our history into a pre-calculated path. It is those crises which direct us - and therefore a crisis must come now.
“Now!” she repeated, forcefully. “It’s almost a century since the last one, and in that century, every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.”
“While others starve!” roared Fran suddenly with a mighty blow of his fist upon the arm of his chair. “Girl, your words are pearls. The fat guts on their moneybags ruin the Foundation, while the brave Traders hide their poverty on dregs of worlds like Haven. It’s a disgrace to Seldon, a casting of dirt in his face, a spewing in his beard.” He raised his arm high, and then his face lengthened. “If I had my other arm! If - once - they had listened to me!”
“Dad,” said Toran, “take it easy.”
“Take it easy. Take it easy,” his father mimicked savagely. “We’ll live here and die here forever - and you say, take it easy.”
“That’s our modern Lathan Devers,” said Randu, gesturing with his pipe, “this Fran of ours. Devers died in the slave mines eighty years ago with your husband’s great-grandfather, because he lacked wisdom and didn’t lack heart-”
“Yes, by the Galaxy, I’d do the same if I were he,” swore Fran. “Devers was the greatest Trader in history - greater than the overblown windbag, Mallow, the Foundationers worship. If the cutthroats who lord the Foundation killed him because he loved justice, the greater the blood-debt owed them.”
“Go on, girl,” said Randu. “Go on, or, surely, he’ll talk a the night and rave all the next day.”
“There’s nothing to go on about,” she said, with a sudden gloom. “There must be a crisis, but I don’t know how to make one. The progressive forces on the Foundation are oppressed fearfully. You Traders may have the will, but you are hunted and disunited. If all the forces of good will in and out of the Foundation could combine-”
Fran’s laugh was a raucous jeer. “Listen to her, Randu, listen to her. In and out of the Foundation, she says. Girl, girl, there’s no hope in the flab-sides of the Foundation. Among them some hold the whip and the rest are whipped dead whipped. Not enough spunk left in the whole rotten world to outface one good Trader.”
Bayta’s attempted interruptions broke feebly against the overwhelming wind.
Toran leaned over and put a hand over her mouth. “Dad,” he said, coldly, “you’ve never been on the Foundation. You know nothing about it. I tell you that the underground there is brave and daring enough. I could tell you that Bayta was one of them-”
“All right, boy, no offense. Now, where’s the cause for anger?” He was genuinely perturbed.
Toran drove on fervently, “The trouble with you, Dad, is that you’ve got a provincial outlook. You think because some hundred thousand Traders scurry into holes on an unwanted planet at the end of nowhere, that they’re a great people. Of course, any tax collector from the Foundation that gets here never leaves again, but that’s cheap heroism. What would you do if the Foundation sent a fleet?”
“We’d blast them,” said Fran, sharply.
“And get blasted - with the balance in their favor. You’re outnumbered, outarmed, outorganized - and as soon as the Foundation thinks it worth its while, you’ll realize that. So you had better seek your allies - on the Foundation itself, if you can.”
“Randu, said Fran, looking at his brother like a great, helpless bull.
Randu took his pipe away from his lips, “The boy’s right, Fran. When you listen to the little thoughts deep inside you, you know he is. But they’re uncomfortable thoughts, so you drown them out with that roar of yours. But they’re still there. Toran, I’ll tell you why I brought all this up.”
He puffed thoughtfully awhile, then dipped his pipe into the neck of the tray, waited for the silent flash, and withdrew it clean. Slowly, he filled it again with precise tamps of his little finger.
He said, “Your little suggestion of Foundation’s interest in us, Toran, is to the point. There have been two recent visits lately - for tax purposes. The disturbing point is that the second visitor was accompanied by a light patrol ship. They landed in Gleiar City - giving us the miss for a change - and they never lifted off again, naturally. But now they’ll surely be back. Your father is aware of all this, Toran, he really is.
“Look at the stubborn rakehell. He knows Haven is in trouble, and he knows we’re helpless, but he repeats his formulas. It warms and protects him. But once he’s had his say, and roared his defiance, and feels he’s discharged his duty as a man and a Bull Trader, why he’s as reasonable as any of us.”
“Any of who?” asked Bayta.
He smiled at her. “We’ve formed a little group, Bayta - just in our city. We haven’t done anything, yet. We haven’t even managed to contact the other cities yet, but it’s a start.”
“But towards what?”
Randu shook his head. “We don’t know-yet. We hope for a miracle. We have decided that, as you say, a Seldon crisis must be at hand.” He gestured widely upwards. “The Galaxy is full of the chips and splinters of the broken Empire. The generals swarm. Do you suppose the time may come when one will grow bold?”
Bayta considered, and shook her head decisively, so that the long straight hair with the single inward curl at the end swirled about her ears. “No, not a chance. There’s not one of those generals who doesn’t know that an attack on the Foundation is suicide. Bel Riose of the old Empire was a better man than any of them, and he attacked with the resources of a galaxy, and couldn’t win against the Seldon Plan. Is there one general that doesn’t know that?”
“But what if we spur them on?”
“Into where? Into an atomic furnace? With what could you possibly spur them?”
“Well, there is one - a new one. In this past year or two, there has come word of a strange man whom they call the Mule.”
“The Mule?” She considered. “Ever hear of him, Torie?’’
Toran shook his head. She said, “What about him?”
“I don’t know. But he wins victories at, they say, impossible odds. The rumors may be exaggerated, but it would be interesting, in any case, to become acquainted with him. Not every man with sufficient ability and sufficient ambition would believe in Hari Seldon and his laws of psychohistory. We could encourage that disbelief. He might attack.”
“And the Foundation would win.”
“Yes - but not necessarily easily. It might be a crisis, and we could take advantage of such a crisis to force a compromise with the despots of the Foundation. At the worst, they would forget us long enough to enable us to plan farther.”
“What do you think, Torie?”
Toran smiled feebly and pulled at a loose brown curl that fell over one eye. “The way he describes it, it can’t hurt; but who is the Mule? What do you know of him, Randu?”
“Nothing yet. For that, we could use you, Toran. And your wife, if she’s willing. We’ve talked of this, your father and I. We’ve talked of this thoroughly.”
“In what way, Randu? What do you want of us?” The young man cast a quick inquisitive look at his wife.
“Have you had a honeymoon?”
“Well ... yes ... if you can call the trip from the Foundation a honeymoon.”
“How about a better one on Kalgan? It’s semitropical beaches - water sports - bird hunting - quite the vacation spot. It’s about seven thousand parsecs in-not too far.”
“What’s on Kalgan?”
“The Mule! His men, at least. He took it last month, and without a battle, though Kalgan’s warlord broadcast a threat to blow the planet to ionic dust before giving it up.”
“Where’s the warlord now?”
“He isn’t,” said Randu, with a shrug. “What do you say?”
“But what are we to do?”
“I don’t know. Fran and I are old; we’re provincial. The Traders of Haven are all essentially provincial. Even you say so. Our trading is of a very restricted sort, and we’re not the Galaxy roamers our ancestors were, Shut up, Fran! But you two know the Galaxy. Bayta, especially, speaks with a nice Foundation accent. We merely wish whatever you can find out. If you can make contact ... but we wouldn’t expect that. Suppose you two think it over. You can meet our entire group if you wish ... oh, not before next week. You ought to have some time to catch your breath.”
There was a pause and then Fran roared, “Who wants; another drink? I mean, besides me?”
Captain Han Pritcher was unused to the luxury of his surroundings and by no means impressed. As a general thing, he discouraged self-analysis and all forms of philosophy and metaphysics not directly connected with his work.
It helped.
His work consisted largely of what the War Department called “intelligence,” the sophisticates, “espionage,” and the romanticists, “spy stuff.” And, unfortunately, despite the frothy shrillness of the televisors, “intelligence,” “espionage,” and “spy stuff” are at best a sordid business of routine betrayal and bad faith. It is excused by society since it is in the “interest of the State,” but since philosophy seemed always to lead Captain Pritcher to the conclusion that even in that holy interest, society is much more easily soothed than one’s own conscience - he discouraged philosophy.
And now, in the luxury of the mayor’s anteroom, his thoughts turned inward despite himself.
Men had been promoted over his head continuously, though of lesser ability - that much was admitted. He had withstood an eternal rain of black marks and official reprimands, and survived it. And stubbornly he had held to his own way in the firm belief that insubordination in that same holy “interest of the State” would yet be recognized for the service it was.
So here he was in the anteroom of the mayor-with five soldiers as a respectful guard, and probably a court-martial awaiting him.
The heavy, marble doors rolled apart smoothly, silently, revealing satiny walls, a red plastic carpeting, and two more marble doors, metal-inlaid, within. Two officials in the straight-lined costume of three centuries back, stepped out, and called:
“An audience to Captain Han Pritcher of Information.”
They stepped back with a ceremonious bow as the captain started forward. His escort stopped at the outer door, and he entered the inner alone.
On the other side of the doors, in a large room strangely simple, behind a large desk strangely angular, sat a small man, almost lost in the immensity,
Mayor Indbur - successively the third of that name - was the grandson of the first Indbur, who had been brutal and capable; and who had exhibited the first quality in spectacular fashion by his manner of seizing power, and the latter by the skill with which he put an end to the last farcical remnants of free election and the even greater skill with which he maintained a relatively peaceful rule.
Mayor Indbur was also the son of the second Indbur, who was the first Mayor of the Foundation to succeed to his post by right of birth - and who was only half his father, for he was merely brutal.
So Mayor Indbur was the third of the name and the second to succeed by right of birth, and he was the least of the three, for he was neither brutal nor capable - but merely an excellent bookkeeper born wrong.
Indbur the Third was a peculiar combination of ersatz characteristics to all but himself.
To him, a stilted geometric love of arrangement was “system,” an indefatigable and feverish interest in the pettiest facets of day-to-day bureaucracy was “industry,” indecision when right was “caution,” and blind stubbornness when wrong, “determination.”
And withal he wasted no money, killed no man needlessly, and meant extremely well.
If Captain Pritcher’s gloomy thoughts ran along these lines as he remained respectfully in place before the large desk, the wooden arrangement of his features yielded no insight into the fact. He neither coughed, shifted weight, nor shuffled his feet until the thin face of the mayor lifted slowly as the busy stylus ceased in its task of marginal notations, and a sheet of close-printed paper was lifted from one neat stack and placed upon another neat stack.
Mayor Indbur clasped his hands carefully before him, deliberately refraining from disturbing the careful arrangement of desk accessories.
He said, in acknowledgment, “Captain Han Pritcher of Information.”
And Captain Pritcher in strict obedience to protocol bent one knee nearly to the ground and bowed his head until he heard the words of release.
“Arise, Captain Pritcher!”
The mayor said with an air of warm sympathy, “You are here, Captain Pritcher, because of certain disciplinary action taken against yourself by your superior officer. The papers concerning such action have come, in the ordinary course of events, to my notice, and since no event in the Foundation is of disinterest to me, I took the trouble to ask for further information on your case. You are not, I hope, surprised.”
Captain Pritcher said unemotionally, “Excellence, no. Your justice is proverbial.”
“Is it? Is it?” His tone was pleased, and the tinted contact lenses he wore caught the light in a manner that imparted a hard, dry gleam to his eyes. Meticulously, he fanned out a series of metal-bound folders before him. The parchment sheets within crackled sharply as he turned them, his long finger following down the line as he spoke.
