Pritcher’s head bowed. Futility wrenched him and left him gray and haggard inside. He said with an effort, “But how can you trust this man. I mean, completely – as you can trust me in my Conversion.”
“Well, I suppose I can’t entirely. That is why you must go with him. You see, Pritcher,” and the Mule buried himself in the large armchair against the soft back of which he looked like an angularly animated toothpick, “if he should stumble on the Second Foundation – if it should occur to him that an arrangement with them might be more profitable than with me – You understand?”
A profoundly satisfied light blazed in Pritcher’s eyes. “That is better, Sir.”
“Exactly. But remember, he must have a free rein as far as possible.”
“Certainly.”
“And … uh … Pritcher. The young man is handsome, pleasant and extremely charming. Don’t let him fool you. He’s a dangerous and unscrupulous character. Don’t get in his way unless you’re prepared to meet him properly. That’s all.”
The Mule was alone again. He let the lights die and the wall before him kicked to transparency again. The sky was purple now, and the city was a smudge of light on the horizon.
What was it all for? And if he were the master of all there was – what then? Would it really stop men like Pritcher. from being straight and tall, self-confident, strong? Would Bail Channis lose his looks? Would he himself be other than he was?
He cursed his doubts. What was he really after?
The cool, overhead warning light flickered. He could follow the progress of the man who had entered the palace and, almost against his will, he felt the soft wash of emotional content touch the fibers of his brain.
He recognized the identity without an effort. It was Channis. Here the Mule saw no uniformity, but the primitive diversity of a strong mind, untouched and unmolded except by the manifold disorganizations of the Universe. It writhed in floods and waves. There was caution on the surface, a thin, smoothing effect, but with touches of cynical ribaldry in the hidden eddies of it. And underneath there was the strong flow of self-interest and self-love, with a gush of cruel humor here and there, and a deep, still pool of ambition underlying all.
The Mule felt that he could reach out and dam the current, wrench the pool from its basin and turn it in another course, dry up one flow and begin another. But what of it? If he could bend Channis’ curly head in the profoundest adoration, would that change his own grotesquerie that made him shun the day and love the night, that made him a recluse inside an empire that was unconditionally big?
The door behind him opened, and he turned. The transparency of the wall faded to opacity, and the darkness gave way to the whitely blazing artifice of atomic power.
Bail Channis sat down lightly and said: “This is a not-quite-unexpected honor, sir.”
The Mule rubbed his proboscis with all four fingers at once and sounded a bit irritable in his response. “Why so, young man?”
“A hunch, I suppose. Unless I want to admit that I’ve been listening to rumors.”
“Rumors? Which one of the several dozen varieties are you referring to?”
“Those that say a renewal of the Galactic Offensive is being planned. It is a hope with me that such is true and that I might play an appropriate part.”
“Then you think there is a Second Foundation?”
“Why not? It would make things so much more interesting.”
“And you find interest in it as well?”
“Certainly. In the very mystery of it! What better subject could you find for conjecture? The newspaper supplements are full of nothing else lately – which is probably significant. The Cosmos had one of its feature writers compose a weirdie about a world consisting of beings of pure mind – the Second Foundation, you see – who had developed mental force to energies large enough to compete with any known to physical science. Spaceships could be blasted light-years away, planets could be turned out of their orbits–”
“Interesting. Yes. But do you have any notions on the subject? Do you subscribe to this mind-power notion?’