“Very well,” came the unemotional response. “I have no objection to landing. At the worst – a little lost time.”
“Oh, no. At the worst – complete defeat. If it is the Second Foundation. Remember it would be a world of space-knows-how-many Mules.”
“What do you plan to do?”
“Land on some minor subject planet. Find out as much as we can about Tazenda first, then improvise from that.”
“All right. No objection. If you don’t mind now, I would like the light out.”
Channis left with a wave of his hand.
And in the darkness of a tiny room in an island of driving metal lost in the vastness of space, General Han Pritcher remained awake, following the thoughts that led him through such fantastic reaches.
If everything he had so painfully decided were true – and how all the facts were beginning to fit – then Tazenda was the Second Foundation. There was no way out. But how? How?
Could it be Tazenda? An ordinary world? One without distinction? A slum lost amid the wreckage of an Empire? A splinter among the fragments? He remembered, as from a distance, the Mule’s shriveled face and his thin voice as he used to speak of the old Foundation psychologist, Ebling Mis, the one man who had – maybe – learned the secret of the Second Foundation.
Pritcher recalled the tension of the Mule’s words: “It was as if astonishment had overwhelmed Mis. It was as though something about the Second Foundation had surpassed all his expectations, had driven in a direction completely different from what he might have assumed. If I could only have read his thoughts rather than his emotions. Yet the emotions were plain – and above everything else was this vast surprise.”
Surprise was the keynote. Something supremely astonishing! And now came this boy, this grinning youngster, glibly joyful about Tazenda and its undistinguished subnormality. And he had to be right. He had to. Otherwise, nothing made sense.
Pritcher’s last conscious thought had a touch of grimness. That hypertracer along the Etheric tube was still there. He had checked it one hour back, with Channis well out of the way.
SECOND INTERLUDE
It was a casual meeting in the anteroom of the Council Chamber – just a few moments before passing into the Chamber to take up the business of the day – and the few thoughts flashed back and forth quickly.
“So the Mule is on his way.”
“That’s what I hear, too. Risky! Mighty risky!”
“Not if affairs adhere to the functions set up.”
“The Mule is not an ordinary man – and it is difficult to manipulate his chosen instruments without detection by him. The controlled minds are difficult to touch. They say he’s caught on to a few cases.”
“Yes, I don’t see how that can be avoided.”
“Uncontrolled minds are easier. But so few are in positions of authority under him–”
They entered the Chamber. Others of the Second Foundation followed them.
3
Two Men and a Peasant
Rossem is one of those marginal worlds usually neglected in Galactic history and scarcely ever obtruding itself upon the notice of men of the myriad happier planets.
In the latter days of the Galactic Empire, a few political prisoners had inhabited its wastes, while an observatory and a small Naval garrison served to keep it from complete desertion. Later, in the evil days of strife, even before the time of Hari Seldon, the weaker sort of men, tired of the periodic decades of insecurity and danger; weary of sacked planets and a ghostly succession of ephemeral emperors making their way to the Purple for a few wicked, fruitless years – these men fled the populated centers and sought shelter in the barren nooks of the Galaxy.
Along the chilly wastes of Rossem, villages huddled. Its sun was a small ruddy niggard that clutched its dribble of heat to itself, while snow beat thinly down for nine months of the year. The tough native grain lay dormant in the soil those snow-filled months, then grew and ripened in almost panic speed, when the sun’s reluctant radiation brought the temperature to nearly fifty.
Small, goatlike animals cropped the grasslands, kicking the thin snow aside with tiny, tri-hooved feet.