“I have your record here, captain - complete. You are forty-three and have been an Officer of the Armed Forces for seventeen years. You were born in Loris, of Anacreonian parents, no serious childhood diseases, an attack of myo ... well, that’s of no importance ... education, premilitary, at the Academy of Sciences, major, hyper-engines, academic standing ... hm-m-m, very good, you are to be congratulated ... entered the Army as Under-Officer on the one hundred second day of the 293rd year of the Foundation Era.”
He lifted his eyes momentarily as he shifted the first folder, and opened the second.
“You see,” he said, “in my administration, nothing is left to chance. Order! System!”
He lifted a pink, scented jelly-globule to his lips. It was his one vice, and but dolingly indulged in. Witness the fact that the mayor’s desk lacked that almost-inevitable atom flash for the disposal of dead tobacco. For the mayor did not smoke.
Nor, as a matter of course, did his visitors.
The mayor’s voice droned on, methodically, slurringly, mumblingly - now and then interspersed with whispered comments of equally mild and equally ineffectual commendation or reproof.
Slowly, he replaced the folders as originally, in a single neat pile.
“Well, captain,” he said, briskly, “your record is unusual. Your ability is outstanding, it would seem, and your services valuable beyond question. I note that you have been wounded in the line of duty twice, and that you have been awarded the Order of Merit for bravery beyond the call of duty. Those are facts not lightly to be minimized.”
Captain Pritcher’s expressionless face did not soften. He remained stiffly erect. Protocol required that a subject honored by an audience with the mayor may not sit down - a point perhaps needlessly reinforced by the fact that only one chair existed in the room, the one underneath the mayor. Protocol further required no statements other than those needed to answer a direct question.
The mayor’s eyes bore down hard upon the soldier and his voice grew pointed and heavy. “However, you have not been promoted in ten years, and your superiors report, over and over again, of the unbending stubbornness of your character. You are reported to be chronically insubordinate, incapable of maintaining a correct attitude towards superior officers, apparently uninterested in maintaining frictionless relationships with your colleagues, and an incurable troublemaker, besides. How do you explain that, captain?”
“Excellence, I do what seems right to me. My deeds on behalf of the State, and my wounds in that cause bear witness that what seems fight to me is also in the interest of the State.”
“A soldierly statement, captain, but a dangerous doctrine. More of that, later. Specifically, you are charged with refusing an assignment three times in the face of orders signed by my legal delegates. What have you to say to that?”
“Excellence, the assignment lacks significance in a critical time, where matters of first importance are being ignored.”
“Ah, and who tells you these matters you speak of are of the first importance at all, and if they are, who tells you further that they are ignored?”
“Excellence, these things are quite evident to me. My experience and my knowledge of events - the value of neither of which my superiors deny - make it plain.”
“But, my good captain, are you blind that you do not see that by arrogating to yourself the right to determine Intelligence policy, you usurp the duties of your superior?”
“Excellence, my duty is primarily to the State, and not to my superior.”
“Fallacious, for your superior has his superior, and that superior is myself, and I am the State. But come, you shall have no cause to complain of this justice of mine that you say is proverbial. State in your own words the nature of the breach in discipline that has brought all this on.”
“Excellence, my duty is primarily to the State, and not to my living the life of a retired merchant mariner upon the world of Kalgan. My instructions were to direct Foundation activity upon the planet, perfect an organization to act as check upon the warlord of Kalgan, particularly as regards his foreign policy.”
“This is known to me. Continue!”
“Excellence, my reports have continually stressed the strategic positions of Kalgan and the systems it controls. I have reported on the ambition of the warlord, his resources, his determination to extend his domain and his essential friendliness - or, perhaps, neutrality - towards the Foundation.”
“I have read your reports thoroughly. Continue!”
“Excellence, I returned two months ago. At that time, there was no sign of impending war; no sign of anything but an almost superfluity of ability to repel any conceivable attack. One month ago, an unknown soldier of fortune took Kalgan without a fight. The man who was once warlord of Kalgan is apparently no longer alive. Men do not speak of treason - they speak only of the power and genius of this strange condottiere - this Mule.”
“This who?” the mayor leaned forward, and looked offended.
“Excellence, he is known as the Mule. He is spoken of little, in a factual sense, but I have gathered the scraps and fragments of knowledge and winnowed out the most probable of them. He is apparently a man of neither birth nor standing. His father, unknown. His mother, dead in childbirth. His upbringing, that of a vagabond. His education, that of the tramp worlds, and the backwash alleys of space. He has no name other than that of the Mule, a name reportedly applied by himself to himself, and signifying, by popular explanation, his immense physical strength, and stubbornness of purpose.”
“What is his military strength, captain? Never mind his physique.”
“Excellence, men speak of huge fleets, but in this they may be influenced by the strange fall of Kalgan. The territory he controls is not large, though its exact limits are not capable of definite determination. Nevertheless, this man must be investigated.”
“Hm-m-m. So! So!” The mayor fell into a reverie, and slowly with twenty-four strokes of his stylus drew six squares in hexagonal arrangements upon the blank top sheet of a pad, which he tore off, folded neatly in three parts and slipped into the wastepaper slot at his right hand. It slid towards a clean and silent atomic disintegration.
“Now then, tell me, captain, what is the alternative? You have told me what ‘must’ be investigated. What have you been ordered to investigate?”
“Excellence, there is a rat hole in space that, it seems, does not pay its taxes.”
“Ah, and is that all? You are not aware, and have not been told that these men who do not pay their taxes, are descendants of the wild Traders of our early days - anarchists, rebels, social maniacs who claim Foundation ancestry and deride Foundation culture. You are not aware, and have not been told, that this rat hole in space, is not one, but many; that these rat holes are in greater number than we know; that these rat holes conspire together, one with the other, and all with the criminal elements that still exist throughout Foundation territory. Even here, captain, even here!”
The mayor’s momentary fire subsided quickly. “You are not aware, captain?”
“Excellence, I have been told all this. But as servant of the State, I must serve faithfully - and he serves most faithfully who serves Truth. Whatever the political implications of these dregs of the ancient Traders - the warlords who have inherited the splinters of the old Empire have the power. The Traders have neither arms nor resources. They have not even unity. I am not a tax collector to be sent on a child’s errand.”
“Captain Pritcher, you are a soldier, and count guns. It is a failing to be allowed you up to the point where it involves disobedience to myself. Take care. My justice is not simply weakness. Captain, it has already been proven that the generals of the Imperial Age and the warlords of the present age are equally impotent against us. Seldon’s science which predicts the course of the Foundation is based, not on individual heroism, as you seem to believe, but on the social and economic trends of history. We have passed successfully through four crises already, have we not?”
“Excellence, we have. Yet Seldon’s science is known only to Seldon. We ourselves have but faith. In the first three crises, as I have been carefully taught, the Foundation was led by wise leaders who foresaw the nature of the crises and took the proper precautions. Otherwise - who can say?”
“Yes, captain, but you omit the fourth crisis. Come, captain, we had no leadership worthy of the name then, and we faced the cleverest opponent, the heaviest armor, the strongest force of all. Yet we won by the inevitability of history.”
“Excellence, that is true. But this history you mention became inevitable only after we had fought desperately for over a year. The inevitable victory we won cost us half a thousand ships and half a million men. Excellence, Seldon’s plan helps those who help themselves.”
Mayor Indbur frowned and grew suddenly tired of his patient exposition. It occurred to him that there was a fallacy in condescension, since it was mistaken for permission to argue eternally; to grow contentious; to wallow in dialectic. He said, stiffly, “Nevertheless, captain, Seldon guarantees victory over the warlords, and I can not, in these busy times, indulge in a dispersal of effort. These Traders you dismiss are Foundation-derived. A war with them would be a civil war. Seldon’s plan makes no guarantee there for us - since they and we are Foundation. So they must be brought to heel. You have your orders.”
“Excellence-”
“You have been asked no question, captain. You have your orders. You will obey those orders. Further argument of any sort with myself or those representing myself will be considered treason. You are excused.”
Captain Han Pritcher knelt once more, then left with slow, backward steps.
Mayor Indbur, third of his name, and second mayor of Foundation history to be so by fight of birth, recovered his equilibrium, and lifted another sheet of paper from the neat stack at his left. It was a report on the saving of funds due to the reduction of the quantity of metal-foam edging on the uniforms of the police force. Mayor Indbur crossed out a superfluous comma, corrected a misspelling, made three marginal notations, and placed it upon the neat stack at his fight. He lifted another sheet of paper from the neat stack at his left.
Captain Han Pritcher of Information found a Personal Capsule waiting for him when he returned to barracks. It contained orders, terse and redly underlined with a stamped “URGENT”‘ across it, and the whole initialed with a precise, capital “I”.
Captain Han Pritcher was ordered to the “rebel world called Haven” in the strongest terms.
Captain Han Pritcher, alone in his light one-man speedster, set his course quietly and calmly for Kalgan. He slept that night the sleep of a successfully stubborn man.
If, from a distance of seven thousand parsecs, the fall of Kalgan to the armies of the Mule had produced reverberations that had excited the curiosity of an old Trader, the apprehension of a dogged captain, and the annoyance of a meticulous mayor - to those on Kalgan itself, it produced nothing and excited no one. It is the invariable lesson to humanity that distance in time, and in space as well, lends focus. It is not recorded, incidentally, that the lesson has ever been permanently learned.
Kalgan was - Kalgan. It alone of all that quadrant of the Galaxy seemed not to know that the Empire had fallen, that the Stannells no longer ruled, that greatness had departed, and peace had disappeared.
Kalgan was the luxury world. With the edifice of mankind crumbling, it maintained its integrity as a producer of pleasure, a buyer of gold and a seller of leisure.
It escaped the harsher vicissitudes of history, for what conqueror would destroy or even seriously damage a world so full of the ready cash that would buy immunity.
Yet even Kalgan had finally become the headquarters of a warlord and its softness had been tempered to the exigencies of war.
Its tamed jungles, its mildly modeled shores, and its garishly glamorous cities echoed to the march of imported mercenaries and impressed citizens. The worlds of its province had been armed and its money invested in battleships rather than bribes for the first time in its history. Its ruler proved beyond doubt that he was determined to defend what was his and eager to seize what was others. He was a great one of the Galaxy, a war and peace maker, a builder of Empire, an establisher of dynasty.
And an unknown with a ridiculous nickname had taken him - and his arms - and his budding Empire - and had not even fought a battle.
So Kalgan was as before, and its uniformed citizens hurried back to their older life, while the foreign professionals of war merged easily into the newer bands that descended.
Again as always, there were the elaborate luxury hunts for the cultivated animal life of the jungles that never took human life; and the speedster bird-chases in the air above, that was fatal only to the Great Birds.
In the cities, the escapers of the Galaxy could take their varieties of pleasure to suit their purse, from the ethereal sky-palaces of spectacle and fantasy that opened their doors to the masses at the jingle of half a credit, to the unmarked, unnoted haunts to which only those of great wealth were of the cognoscenti.
To the vast flood, Toran and Bayta added not even a trickle. They registered their ship in the huge common hangar on the East Peninsula, and gravitated to that compromise of the middle-classes, the Inland Sea-where the pleasures were yet legal, and even respectable, and the crowds not yet beyond endurance.
Bayta wore dark glasses against the light, and a thin, white robe against the heat. Warm-tinted arms, scarcely the goldener for the sun, clasped her knees to her, and she stared with firm, abstracted gaze at the length of her husband’s outstretched body - almost shimmering in the brilliance of white sun-splendor.
“Don’t overdo it,” she had said at first, but Toran was of a dying-red star, Despite three years of the Foundation, sunlight was a luxury, and for four days now his skin, treated beforehand for ray resistance, had not felt the harshness of clothing, except for the brief shorts.
Bayta huddled close to him on the sand and they spoke in whispers.
Toran’s voice was gloomy, as it drifted upwards from a relaxed face, “No, I admit we’re nowhere. But where is he? Who is he? This mad world says nothing of him. Perhaps he doesn’t exist.”
“He exists,” replied Bayta, with lips that didn’t move. “He’s clever, that’s all. And your uncle is right. He’s a man we could use - if there’s time.”
A short pause. Toran whispered, “Know what I’ve been doing, Bay? I’m just daydreaming myself into a sun-stupor. Things figure themselves out so neatly - so sweetly.” His voice nearly trailed off, then returned, “Remember the way Dr. Amann talked back at college, Bay. The Foundation can never lose, but that does not mean the rulers of the Foundation can’t. Didn’t the real history of the Foundation begin when Salvor Hardin kicked out the Encyclopedists and took over the planet Terminus as the first mayor? And then in the next century, didn’t Hober Mallow gain power by methods almost as drastic? That’s twice the rulers were defeated, so it can be done. So why not by us?”
“It’s the oldest argument in the books. Torie. What a waste of good reverie.”
“Is it? Follow it out. What’s Haven? Isn’t it part of the Foundation? If we become top dog, it’s still the Foundation winning, and only the current rulers losing.”
“Lots of difference between ‘we can’ and ‘we will.’ You’re just jabbering.”
Toran squirmed. “Nuts, Bay, you’re just in one of your sour, green moods. What do you want to spoil my fun for? I’ll just go to sleep if you don’t mind.”
But Bayta was craning her head, and suddenly - quite a non sequitur - she giggled, and removed her glasses to look down the beach with only her palm shading her eyes.
Toran looked up, then lifted and twisted his shoulders to follow her glance.
Apparently, she was watching a spindly figure, feet in air, who teetered on his hands for the amusement of a haphazard crowd. It was one of the swarming acrobatic beggars of the shore, whose supple joints bent and snapped for the sake of the thrown coins.
A beach guard was motioning him on his way and with a surprising one-handed balance, the clown brought a thumb to his nose in an upside-down gesture. The guard advanced threateningly and reeled backward with a foot in his stomach. The clown righted himself without interrupting the motion of the initial kick and was away, while the frothing guard was held off by a thoroughly unsympathetic crowd.
The clown made his way raggedly down the beach. He brushed past many, hesitated often, stopped nowhere. The original crowd had dispersed. The guard had departed.
“He’s a queer fellow,” said Bayta, with amusement, and Toran agreed indifferently. The clown was close enough now to be seen clearly. His thin face drew together in front into a nose of generous planes and fleshy tip that seemed all but prehensile. His long, lean limbs and spidery body, accentuated by his costume, moved easily and with grace, but with just a suggestion of having been thrown together at random.
To look was to smile.
The clown seemed suddenly aware of their regard, for he stopped after he had passed, and, with a sharp turn, approached. His large, brown eyes fastened upon Bayta.
She found herself disconcerted.
The clown smiled, but it only saddened his beaked face, and when he spoke it was with the soft, elaborate phrasing of the Central Sectors.
“Were I to use the wits the good Spirits gave me,” he said, “then I would say this lady can not exist - for what sane man would hold a dream to be reality. Yet rather would I not be sane and lend belief to charmed, enchanted eyes.”
Bayta’s own eyes opened wide. She said, “Wow!”
Toran laughed, “Oh, you enchantress. Go ahead, Bay, that deserves a five-credit piece. Let him have it.”
But the clown was forward with a jump. “No, my lady, mistake me not. I spoke for money not at all, but for bright eyes and sweet face.”
“Well, thanks,” then, to Toran, “Golly, you think the sun’s in his eyes?”
“Yet not alone for eyes and face,” babbled the clown, as his words hurled past each other in heightened frenzy, “but also for a mind, clear and sturdy - and kind as well.”
Toran rose to his feet, reached for the white robe he had crooked his arm about for four days, and slipped into it.
“Now, bud,” he said, “suppose you tell me what you want, and stop annoying the lady.”
The clown fell back a frightened step, his meager body cringing. “Now, sure I meant no harm. I am a stranger here, and it’s been said I am of addled wits; yet there is something in a face that I can read. Behind this lady’s fairness, there is a heart that’s kind, and that would help me in my trouble for all I speak so boldly.”
“Will five credits cure your trouble?” said Toran, dryly, and held out the coin.
But the clown did not move to take it, and Bayta said, “Let me talk to him, Torie,” She added swiftly, and in an undertone, “There’s no use being annoyed at his silly way of talking. That’s just his dialect; and our speech is probably as strange to him.”
She said, “What is your trouble? You’re not worried about the guard, are you? He won’t bother you.”
“Oh, no, not he. He’s but a windlet that blows the dust about my ankles. There is another that I flee, and he is a storm that sweeps the worlds aside and throws them plunging at each other. A week ago, I ran away, have slept in city streets, and hid in city crowds. I’ve looked in many faces for help in need. I find it here.” He repeated the last phrase in softer, anxious tones, and his large eyes were troubled, “I find it here.”
“Now,” said Bayta, reasonably, “I would like to help, but really, friend, I’m no protection against a world-sweeping storm. To be truthful about it, I could use-”
There was an uplifted, powerful voice that bore down upon them.
“Now, then, you mud-spawned rascal-”
It was the beach guard, with a fire-red face, and snarling mouth, that approached at a run. He pointed with his low-power stun pistol.
“Hold him, you two. Don’t let him get away.” His heavy hand fell upon the clown’s thin shoulder, so that a whimper was squeezed out of him.
Toran said, “What’s he done?”
“What’s he done? What’s he done? Well, now, that’s good!” The guard reached inside the dangling pocket attached to his belt, and removed a purple handkerchief, with which he mopped his bare neck. He said with relish. “I’ll tell you what he’s done. He’s run away. The word’s all over Kalgan and I would have recognized him before this if he had been on his feet instead of on his hawkface top.” And he rattled his prey in a fierce good humor.
Bayta said with a smile, “Now where did he escape from, sir?”
The guard raised his voice. A crowd was gathering, popeyed and jabbering, and with the increase of audience, the guard’s sense of importance increased in direct ratio.
“Where did he escape from?” he declaimed in high sarcasm. “Why, I suppose you’ve heard of the Mule, now.”
All jabbering stopped, and Bayta felt a sudden iciness trickle down into her stomach. The clown had eyes only for her-he still quivered in the guard’s brawny grasp.
“And who,” continued the guard heavily, “would this infernal ragged piece be, but his lordship’s own court fool who’s run away.” He jarred his captive with a massive shake, “Do you admit it, fool?”
There was only white fear for answer, and the soundless sibilance of Bayta’s voice close to Toran’s ear.
Toran stepped forward to the guard in friendly fashion, “Now, my man, suppose you take your hand away for just a while. This entertainer you hold has been dancing for us and has not yet danced out his fee.”
“Here!” The guard’s voice rose in sudden concern. “There’s a reward-”
“You’ll have it, if you can prove he’s the man you want. Suppose you withdraw till then. You know that you’re interfering with a guest, which could be serious for you.”
“But you’re interfering with his lordship and that will be serious for you.” He shook the clown once again. “Return the man’s fee, carrion.”
Toran’s hand moved quickly and the guard’s stun pistol was wrenched away with half a finger nearly following it. The guard howled his pain and rage. Toran shoved him violently aside, and the clown, unhanded, scuttled behind him.
The crowd, whose fringes were now lost to the eye, paid little attention to the latest development. There was among them a craning of necks, and a centrifugal motion as if many had decided to increase their distance from the center of activity.
Then there was a bustle, and a rough order in the distance. A corridor formed itself and two men strode through, electric whips in careless readiness. Upon each purple blouse was designed an angular shaft of lightning with a splitting planet underneath.
A dark giant, in lieutenant’s uniform, followed them; dark of skin, and hair, and scowl.
The dark man spoke with the dangerous softness that meant he had little need of shouting to enforce his whims. He said, “Are you the man who notified us?”
The guard was still holding his wrenched hand, and with a pain-distorted face mumbled, “I claim the reward, your mightiness, and I accuse that man-”
“You’ll get your reward,” said the lieutenant, without looking at him. He motioned curtly to his men, “Take him.”
Toran felt the clown tearing at his robe with a maddened grip.
He raised his voice and kept it from shaking, “I’m sorry, lieutenant; this man is mine.”
The soldiers took the statement without blinking. One raised his whip casually, but the lieutenant’s snapped order brought it down.
His dark mightiness swung forward and planted his square body before Toran, “Who are you?”
And the answer rang out, “A citizen of the Foundation.”
It worked-with the crowd, at any rate. The pent-up silence broke into an intense hum. The Mule’s name might excite fear, but it was, after all, a new name and scarcely stuck as deeply in the vitals as the old one of the Foundation - that had destroyed the Empire - and the fear of which ruled a quadrant of the Galaxy with ruthless despotism.
The lieutenant kept face. He said, “Are you aware of the identity of the man behind you?”
“I have been told he’s a runaway from the court of your leader, but my only sure knowledge is that he is a friend of mine. You’ll need firm proof of his identity to take him.”
There were high-pitched sighs from the crowd, but the lieutenant let it pass. “Have you your papers of Foundation citizenship with you?”
“At my ship.”
“You realize that your actions are illegal? I can have you shot.”
“Undoubtedly. But then you would have shot a Foundation citizen and it is quite likely that your body would be sent to the Foundation - quartered - as part compensation. It’s been done by other warlords.”
The lieutenant wet his lips. The statement was true.
He said, “Your name?”
Toran followed up his advantage, “I will answer further questions at my ship. You can get the cell number at the Hangar; it is registered under the name ‘Bayta’.”
“You won’t give up the runaway?”
“To the Mule, perhaps. Send your master!”
The conversation had degenerated to a whisper and the lieutenant turned sharply away.
“Disperse the crowd!” he said to his men, with suppressed ferocity.
The electric whips rose and fell. There were shrieks and a vast surge of separation and flight.
Toran interrupted his reverie only once on their way back to the Hangar. He said, almost to himself, “Galaxy, Bay, what a time I had! I was so scared-”
“Yes,” she said, with a voice that still shook, and eyes that still showed something akin to worship, “it was quite out of character.”
“Well, I still don’t know what happened. I just got up there with a stun pistol that I wasn’t even sure I knew how to use, and talked back to him. I don’t know why I did it.”
He looked across the aisle of the short-run air vessel that was carrying them out of the beach area, to the seat on which the Mule’s clown scrunched up in sleep, and added distastefully, “It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
The lieutenant stood respectfully before the colonel of the garrison, and the colonel looked at him and said, “Well done. Your part’s over now.”
But the lieutenant did not retire immediately. He said darkly, “The Mule has lost face before a mob, sir. It will be necessary to undertake disciplinary action to restore proper atmosphere of respect.”
“Those measures have already been taken.”
The lieutenant half turned, then, almost with resentment, “I’m willing to agree, sir, that orders are orders, but standing before that man with his stun pistol and swallowing his insolence whole, was the hardest thing I’ve ever done.”
The “hangar” on Kalgan is an institution peculiar unto itself, born of the need for the disposition of the vast number of ships brought in by the visitors from abroad, and the simultaneous and consequent vast need for living accommodations for the same. The original bright one who had thought of the obvious solution had quickly become a millionaire. His heirs - by birth or finance - were easily among the richest on Kalgan.
The “hangar” spreads fatly over square miles of territory, and “hangar” does not describe it at all sufficiently. It is essentially a hotel - for ships. The traveler pays in advance and his ship is awarded a berth from which it can take off into space at any desired moment. The visitor then lives in his ship as always. The ordinary hotel services such as the replacement of food and medical supplies at special rates, simple servicing of the ship itself, special intra-Kalgan transportation for a nominal sum are to be had, of course.
As a result, the visitor combines hangar space and hotel bill into one, at a saving. The owners sell temporary use of ground space at ample profits. The government collects huge taxes. Everyone has fun. Nobody loses. Simple!
The man who made his way down the shadow-borders of the wide corridors that connected the multitudinous wings of the “hangar” had in the past speculated on the novelty and usefulness of the system described above, but these were reflections for idle moments - distinctly unsuitable at present.
The ships hulked in their height and breadth down the long lines of carefully aligned cells, and the man discarded line after line. He was an expert at what he was doing now and if his preliminary study of the hangar registry had failed to give specific information beyond the doubtful indication of a specific wing - one containing hundreds of ships - his specialized knowledge could winnow those hundreds into one.
There was the ghost of a sigh in the silence, as the man stopped and faded down one of the lines; a crawling insect beneath the notice of the arrogant metal monsters that rested there.
Here and there the sparkling of light from a porthole would indicate the presence of an early returner from the organized pleasures to simpler - or more private - pleasures of his own.
The man halted, and would have smiled if he ever smiled. Certainly the convolutions of his brain performed the mental equivalent of a smile.
The ship he stopped at was sleek and obviously fast. The peculiarity of its design was what he wanted. It was not a usual model - and these days most of the ships of this quadrant of the Galaxy either imitated Foundation design or were built by Foundation technicians. But this was special. This was a Foundation ship - if only because of the tiny bulges in the skin that were the nodes of the protective screen that only a Foundation ship could possess. There were other indications, too.
The man felt no hesitation.
The electronic barrier strung across the line of the ships as a concession to privacy on the part of the management was not at all important to him. It parted easily, and without activating the alarm, at the use of the very special neutralizing force he had at his disposal.
So the first knowledge within the ship of the intruder without was the casual and almost friendly signal of the muted buzzer in the ship’s living room that was the result of a palm placed over the little photocell just one side of the main air lock.
And while that successful search went on, Toran and Bayta felt only the most precarious security within the steel walls of the Bayta. The Mule’s clown who had reported that within his narrow compass of body he held the lordly name of Magnifico Giganticus, sat hunched over the table and gobbled at the food set before him.
His sad, brown eyes lifted from his meat only to follow Bayta’s movements in the combined kitchen and larder where he ate.
“The thanks of a weak one are of but little value,” he muttered, “but you have them, for truly, in this past week, little but scraps have come my way - and for all my body is small, yet is my appetite unseemly great.”
“Well, then, eat!” said Bayta, with a smile. “Don’t waste your time on thanks. Isn’t there a Central Galaxy proverb about gratitude that I once heard?”
“Truly there is, my lady. For a wise man, I have been told, once said, ‘Gratitude is best and most effective when it does not evaporate itself in empty phrases.’ But alas, my lady, I am but a mass of empty phrases, it would seem. When my empty phrases pleased the Mule, it brought me a court dress, and a grand name - for, see you, it was originally simply Bobo, one that pleases him not - and then when my empty phrases pleased him not, it would bring upon my poor bones beatings and whippings.”
Toran entered from the pilot room, “Nothing to do now but wait, Bay. I hope the Mule is capable of understanding that a Foundation ship is Foundation territory.”
Magnifico Giganticus, once Bobo, opened his eyes wide and exclaimed, “How great is the Foundation before which even the cruel servants of the Mule tremble.”
“Have you heard of the Foundation, too?” asked Bayta, with a little smile.
“And who has not?” Magnifico’s voice was a mysterious whisper. “There are those who say it is a world of great magic, of fires that can consume planets, and secrets of mighty strength. They say that not the highest nobility of the Galaxy could achieve the honor and deference considered only the natural due of a simple man who could say ‘I am a citizen of the Foundation,’ - were he only a salvage miner of space, or a nothing like myself.”
Bayta said, “Now, Magnifico, you’ll never finish if you make speeches. Here, I’ll get you a little flavored milk. It’s good.”
She placed a pitcher of it upon the table and motioned Toran out of the room.
“Torie, what are we going to do now - about him?” and she motioned towards the kitchen.
“How do you mean?”
“If the Mule comes, are we going to give him up?”
“Well, what else, Bay?” He sounded harassed, and the gesture with which he shoved back the moist curl upon his forehead testified to that.
He continued impatiently, “Before I came here I had a sort of vague idea that all we had to do was to ask for the Mule, and then get down to business - just business, you know, nothing definite.”
“I know what you mean, Torie. I wasn’t much hoping to see the Mule myself, but I did think we could pick up some firsthand knowledge of the mess, and then pass it over to people who know a little more about this interstellar intrigue. I’m no storybook spy.”
“You’re not behind me, Bay.” He folded his arms and frowned. “What a situation! You’d never know there was a person like the Mule, except for this last queer break. Do you suppose he’ll come for his clown?”
Bayta looked up at him. “I don’t know that I want him to. I don’t know what to say or do. Do you?”
The inner buzzer sounded with its intermittent burring noise. Bayta’s lips moved wordlessly, “The Mule!”
Magnifico was in the doorway, eyes wide, his voice a whimper, “The Mule?”
Toran murmured, “I’ve got to let them in.”
A contact opened the air lock and the outer door closed behind the newcomer. The scanner showed only a single shadowed figure.
“It’s only one person,” said Toran, with open relief, and his voice was almost shaky as he bent toward the signal tube, “Who are you?”
“You’d better let me in and find out, hadn’t you?” The words came thinly out the receiver.
“I’ll inform you that this is a Foundation ship and consequently Foundation territory by international treaty.”
“I know that.”
“Come with your arms free, or I’ll shoot. I’m well-armed.”
“Done!”
Toran opened the inner door and closed contact on his blast pistol, thumb hovering over the pressure point. There was the sound of footsteps and then the door swung open, and Magnifico cried out, “It’s not the Mule. It’s but a man.”
The “man” bowed to the clown somberly, “Very accurate. I’m not the Mule.” He held his hands apart, “I’m not armed, and I come on a peaceful errand. You might relax and put the blast pistol away. Your hand isn’t steady enough for my peace of mind.”
“Who are you?” asked Toran, brusquely.
“I might ask you that,” said the stranger, coolly, “since you’re the one under false pretenses, not I.”
“How so?”
“You’re the one who claims to be a Foundation citizen when there’s not an authorized Trader on the planet.”
“That’s not so. How would you know?”
“Because I am a Foundation citizen, and have my papers to prove it. Where are yours?”
“I think you’d better get out.”
“I think not. If you know anything about Foundation methods, and despite your imposture you might, you’d know that if I don’t return alive to my ship at a specified time, there’ll be a signal at the nearest Foundation headquarters so I doubt if your weapons will have much effect, practically speaking.”
There was an irresolute silence and then Bayta said, calmly, “Put the blaster away, Toran, and take him at face value. He sounds like the real thing.”
“Thank you,” said the stranger.
Toran put his gun on the chair beside him, “Suppose you explain all this now.”
The stranger remained standing. He was long of bone and large of limb. His face consisted of hard flat planes and it was somehow evident that he never smiled. But his eyes lacked hardness.
He said, “News travels quickly, especially when it is apparently beyond belief. I don’t suppose there’s a person on Kalgan who doesn’t know that the Mule’s men were kicked in the teeth today by two tourists from the Foundation. I knew of the important details before evening, and, as I said, there are no Foundation tourists aside from myself on the planet. We know about those things.”
“Who are the ‘we’?”
“‘We’ are - ‘we’! Myself for one! I knew you were at the Hangar - you had been overheard to say so. I had my ways of checking the registry, and my ways of finding the ship.”
He turned to Bayta suddenly, “You’re from the Foundation - by birth, aren’t you?”
“Am I?”
“You’re a member of the democratic opposition - they call it ‘the underground.’ I don’t remember your name, but I do the face. You got out only recently - and wouldn’t have if you were more important.”
Bayta shrugged, “You know a lot.”
“I do. You escaped with a man. That one?”
“Does it matter what I say?”
“No. I merely want a thorough mutual understanding. I believe that the password during the week you left so hastily was ‘Seldon, Hardin, and Freedom.’ Porfirat Hart was your section leader. “
“Where’d you get that?” Bayta was suddenly fierce. “Did the police get him?” Toran held her back, but she shook herself loose and advanced.
The man from the Foundation said quietly, “Nobody has him. It’s just that the underground spreads widely and in queer places. I’m Captain Han Pritcher of Information, and I’m a section leader myself - never mind under what name.”
He waited, then said, “No, you don’t have to believe me. In our business it is better to overdo suspicion than the opposite. But I’d better get past the preliminaries.”
“Yes,” said Toran, “suppose you do.”
“May I sit down? Thanks.” Captain Pritcher swung a long leg across his knee and let an arm swing loose over the back of the chair. “I’ll start out by saying that I don’t know what all this is about - from your angle. You two aren’t from the Foundation, but it’s not a hard guess that you’re from one of the independent Trading worlds. That doesn’t bother me overmuch. But out of curiosity, what do you want with that fellow, that clown you snatched to safety? You’re risking your life to hold on to him.”
“I can’t tell you that.”
“Hm-m-m. Well, I didn’t think you would. But if you’re waiting for the Mule himself to come behind a fanfarade of horns, drums, and electric organs - relax! The Mule doesn’t work that way.”
“What?” It came from both Toran and Bayta, and in the comer where Magnifico lurked with ears almost visibly expanded, there was a sudden joyful start.
“That’s right. I’ve been trying to contact him myself, and doing a rather more thorough job of it than you two amateurs can. It won’t work. The man makes no personal appearance, does not allow himself to be photographed or simulated, and is seen only by his most intimate associates.”
“Is that supposed to explain your interest in us, captain?” questioned Toran.
“No. That clown is the key. That clown is one of the very few that have seen him. I want him. He may be the proof I need - and I need something, Galaxy knows - to awaken the Foundation.”
“It needs awakening?” broke in Bayta with sudden sharpness. “Against what? And in what role do you act as alarm, that of rebel democrat or of secret police and provocateur?”
The captain’s face set in its hard lines. “When the entire Foundation is threatened, Madame Revolutionary, both democrats and tyrants perish. Let us save the tyrants from a greater, that we may overthrow them in their turn.”
“Who’s the greater tyrant you speak of?” flared Bayta.
“The Mule! I know a bit about him, enough to have been my death several times over already, if I had moved less nimbly. Send the clown out of the room. This will require privacy.”
“Magnifico,” said Bayta, with a gesture, and the clown left without a sound.
The captain’s voice was grave and intense, and low enough so that Toran and Bayta drew close.
He said, “The Mule is a shrewd operator - far too shrewd not to realize the advantage of the magnetism and glamour of personal leadership. If he gives that up, it’s for a reason. That reason must be the fact that personal contact would reveal something that is of overwhelming importance not to reveal.”
He waved aside questions, and continued more quickly, “I went back to his birthplace for this, and questioned people who for their knowledge will not live long. Few enough are still alive. They remember the baby born thirty years before - the death of his mother - his strange youth. The Mule is not a human being!”
And his two listeners drew back in horror at the misty implications. Neither understood, fully or clearly, but the menace of the phrase was definite.
The captain continued, “He is a mutant, and obviously from his subsequent career, a highly successful one. I don’t know his powers or the exact extent to which he is what our thrillers would call a ‘superman,’ but the rise from nothing to the conqueror of Kalgan’s warlord in two years is revealing. You see, don’t you, the danger? Can a genetic accident of unpredictable biological properties be taken into account in the Seldon plan?”
Slowly, Bayta spoke, “I don’t believe it. This is some sort of complicated trickery. Why didn’t the Mule’s men kill us when they could have, if he’s a superman?”
“I told you that I don’t know the extent of his mutation. He may not be ready, yet, for the Foundation, and it would be a sign of the greatest wisdom to resist provocation until ready. Now let me speak to the clown.”
The captain faced the trembling Magnifico, who obviously distrusted this huge, hard man who faced him.
The captain began slowly, “Have you seen the Mule with your own eyes?”
“I have but too well, respected sir. And felt the weight of his arm with my own body as well.”
“I have no doubt of that. Can you describe him?”
“It is frightening to recall him, respected sir. He is a man of mighty frame. Against him, even you would be but a spindling. His hair is of a burning crimson, and with all my strength and weight I could not pull down his arm, once extended - not a hair’s thickness.” Magnifico’s thinness seemed to collapse upon itself in a huddle of arms and legs. “Often, to amuse his generals or to amuse only himself, he would suspend me by one finger in my belt from a fearful height, while I chattered poetry. It was only after the twentieth verse that I was withdrawn, and each improvised and each a perfect rhyme, or else start over. He is a man of overpowering might, respected sir, and cruel in the use of his power - and his eyes, respected sir, no one sees.”
“What? What’s that last?”
“He wears spectacles, respected sir, of a curious nature. It is said that they are opaque and that he sees by a powerful magic that far transcends human powers. I have heard,” and his voice was small and mysterious, “that to see his eyes is to see death; that he kills with his eyes, respected sir.”
Magnifico’s eyes wheeled quickly from one watching face to another. He quavered, “It is true. As I live, it is true. “
Bayta drew a long breath, “Sounds like you’re right, captain. Do you want to take over?”
“Well, let’s look at the situation. You don’t owe anything here? The hangar’s barrier above is free?”
“I can leave any time.”
“Then leave. The Mule may not wish to antagonize the Foundation, but he runs a frightful risk in letting Magnifico get away. It probably accounts for the hue and cry after the poor devil in the first place. So there may be ships waiting for you upstairs. If you’re lost in space, who’s to pin the crime?”
“You’re right,” agreed Toran, bleakly.
“However, you’ve got a shield and you’re probably speedier than anything they’ve got, so as soon as you’re clear of the atmosphere make the circle in neutral to the other hemisphere, then just cut a track outwards at top acceleration.”
“Yes,” said Bayta coldly, “and when we are back on the Foundation, what then, captain?”
“Why, you are then co-operative citizens of Kalgan, are you not? I know nothing to the contrary, do I?”
Nothing was said. Toran turned to the controls. There was an imperceptible lurch.
It was when Toran had left Kalgan sufficiently far in the rear to attempt his first interstellar jump, that Captain Pritcher’s face first creased slightly - for no ship of the Mule had in any way attempted to bar their leaving.
“Looks like he’s letting us carry off Magnifico,” said Toran. “Not so good for your story.”
“Unless,” corrected the captain, “he wants us to carry him off, in which case it’s not so good for the Foundation.”
It was after the last jump, when within neutral-flight distance of the Foundation, that the first hyperwave news broadcast reached the ship.
And there was one news item barely mentioned. It seemed that a warlord - unidentified by the bored speaker - had made representations to the Foundation concerning the forceful abduction of a member of his court. The announcer went on to the sports news.
Captain Pritcher said icily, “He’s one step ahead of us after all.” Thoughtfully, he added, “He’s ready for the Foundation, and he uses this as an excuse for action. It makes things more difficult for us. We will have to act before we are really ready.”
There was reason to the fact that the element known as “pure science” was the freest form of life on the Foundation. In a Galaxy where the predominance - and even survival - of the Foundation still rested upon the superiority of its technology - even despite its large access of physical power in the last century and a half - a certain immunity adhered to The Scientist. He was needed, and he knew it.
Likewise, there was reason to the fact that Ebling Mis - only those who did not know him added his titles to his name - was the freest form of life in the “pure science” of the Foundation. In a world where science was respected, he was The Scientist - with capital letters and no smile. He was needed, and he knew it.
And so it happened, that when others bent their knee, he refused and added loudly that his ancestors in their time bowed no knee to any stinking mayor. And in his ancestors’ time the mayor was elected anyhow, and kicked out at will, and that the only people that inherited anything by right of birth were the congenital idiots.
So it also happened, that when Ebling Mis decided to allow Indbur to honor him with an audience, he did not wait for the usual rigid line of command to pass his request up and the favored reply down, but, having thrown the less disreputable of his two formal jackets over his shoulders and pounded an odd hat of impossible design on one side of his head, and lit a forbidden cigar into the bargain, he barged past two ineffectually bleating guards and into the mayor’s palace.
The first notice his excellence received of the intrusion was when from his garden he heard the gradually nearing uproar of expostulation and the answering bull-roar of inarticulate swearing.
Slowly, Indbur lay down his trowel; slowly, he stood up; and slowly, he frowned. For Indbur allowed himself a daily vacation from work, and for two hours in the early afternoon, weather permitting, he was in his garden. There in his garden, the blooms grew in squares and triangles, interlaced in a severe order of red and yellow, with little dashes of violet at the apices, and greenery bordering the whole in rigid lines. There in his garden no one disturbed him - no one!
Indbur peeled off his soil-stained gloves as he advanced toward the little garden door.
Inevitably, he said, “What is the meaning of this?”
It is the precise question and the precise wording thereof that has been put to the atmosphere on such occasions by an incredible variety of men since humanity was invented. It is not recorded that it has ever been asked for any purpose other than dignified effect.
But the answer was literal this time, for Mis’s body came plunging through with a bellow, and a shake of a fist at the ones who were still holding tatters of his cloak.
Indbur motioned them away with a solemn, displeased frown, and Mis bent to pick up his ruin of a hat, shake about a quarter of the gathered dirt off it, thrust it under his armpit and say:
“Look here, Indbur, those unprintable minions of yours will be charged for one good cloak. Lots of good wear left in this cloak.” He puffed and wiped his forehead with just a trace of theatricality.
The mayor stood stiff with displeasure, and said haughtily from the peak of his five-foot-two, “It has not been brought to my attention, Mis, that you have requested an audience. You have certainly not been assigned one.”
Ebling Mis looked down at his mayor with what was apparently shocked disbelief, “Ga-LAX-y, Indbur, didn’t you get my note yesterday? I handed it to a flunky in purple uniform day before. I would have handed it to you direct, but I know how you like formality.”
“Formality!” Indbur turned up exasperated eyes. Then, strenuously, “Have you ever heard of proper organization? At all future times you are to submit your request for an audience, properly made out in triplicate, at the government office intended for the purpose. You are then to wait until the ordinary course of events brings you notification of the time of audience to be granted. You are then to appear, properly clothed - properly clothed, do you understand - and with proper respect, too. You may leave.”
“What’s wrong with my clothes?” demanded Mis, hotly. “Best cloak I had till those unprintable fiends got their claws on it. I’ll leave just as soon as I deliver what I came to deliver. “Ga-LAX-y, if it didn’t involve a Seldon Crisis, I would leave right now.”
“Seldon crisis!” Indbur exhibited first interest. Mis was a great psychologist - a democrat, boor, and rebel certainly, but a psychologist, too. In his uncertainty, the mayor even failed to put into words the inner pang that stabbed suddenly when Mis plucked a casual bloom, held it to his nostrils expectantly, then flipped it away with a wrinkled nose.
Indbur said coldly, “Would you follow me? This garden wasn’t made for serious conversation.”
He felt better in his built-up chair behind his large desk from which he could look down on the few hairs that quite ineffectually hid Mis’s pink scalp-skin. He felt much better when Mis cast a series of automatic glances about him for a non-existent chair and then remained standing in uneasy shifting fashion. He felt best of all when in response to a careful pressure of the correct contact, a liveried underling scurried in, bowed his way to the desk, and laid thereon a bulky, metal-bound volume.
“Now, in order,” said Indbur, once more master of the situation, “to make this unauthorized interview as short as possible, make your statement in the fewest possible words.”
Ebling Mis said unhurriedly, “You know what I’m doing these days?”
“I have your reports here,” replied the mayor, with satisfaction, “together with authorized summaries of them. As I understand it, your investigations into the mathematics of psychohistory have been intended to duplicate Hari Seldon’s work and, eventually, trace the projected course of future history, for the use of the Foundation.”
“Exactly,” said Mis, dryly. “When Seldon first established the Foundation, he was wise enough to include no psychologists among the scientists placed here - so that the Foundation has always worked blindly along the course of historical necessity. In the course of my researches, I have based a good deal upon hints found at the Time Vault.”
“I am aware of that, Mis. It is a waste of time to repeat.”
“I’m not repeating,” blared Mis, “because what I’m going to tell you isn’t in any of those reports.”
“How do you mean, not in the reports?” said Indbur, stupidly. “How could-”
“Ga-LAX-y, Let me tell this my own way, you offensive little creature. Stop putting words into my mouth and questioning my every statement or I’ll tramp out of here and let everything crumble around you. Remember, you unprintable fool, the Foundation will come through because it must, but if I walk out of here now - you won’t.”
Dashing his hat on the floor, so that clods of earth scattered, he sprang up the stairs of the dais on which the wide desk stood and shoving papers violently, sat down upon a comer of it.
Indbur thought frantically of summoning the guard, or using the built-in blasters of his desk. But Mis’s face was glaring down upon him and there was nothing to do but cringe the best face upon it.
“Dr. Mis,” he began, with weak formality, “you must-”
“Shut up,” said Mis, ferociously, “and listen. If this thing here,” and his palm came down heavily on the metal of the bound data, “is a mess of my reports - throw it out. Any report I write goes up through some twenty-odd officials, gets to you, and then sort of winds down through twenty more. That’s fine if there’s nothing you don’t want kept secret. Well, I’ve got something confidential here. It’s so confidential, even the boys working for me haven’t got wind of it. They did the work, of course, but each just a little unconnected piece - and I put it together. You know what the Time Vault is?”
Indbur nodded his head, but Mis went on with loud enjoyment of the situation, “Well, I’ll tell you anyhow because I’ve been sort of imagining this unprintable situation for a “Ga-LAX-y, of a long time; I can read your mind, you puny fraud. You’ve got your hand right near a little knob that’ll call in about five hundred or so armed men to finish me off, but you’re afraid of what I know - you’re afraid of a Seldon Crisis. Besides which, if you touch anything on your desk, I’ll knock your unprintable head off before anyone gets here. You and your bandit father and pirate grandfather have been blood-sucking the Foundation long enough anyway.”
“This is treason,” gabbled Indbur.
“It certainly is,” gloated Mis, “but what are you going to do about it? Let me tell you about the Time Vault. That Time Vault is what Hari Seldon placed here at the beginning to help us over the rough spots. For every crisis, Seldon has prepared a personal simulacrum to help - and explain. Four crises so far - four appearances. The first time he appeared at the height of the first crisis. The second time, he appeared at the moment just after the successful evolution of the second crisis. Our ancestors were there to listen to him both times. At the third and fourth crises, he was ignored - probably because he was not needed, but recent investigations - not included in those reports you have - indicate that he appeared anyway, and at the proper times. Get it?”
He did not wait for any answer. His cigar, a tattered, dead ruin was finally disposed of, a new cigar groped for, and lit. The smoke puffed out violently.
He said, “Officially I’ve been trying to rebuild the science of psychohistory. Well, no one man is going to do that, and it won’t get done in any one century, either. But I’ve made advances in the more simple elements and I’ve been able to use it as an excuse to meddle with the Time Vault. What I have done, involves the determination, to a pretty fair kind of certainty, of the exact date of the next appearance of Hari Seldon. I can give you the exact day, in other words, that the coming Seldon Crisis, the fifth, will reach its climax. “
“How far off?” demanded Indbur, tensely.
And Mis exploded his bomb with cheerful nonchalance,
“Four months,” he said. “Four unprintable months, less two days.”
“Four months,” said Indbur, with uncharacteristic vehemence. “Impossible.”
“Impossible, my unprintable eye.”
“Four months? Do you understand what that means? For a crisis to come to a head in four months would mean that it has been preparing for years.”
“And why not? Is there a law of Nature that requires the process to mature in the full light of day?”
“But nothing impends. Nothing hangs over us.” Indbur almost wrung his hands for anxiety. With a sudden spasmodic recrudescence of ferocity, he screamed, “Will you get off my desk and let me put it in order? How do you expect me to think?”
Mis, startled, lifted heavily and moved aside.
Indbur replaced objects in their appropriate niches with a feverish motion. He was speaking quickly, “You have no right to come here like this. If you had presented your theory-”
“It is not a theory.”
“I say it is a theory. If you had presented it together with your evidence and arguments, in appropriate fashion, it would have gone to the Bureau of Historical Sciences. There it could have been properly treated, the resulting analyses submitted to me, and then, of course, proper action would have been taken. As it is, you’ve vexed me to no purpose. Ah, here it is.”
He had a sheet of transparent, silvery paper in his hand which he shook at the bulbous psychologist beside him.
“This is a short summary I prepare myself - weekly - of foreign matters in progress. Listen - we have completed negotiations for a commercial treaty with Mores, continue negotiations for one with Lyonesse, sent a delegation to some celebration or other on Bonde, received some complaint or other from Kalgan and we’ve promised to look into it, protested some sharp trade practices in Asperta and they’ve promised to look into it - and so on and so on.” The mayor’s eyes swarmed down the list of coded notations, and then he carefully placed the sheet in its proper place in the proper folder in the proper pigeonhole.
I tell you, Mis, there’s not a thing there that breathes anything but order and peace-”
The door at the far, long end opened, and, in far too dramatically coincident a fashion to suggest anything but real life, a plainly-costumed notable stepped in.
Indbur half-rose. He had the curiously swirling sensation of unreality that comes upon those days when too much happens. After Mis’s intrusion and wild fumings there now came the equally improper, hence disturbing, intrusion unannounced, of his secretary, who at least knew the rules.
The secretary kneeled low.
Indbur said, sharply, “Well!”
The secretary addressed the floor, “Excellence, Captain Han Pritcher of Information, returning from Kalgan, in disobedience to your orders, has according to prior instructions - your order X20-513 - been imprisoned, and awaits execution. Those accompanying him are being held for questioning. A full report has been filed.”
Indbur, in agony, said, “A full report has been received. Well!”
“Excellence, Captain Pritcher has reported, vaguely, dangerous designs on the part of the new warlord of Kalgan. He has been given, according to prior instructions - your order X20-651 - no formal hearing, but his remarks have been recorded and a full report filed.”
Indbur screamed, “A full report has been received. Well!”
“Excellence, reports have within the quarter-hour been received from the Salinnian frontier. Ships identified as Kalganian have been entering Foundation territory, unauthorized. The ships are armed. Fighting has occurred.”
The secretary was bent nearly double. Indbur remained standing. Ebling Mis shook himself, clumped up to the secretary, and tapped him sharply on the shoulder.
“Here, you’d better have them release this Captain Pritcher, and have him sent here. Get out.”
The secretary left, and Mis turned to the mayor, “Hadn’t you better get the machinery moving, Indbur? Four months, you know.”
Indbur remained standing, glaze-eyed. Only one finger seemed alive - and it traced rapid jerky triangles on the smooth desk top before him.
When the twenty-seven independent Trading worlds, united only by their distrust of the mother planet of the Foundation, concert an assembly among themselves, and each is big with a pride grown of its smallness, hardened by its own insularity and embittered by eternal danger - there are preliminary negotiations to be overcome of a pettiness sufficiently staggering to heartsicken the most persevering.
It is not enough to fix in advance such details as methods of voting, type of representation - whether by world or by population. These are matters of involved political importance. It is not enough to fix matters of priority at the table, both council and dinner, those are matters of involved social importance.
It was the place of meeting - since that was a matter of overpowering provincialism. And in the end the devious routes of diplomacy led to the world of Radole, which some commentators had suggested at the start for logical reason of central position.
Radole was a small world - and, in military potential, perhaps the weakest of the twenty-seven. That, by the way, was another factor in the logic of the choice.
It was a ribbon world - of which the Galaxy boasts sufficient, but among which, the inhabited variety is a rarity for the physical requirements are difficult to meet. It was a world, in other words, where the two halves face the monotonous extremes of heat and cold, while the region of possible life is the girdling ribbon of the twilight zone.
Such a world invariably sounds uninviting to those who have not tried it, but there exist spots, strategically placed - and Radole City was located in such a one.
It spread along the soft slopes of the foothills before the hacked-out mountains that backed it along the rim of the cold hemisphere and held off the frightful ice. The warm, dry air of the sun-half spilled over, and from the mountains was piped the water-and between the two, Radole City became a continuous garden, swimming in the eternal morning of an eternal June.
Each house nestled among its flower garden, open to the fangless elements. Each garden was a horticultural forcing ground, where luxury plants grew in fantastic patterns for the sake of the foreign exchange they brought - until Radole had almost become a producing world, rather than a typical Trading world.
So, in its way, Radole City was a little point of softness and luxury on a horrible planet - a tiny scrap of Eden - and that, too, was a factor in the logic of the choice.
The strangers came from each of the twenty-six other Trading worlds: delegates, wives, secretaries, newsmen, ships, and crews - and Radole’s population nearly doubled and Radole’s resources strained themselves to the limit. One ate at will, and drank at will, and slept not at all.
Yet there were few among the roisterers who were not intensely aware that all that volume of the Galaxy burnt slowly in a sort of quiet, slumbrous war. And of those who were aware, there were dime classes. First, there were the many who knew little and were very confident.
Such as the young space pilot who wore the Haven cockade on the clasp of his cap, and who managed, in holding his glass before his eyes, to catch those of the faintly smiling Radolian girl opposite. He was saying:
“We came fight through the war-zone to get here-on purpose. We traveled about a light-minute or so, in neutral, right past Horleggor-”
“Horleggor?” broke in a long-legged native, who was playing host to that particular gathering. “That’s where the Mule got the guts beat out of him last week, wasn’t it?”
“Where’d you hear that the Mule got the guts beat out of him?” demanded the pilot, loftily.
“Foundation radio.”
“Yeah? Well, the Mule’s got Horleggor. We almost ran into a convoy of his ships, and that’s where they were coming from. It isn’t a gut-beating when you stay where you fought, and the gut-beater leaves in a hurry.”
Someone else said in a high, blurred voice, “Don’t talk like that. Foundation always takes it on the chin for a while. You watch; just sit tight and watch. Ol’ Foundation knows when to come back. And then - pow!” The thick voice concluded and was succeeded by a bleary grin.
“Anyway.” said the pilot from Haven, after a short pause, “As I say, we saw the Mule’s ships, and they looked pretty good, pretty good. I tell you what - they looked new.”
“New?” said the native, thoughtfully. “They build them themselves?” He broke a leaf from an overhanging branch, sniffed delicately at it, then crunched it between his teeth, the bruised tissues bleeding greenly and diffusing a minty odor. He said, “You trying to tell me they beat Foundation ships with homebuilt jobs? Go on.”
“We saw them, doc. And I can tell a ship from a comet, too, you know.”
The native leaned close. “You know what I think. Listen, don’t kid yourself. Wars don’t just start by themselves, and we have a bunch of shrewd apples running things. They know what they’re doing.”
The well-unthirsted one said with sudden loudness, “You watch ol’ Foundation. They wait for the last minute, then - pow!” He grinned with vacuously open mouth at the girl, who moved away from him.
The Radolian was saying, “For instance, old man, you think maybe that this Mule guy’s running things. No-o-o.” And he wagged a finger horizontally. “The way I hear it, and from pretty high up, mind you, he’s our boy. We’re paying him off, and we probably built those ships. Let’s be realistic about it - we probably did. Sure, he can’t beat the Foundation in the long run, but he can get them shaky, and when he does - we get in.”
The girl said, “Is that all you can talk about, Klev? The war? You make me tired.”
The pilot from Haven said, in an access of gallantry,
“Change the subject. Can’t make the girls tired.”
The bedewed one took up the refrain and banged a mug to the rhythm. The little groups of two that had formed broke up with giggles and swagger, and a few similar groups of twos emerged from the sun-house in the background.
The conversation became more general, more varied, more meaningless.
Then there were those who knew a little more and were less confident.
Such as the one-armed Fran, whose large bulk represented Haven as official delegated, and who lived high in consequence, and cultivated new friendships - with women when he could and with men when he had to.
It was on the sun platform of the hilltop home, of one of these new friends, that he relaxed for the first of what eventually proved to be a total of two times while on Radole. The new friend was Iwo Lyon, a kindred soul of Radole. Iwo’s house was apart from the general cluster, apparently alone in a sea of floral perfume and insect chatter. The sun platform was a grassy strip of lawn set at a forty-five degree angle, and upon it Fran stretched out and fairly sopped up sun.
He said, “Don’t have anything like this on Haven.”
Iwo replied, sleepily, “Ever seen the cold side. There’s a spot twenty miles from here where the oxygen runs like water. “
“Go on.
“Fact.”
“Well, I’ll tell you, Iwo-In the old days before my arm was chewed off I knocked around, see - and you won’t believe this, but” - The story that followed lasted considerably, and Iwo didn’t believe it.
Iwo said, through yawns, “They don’t make them like in the old days, that’s the truth.”
“No, guess they don’t. Well, now,” Fran fired up, “don’t say that. I told you about my son, didn’t I? He’s one of the old school, if you like. He’ll make a great Trader, blast it. He’s his old man up and down. Up and down, except that he gets married.”
“You mean legal contract? With a girl?”
“That’s right. Don’t see the sense in it myself. They went to Kalgan for their honeymoon.”
“Kalgan? Kalgan? When the Galaxy was this?”
Fran smiled broadly, and said with slow meaning, “Just before the Mule declared war on the Foundation.”
“That so?”
Fran nodded and motioned Iwo closer with his head. He said, hoarsely, “In fact, I can tell you something, if you don’t let it go any further. My boy was sent to Kalgan for a purpose. Now I wouldn’t like to let it out, you know, just what the purpose was, naturally, but you look at the situation now, and I suppose you can make a pretty good guess. In any case, my boy was the man for the job. We Traders needed some sort of ruckus.” He smiled, craftily. “It’s here. I’m not saying how we did it, but - my boy went to Kalgan, and the Mule sent out his ships. My son!”
Iwo was duly impressed. He grew confidential in his turn, “That’s good. You know, they say we’ve got five hundred ships ready to pitch in on our own at the right time. “
Fran said authoritatively, “More than that, maybe. This is real strategy. This is the kind I like.” He clawed loudly at the skin of his abdomen. “But don’t you forget that the Mule is a smart boy, too. What happened at Horleggor worries me.”
“I heard he lost about ten ships.”
“Sure, but he had a hundred more, and the Foundation had to get out. It’s all to the good to have those tyrants beaten, but not as quickly as all that.” He shook his head.
“The question I ask is where does the Mule get his ships? There’s a widespread rumor we’re making them for him.”
“We? The Traders? Haven has the biggest ship factories anywhere in the independent worlds, and we haven’t made one for anyone but ourselves. Do you suppose any world is building a fleet for the Mule on its own, without taking the precaution of united action? That’s a ... a fairy tale.”
“Well, where does he get them?”
And Fran shrugged, “Makes them himself, I suppose. That worries me, too.”
Fran blinked at the sun and curled his toes about the smooth wood of the polished foot-rest. Slowly, he fell asleep and the soft burr of his breathing mingled with the insect sibilance.
Lastly, there were the very few who knew considerable and were not confident at all.
Such as Randu, who on the fifth day of the all-Trader convention entered the Central Hall and found the two men he had asked to be there, waiting for him. The five hundred seats were empty - and were going to stay so.
Randu said quickly, almost before he sat down, “We three represent about half the military potential of the Independent Trading Worlds.”
“Yes,” said Mangin of Iss, “my colleague and I have already commented upon the fact.”
“I am ready,” said Randu, “to speak quickly and earnestly. I am not interested in bargaining or subtlety. Our position is radically in the worse.”
“As a result of-” urged Ovall Gri of Mnemon.
“Of developments of the last hour. Please! From the beginning. First, our position is not of our doing, and but doubtfully of our control. Our original dealings were not with the Mule, but with several others; notably the ex-warlord of Kalgan, whom the Mule defeated at a most inconvenient time for us.”
“Yes, but this Mule is a worthy substitute,” said Mangin. “I do not cavil at details.”
“You may when you know all the details.” Randu leaned forward and placed his hands upon the table palms-up in an obvious gesture.
He said, “A month ago I sent my nephew and my nephew’s wife to Kalgan.”
“Your nephew!” cried Ovall Gri, in surprise. “I did not know he was your nephew.”
“With what purpose,” asked Mangin, dryly. “This?” And his thumb drew an inclusive circle high in the air.
“No. If you mean the Mule’s war on the Foundation, no. How could I aim so high? The young man knew nothing - neither of our organization nor of our aims. He was told I was a minor member of an intra-Haven patriotic society, and his function at Kalgan was nothing but that of an amateur observer. My motives were, I must admit, rather obscure. Mainly, I was curious about the Mule. He is a strange phenomenon - but that’s a chewed cud; I’ll not go into it. Secondly, it would make an interesting and educational training project for a man who had experience with the Foundation and the Foundation underground and showed promise of future usefulness to us. You see-”
Ovall’s long face fell into vertical lines as he showed his large teeth, “You must have been surprised at the outcome, then, since there is not a world among the Traders, I believe, that does not know that this nephew of yours abducted a Mule underling in the name of the Foundation and furnished the Mule with a casus belli. Galaxy, Randu, you spin romances. I find it hard to believe you had no hand in that. Come, it was a skillful job.”
Randu shook his white head, “Not of my doing. Nor, willfully, of my nephew’s, who is now held prisoner at the Foundation, and may not live to see the completion of this so-skillful job. I have just heard from him. The Personal Capsule has been smuggled out somehow, come through the war zone, gone to Haven, and traveled from there to here. It has been a month on its travels.”
“And?-”
Randu leaned a heavy hand upon the heel of his palm and said, sadly, “I’m afraid we are cast for the same role that the onetime warlord of Kalgan played. The Mule is a mutant!”
There was a momentary qualm; a faint impression of quickened heartbeats. Randu might easily have imagined it.
When Mangin spoke, the evenness of his voice was unchanged, “How do you know?”
“Only because my nephew says so, but he was on Kalgan.
“What kind of a mutant? There are all kinds, you know.”
Randu forced the rising impatience down, “All kinds of mutants, yes, Mangin. All kinds! But only one kind of Mule. What kind of a mutant would start as an unknown, assemble an army, establish, they say, a five-mile asteroid as original base, capture a planet, then a system, then a region - and then attack the Foundation, and defeat them at Horleggor. And all in two or three years!”
Ovall Gri shrugged, “So you think he’ll beat the Foundation?”
“I don’t know. Suppose he does?”
“Sorry, I can’t go that far. You don’t beat the Foundation. Look, there’s not a new fact we have to go on except for the statements of a ... well, of an inexperienced boy. Suppose we shelve it for a while. With all the Mule’s victories, we weren’t worried until now, and unless he goes a good deal further than he has, I see no reason to change that. Yes?”
Randu frowned and despaired at the cobweb texture of his argument. He said to both, “Have we yet made any contact with the Mule?”
“No,” both answered.
“It’s true, though, that we’ve tried, isn’t it? It’s true that there’s not much purpose to our meeting unless we do reach him, isn’t it? It’s true that so far there’s been more drinking than thinking, and more wooing than doing - I quote from an editorial in today’s Radole Tribune - and all because we can’t reach the Mule. Gentlemen, we have nearly a thousand ships waiting to be thrown into the fight at the proper moment to seize control of the Foundation. I say we should change that. I say, throw those thousand onto the board now - against the Mule.”
“You mean for the Tyrant Indbur and the bloodsuckers of the Foundation?” demanded Mangin, with quiet venom.
Randu raised a weary hand, “Spare me the adjectives. Against the Mule, I say, and for I-don’t-care-who.”
Ovall Gri rose, “Randu, I’ll have nothing to do with that, You present it to the full council tonight if you particularly hunger for political suicide.”
He left without another word and Mangin followed silently, leaving Randu to drag out a lonely hour of endless, insoluble consideration.
At the full council that night, he said nothing.
But it was Ovall Gri who pushed into his room the next morning; an Ovall Gri only sketchily dressed and who had neither shaved nor combed his hair.
Randu stared at him over a yet-uncleared breakfast table with an astonishment sufficiently open and strenuous to cause him to drop his pipe.
Ovall said baldly, harshly. “Mnemon has been bombarded from space by treacherous attack.”
Randu’s eyes narrowed, “The Foundation?”
“The Mule!” exploded Ovall. “The Mule!” His words raced, “It was unprovoked and deliberate. Most of our fleet had joined the international flotilla. The few left as Home Squadron were insufficient and were blown out of the sky. There have been no landings yet, and there may not be, for half the attackers are reported destroyed - but it is war - and I have come to ask how Haven stands on the matter.”
“Haven, I am sure, will adhere to the spirit of the Charter of Federation. But, you see? He attacks us as well.”
“This Mule is a madman. Can he defeat the universe?” He faltered and sat down to seize Randu’s wrist, “Our few survivors have reported the Mule’s poss ... enemy’s possession of a new weapon. A nuclear-field depressor.”
“A what?”
Ovall said, “Most of our ships were lost because their nuclear weapons failed them. It could not have happened by either accident or sabotage. It must have been a weapon of the Mule. It didn’t work perfectly; the effect was intermittent; there were ways to neutralize - my dispatches are not detailed. But you see that such a tool would change the nature of war and, possibly, make our entire fleet obsolete.”
Randu felt an old, old man. His face sagged hopelessly, “I am afraid a monster is grown that will devour all of us. Yet we must fight him.”
Ebling Mis’s house in a not-so-pretentious neighborhood of Terminus City was well known to the intelligentsia, literati, and just-plain-well-read of the Foundation. Its notable characteristics depended, subjectively, upon the source material that was read. To a thoughtful biographer, it was the “symbolization of a retreat from a nonacademic reality,” a society columnist gushed silkily at its “frightfully masculine atmosphere of careless disorder,” a University Ph.D. called it brusquely, “bookish, but unorganized,” a nonuniversity friend said, “good for a drink anytime and you can put your feet on the sofa,” and a breezy newsweekly broadcast, that went in for color, spoke of the “rocky, down-to-earth, no-nonsense living quarters of blaspheming, Leftish, balding Ebling Mis.”
To Bayta, who thought for no audience but herself at the moment, and who had the advantage of first-hand information, it was merely sloppy.
Except for the first few days, her imprisonment had been a light burden. Far lighter, it seemed, that this half-hour wait in the psychologist’s home - under secret observation, perhaps? She had been with Toran then, at least.
Perhaps she might have grown wearier of the strain, had not Magnifico’s long nose drooped in a gesture that plainly showed his own far greater tension.
Magnifico’s pipe-stem legs were folded up under a pointed, sagging chin, as if he were trying to huddle himself into disappearance, and Bayta’s hand went out in a gentle and automatic gesture of reassurance. Magnifico winced, then smiled.
“Surely, my lady, it would seem that even yet my body denies the knowledge of my mind and expects of others’ hands a blow.”
“There’s no need for worry, Magnifico. I’m with you, and I won’t let anyone hurt you.”
The clown’s eyes sidled towards her, then drew away quickly. “But they kept me away from you earlier - and from your kind husband - and, on my word, you may laugh, but I was lonely for missing friendship.”
“I wouldn’t laugh at that. I was, too.”
The clown brightened, and he hugged his knees closer. He said, “You have not met this man who will see us?” It was a cautious question.
“No. But he is a famous man. I have seen him in the newscasts and heard quite a good deal of him. I think he’s a good man, Magnifico, who means us no harm.”
“Yes?” The clown stirred uneasily. “That may be, my lady, but he has questioned me before, and his manner is of an abruptness and loudness that bequivers me. He is full of strange words, so that the answers to his questions could not worm out of my throat. Almost, I might believe the romancer who once played on my ignorance with a tale that, at such moments, the heart lodged in the windpipe and prevented speech.”
“But it’s different now. We’re two to his one, and he won’t be able to frighten the both of us, will he?”
“No, my lady.”
A door slammed somewheres, and the roaring of a voice entered the house. Just outside the room, it coagulated into words with a fierce, “Get the “Ga-LAX-y out of here!” and two uniformed guards were momentarily visible through the opening door, in quick retreat.
Ebling Mis entered frowning, deposited a carefully wrapped bundle on the floor, and approached to shake Bayta’s hand with careless pressure. Bayta returned it vigorously, man-fashion. Mis did a double-take as he turned to the clown, and favored the girl with a longer look.
He said, “Married?”
“Yes. We went through the legal formalities.”
Mis paused. Then, “Happy about it?”
“So far.”
Mis shrugged, and turned again to Magnifico. He unwrapped the package, “Know what this is, boy?”
Magnifico fairly hurled himself out of his seat and caught the multi-keyed instrument. He fingered the myriad knobby contacts and threw a sudden back somersault of joy, to the imminent destruction of the nearby furniture.
He croaked, “A Visi-Sonor - and of a make to distill joy out of a dead man’s heart.” His long fingers caressed softly and slowly, pressing lightly on contacts with a rippling motion, resting momentarily on one key then another - and in the air before them there was a soft glowing rosiness, just inside the range of vision.
Ebling Mis said, “All right, boy, you said you could pound on one of those gadgets, and there’s your chance. You’d better tune it, though. It’s out of a museum.” Then, in an aside to Bayta, “Near as I can make it, no one on the Foundation can make it talk right.”
He leaned closer and said quickly, “The clown won’t talk without you. Will you help?”
She nodded.
“Good!” he said. “His state of fear is almost fixed, and I doubt that his mental strength would possibly stand a psychic probe. If I’m to get anything out of him otherwise, he’s got to feel absolutely at ease. You understand?”
She nodded again.
“This Visi-Sonor is the first step in the process. He says he can play it; and his reaction now makes it pretty certain that it’s one of the great joys of his life. So whether the playing is good or bad, be interested and appreciative. Then exhibit friendliness and confidence in me. Above all, follow my lead in everything.” There was a swift glance at Magnifico, huddled in a comer of the sofa, making rapid adjustments in the interior of the instrument. He was completely absorbed.
Mis said in a conversational tone to Bayta, “Ever hear a Visi-Sonor?”
“Once,” said Bayta, equally casually, “at a concert of rare instruments. I wasn’t impressed.”
“Well, I doubt that you came across good playing. There are very few really good players. It’s not so much that it requires physical co-ordination - a multi-bank piano requires more, for instance - as a certain type of free-wheeling mentality.” In a lower voice, “That’s why our living skeleton there might be better than we think. More often than not, good players are idiots otherwise. It’s one of those queer setups that makes psychology interesting.”
He added, in a patent effort to manufacture light conversation, “You know how the beblistered thing works? I looked it up for this purpose, and all I’ve made out so far is that its radiations stimulate the optic center of the brain directly, without ever touching the optic nerve. It’s actually the utilization of a sense never met with in ordinary nature. Remarkable, when you come to think of it. What you hear is all right. That’s ordinary. Eardrum, cochlea, all that. But - Shh! He’s ready. Will you kick that switch. It works better in the dark.”
In the darkness, Magnifico was a mere blob, Ebling Mis a heavy-breathing mass. Bayta found herself straining her eyes anxiously, and at first with no effect. There was a thin, reedy quaver in the air, that wavered raggedly up the scale. It hovered, dropped and caught itself, gained in body, and swooped into a booming crash that had the effect of a thunderous split in a veiling curtain.
A little globe of pulsing color grew in rhythmic spurts and burst in midair into formless gouts that swirled high and came down as curving streamers in interfacing patterns. They coalesced into little spheres, no two alike in color - and Bayta began discovering things.
She noticed that closing her eyes made the color pattern all the clearer; that each little movement of color had its own little pattern of sound; that she could not identify the colors; and, lastly, that the globes were not globes but little figures.
Little figures; little shifting flames, that danced and flickered in their myriads; that dropped out of sight and returned from nowhere; that whipped about one another and coalesced then into a new color.
Incongruously, Bayta thought of the little blobs of color that come at night when you close your eyelids till they hurt, and stare patiently. There was the old familiar effect of the marching polka dots of shifting color, of the contracting concentric circles, of the shapeless masses that quiver momentarily. All that, larger, multivaried - and each little dot of color a tiny figure.
They darted at her in pairs, and she lifted her hands with a sudden gasp, but they tumbled and for an instant she was the center of a brilliant snowstorm, while cold light slipped off her shoulders and down her arm in a luminous ski-slide, shooting off her stiff fingers and meeting slowly in a shining midair focus. Beneath it all, the sound of a hundred instruments flowed in liquid streams until she could not tell it from the light.
She wondered if Ebling Mis were seeing the same thing, and if not, what he did see, The wonder passed, and then-
She was watching again. The little figures-were they little figures? -little tiny women with burning hair that turned and bent too quickly for the mind to focus? -seized one another in star-shaped groups that turned - and the music was faint laughter - girls’ laughter that began inside the ear.
The stars drew together, sparked towards one another, grew slowly into structure - and from below, a palace shot upward in rapid evolution. Each brick a tiny color, each color a tiny spark, each spark a stabbing light that shifted patterns and led the eye skyward to twenty jeweled minarets.
A glittering carpet shot out and about, whirling, spinning an insubstantial web that engulfed all space, and from it luminous shoots stabbed upward and branched into trees that sang with a music all their own.
Bayta sat inclosed in it. The music welled about her in rapid, lyrical flights. She reached out to touch a fragile tree and blossoming spicules floated downwards and faded, each with its clear, tiny tinkle.
The music crashed in twenty cymbals, and before her an area flamed up in a spout and cascaded down invisible steps into Bayta’s lap, where it spilled over and flowed in rapid current, raising the fiery sparkle to her waist, while across her lap was a rainbow bridge and upon it the little figures-
A palace, and a garden, and tiny men and women on a bridge, stretching out as far as she could see, swimming through the stately swells of stringed music converging in upon her-
And then - there seemed a frightened pause, a hesitant, indrawn motion, a swift collapse. The colors fled, spun into a globe that shrank, and rose, and disappeared.
And it was merely dark again.
A heavy foot scratched for the pedal, reached it, and the light flooded in; the flat light of a prosy sun. Bayta blinked until the tears came, as though for the longing of what was gone. Ebling Mis was a podgy inertness with his eyes still round and his mouth still open.
Only Magnifico himself was alive, and he fondled his Visi-Sonor in a crooning ecstasy.
“My lady,” he gasped, “it is indeed of an effect the most magical. It is of balance and response almost beyond hope in its delicacy and stability. On this, it would seem I could work wonders. How liked you my composition, my lady?”
“Was it yours?” breathed Bayta. “Your own?”
At her awe, his thin face turned a glowing red to the tip of his mighty nose. “My very own, my lady. The Mule liked it not, but often and often I have played it for my own amusement. It was once, in my youth, that I saw the palace - a gigantic place of jeweled riches that I saw from a distance at a time of high carnival. There were people of a splendor undreamed of - and magnificence more than ever I saw afterwards, even in the Mule’s service. It is but a poor makeshift I have created, but my mind’s poverty precludes more. I call it, ‘The Memory of Heaven.’“
Now through the midst of the chatter, Mis shook himself to active life. “Here,” he said, “here, Magnifico, would you like to do that same thing for others?”
For a moment, the clown drew back. “For others?” he quavered.
“For thousands,” cried Mis, “in the great Halls of the Foundation. Would you like to be your own master, and honored by all, wealthy, and ... and-” his imagination failed him. “And all that? Eh? What do you say?”
“But how may I be all that, mighty sir, for indeed I am but a poor clown ungiven to the great things of the world?”
The psychologist puffed out his lips, and passed the back of his hand across his brow. He said, “But your playing, man. The world is yours if you would play so for the mayor and his Trading Trusts. Wouldn’t you like that?”
The clown glanced briefly at Bayta, “Would she stay with me?”
Bayta laughed, “Of course, silly. Would it be likely that I’d leave you now that you’re on the point of becoming rich and famous?”
“It would all be yours,” he replied earnestly, “and surely the wealth of Galaxy itself would be yours before I could repay my debt to your kindness.”
“But,” said Mis, casually, “if you would first help me-”
“What is that?”
The psychologist paused, and smiled, “A little surface probe that doesn’t hurt. It wouldn’t touch but the peel of your brain.”
There was a flare of deadly fear in Magnifico’s eyes. “Not a probe. I have seen it used. It drains the mind and leaves an empty skull. The Mule did use it upon traitors and let them wander mindless through the streets, until out of mercy, they were killed.” He held up his hand to push Mis away.
“That was a psychic probe,” explained Mis, patiently, “and even that would only harm a person when misused. This probe I have is a surface probe that wouldn’t hurt a baby. “
“That’s right, Magnifico,” urged Bayta. “It’s only to help beat the Mule and keep him far away. Once that’s done, you and I will be rich and famous all our lives.”
Magnifico held out a trembling hand, “Will you hold my hand, then?”
Bayta took it in both her own, and the clown watched the approach of the burnished terminal plates with large eyes.
Ebling Mis rested carelessly on the too-lavish chair in Mayor Indbur’s private quarters, unregenerately unthankful for the condescension shown him and watched the small mayor’s fidgeting unsympathetically. He tossed away a cigar stub and spat out a shred of tobacco.
“And, incidentally, if you want something for your next concert at Mallow Hall, Indbur,” he said, “you can dump out those electronic gadgeteers into the sewers they came from and have this little freak play the Visi-Sonor for you. Indbur - it’s out of this world.”
Indbur said peevishly, “I did not call you here to listen to your lectures on music. What of the Mule? Tell me that. What of the Mule?”
“The Mule? Well, I’ll tell you - I used a surface probe and got little. Can’t use the psychic probe because the freak is scared blind of it, so that his resistance will probably blow his unprintable mental fuses as soon as contact is made. But this is what I’ve got, if you’ll just stop tapping your fingernails-
“First place, de-stress the Mule’s physical strength. He’s probably strong, but most of the freak’s fairy tales about it are probably considerably blown up by his own fearful memory, He wears queer glasses and his eyes kill, he evidently has mental powers.”
“So much we had at the start,” commented the mayor, sourly.
“Then the probe confirms it, and from there on I’ve been working mathematically.”
“So? And how long will all this take? Your word-rattling will deafen me yet.”
“About a month, I should say, and I may have something for you. And I may not, of course. But what of it? If this is all outside Seldon’s plans, our chances are precious little, unprintable little.”
Indbur whirled on the psychologist fiercely, “Now I have you, traitor. Lie! Say you’re not one of these criminal rumormongers that are spreading defeatism and panic through the Foundation, and making my work doubly hard.”
“I? I?” Mis gathered anger slowly.
Indbur swore at him, “Because by the dust-clouds of space, the Foundation will win - the Foundation must win.”
“Despite the loss at Horleggor?”
“It was not a loss. You have swallowed that spreading lie, too? We were outnumbered and betreasoned-”
“By whom?” demanded Mis, contemptuously.
“By the lice-ridden democrats of the gutter,” shouted Indbur back at him. “I have known for long that the fleet has been riddled by democratic cells. Most have been wiped out, but enough remain for the unexplained surrender of twenty ships in the thickest of the swarming fight. Enough to force an apparent defeat.
“For that matter, my rough-tongued, simple patriot and epitome of the primitive virtues, what are your own connections with the democrats?”
Ebling Mis shrugged it off, “You rave, do you know that? What of the retreat since, and the loss of half of Siwenna? Democrats again?”
“No. Not democrats,” the little man smiled sharply. “We retreat - as the Foundation has always retreated under attack, until the inevitable march of history turns with us. Already, I see the outcome. Already, the so-called underground of the democrats has issued manifestoes swearing aid and allegiance to the Government. It could be a feint, a cover for a deeper treachery, but I make good use of it, and the propaganda distilled from it will have its effect, whatever the crawling traitors scheme. And better than that-”
“Even better than that, Indbur?”
“Judge for yourself. Two days ago, the so-called Association of Independent Traders declared war on the Mule, and the Foundation fleet is strengthened, at a stroke, by a thousand ships. You see, this Mule goes too far. He finds us divided and quarreling among ourselves and under the pressure of his attack we unite and grow strong. He must lose. It is inevitable - as always.”
Mis still exuded skepticism, “Then you tell me that Seldon planned even for the fortuitous occurrence of a mutant.”
“A mutant! I can’t tell him from a human, nor could you but for the ravings of a rebel captain, some outland youngsters, and an addled juggler and clown. You forget the most conclusive evidence of all - your own.”
“My own?” For just a moment, Mis was startled.
“Your own,” sneered the mayor. “The Time Vault opens in nine weeks. What of that? It opens for a crisis. If this attack of the Mule is not the crisis, where is the ‘real’ one, the one the Vault is opening for? Answer me, you lardish ball.”
The psychologist shrugged, “All tight. If it keeps you happy. Do me a favor, though. Just in case ... just in case old Seldon makes his speech and it does go sour, suppose you let me attend the Grand Opening.”
“All right. Get out of here. And stay out of my sight for nine weeks.”
“With unprintable pleasure, you wizened horror,” muttered Mis to himself as he left.