10.

As evening fell beneath the domes and the light outside his office windows dimmed, Chen sat in his favorite chair and called up the Imperial Library’s news service, the finest and most comprehensive in the Galaxy. Words and pictures flitted around him, all relating to the Sarossan disaster and the loss of the Spear of Glory .There was no sign of the ship, and not likely to be; the best experts said it was very likely swallowed by a discontinuity within its final Jump, a hazard associated with supernova explosions but rarely seen, for the simple reason that supernovas were rare on human time scales. In all the Galaxy, less than one or two occurred each year, more often than not in uninhabited regions.

Already the popular journals were calling on the Emperor (respectfully, of course) and on Councilor Sinter, more acerbically, to rethink the transfer of rescue ships. Chen smiled grimly; let Sinter chew on that for a while.

Of course, if he heard nothing from Mors Planch, he would need to replace Lodovik, and soon; he had four candidates, none of them as qualified as Lodovik, but all worthy of service in the Commission of Public Safety. He would choose one as his assistant, and put the other three in apprenticeship programs, saying that the Commission should never again be caught with no immediate backups for the loss of important personnel.

There were three Commissioners who owed Chen for a few choice and private favors, and Chen could use this as a pretense for putting loyal men and women into their offices.

He shut off the news-service report with a flick of his hand and stood, smoothing his robes. Then he went out on the balcony to enjoy the sunset. There was no real sun visible here, of course, but he had mandated the repair of the Imperial Sector dome displays on a regular basis, and the sunsets were as reliable here as they had been everywhere in Trantor in his youth. He watched the highly artistic interpretation with some satisfaction, then put away all these masks of pleasure and considered the future.

Chen rarely slept more than an hour a day, usually at noon, which gave him the entire evening to do his research and make preparations for the work of the next morning. During his hour of sleep, he usually dreamed for about thirty minutes, and this afternoon, he had dreamed of his childhood, for the first time in years. Dreams, in his experience, seldom directly reflected the day-to-day affairs of life, but they could point to personal problems and weaknesses. Chen had great respect for those mental processes below conscious awareness. He knew that was where much of his most important work was done.

He imagined himself the captain of his own personal starship, with many excellent crewmembers-representing subconscious thought processes. It was his task to keep them alert and on duty, and for that reason, Chen performed special mental exercises for at least twenty minutes each day.

He had a machine for that very purpose, designed for him by the greatest psychologist on Trantor-perhaps in the Galaxy. The psychologist had disappeared five years ago, after an Imperial Court scandal orchestrated by Farad Sinter.

So many interconnections, interweavings. Chen regarded his enemies as his most intimate associates, and sometimes even felt a kind of sorrowful affection for them, as they fell by the wayside, one by one, victims of their own peculiar limitations and blindness.

Or, in Sinter’s case, of aggressive idiocy and madness.

11.

Hari lived in simple quarters on the university grounds, in his third apartment since the death of Dors Venabili. He could not seem to find a place that felt like home; after a few months, or in this case ten years, he would grow dissatisfied with the feel of a place, no matter how bland and characterless the decor was, and move to another. Often he spent his nights in a room in the library, explaining that he needed to get to work very early the next morning-which he did, but that was not his main reason for staying.

Wherever he was, Hari felt so very alone.

He was not above using his rank in the university, and his standing in the Imperial Library, to get new housing assignments. He allowed himself a few eccentricities, as one might allow an old engine extra maintenance, hoping that he could finish his task without breaking down. Coming to the end was difficult; he had so many memories of the beginnings, and they were far more exciting, far more satisfying, then anything reality at this point in his life could generate…

For that reason, he was almost looking forward to the trial, to a chance to confront Linge Chen directly and force the Empire’s hand, his last and grandest finesse. Then he would know. It would be finished.

When he had been First Minister to Cleon I, he had also taken advantage of his position, on rare occasions, to gather the information he most needed. One of the crucial problems of psychohistory then had been the notion of unexpected cultural and genetic variability, that is, how to factor in the possibility of extraordinary individuals.

At the time, he had not seriously considered the psychic powers of individuals such as his granddaughter, or her father, Raych; he had not known about such things, other than in the abstract, and he had not considered too rigorously the powers of Daneel in that regard.

All of them, of course, had peculiar talents for persuasion, and he had in the past few years made sure that psychohistory took into account these particular talents, on the level exercised by Wanda.

In the time of his First Ministry, however, he had been concerned with the more familiar historical and political problem of ruthless ambition, whether or not aided by personal charisma. There had been plenty of examples around the Empire to study, and he had examined these political episodes as best he could from afar…

But that had not been enough. With the blind and unshakable determination Hari could bring to bear when confronted with a psychohistorical problem, and against Dors’ wishes, Hari had appealed to Cleon to bring to Trantor five individuals of just that political breed, the ruthless, charismatic tyrant. They had been removed from their worlds after either rebelling against or subverting Imperial authority, which happened on about one in a thousand worlds, every standard year. Most often they were secretly executed; sometimes they were exiled to lonely rocks to live out lives empty of further victims.

Hari had asked Cleon to allow him to interview the five tyrants, and perform certain reasonably non-intrusive psychological and medical procedures.

Hari could remember the day quite clearly, when Cleon had called him into his ornate private rooms and shaken the paper on which his request was written in Hari’s face.

“You’re asking me to bring these vermin to Trantor? To subvert legal procedures and even forestall executions, just so you can scratch a bump of curiosity?”

“It’s a very important problem, Highness. I cannot predict anything if I do not have a complete understanding of such extraordinary individuals, and when and how they appear in human cultures.”

“Huh! Why not study me, First Minister Seldon?”

Hari had smiled. “You do not fit the profile, Highness.”

“I’m not a raving psychopath, am I? Well, at least you think I might be redeemable. But to bring some of these obscene monsters to my world…What would you do if they escaped, Hari?”

“Rely on your security forces to find them again, Highness.”

The Emperor had sniffed. “You have a confidence in Imperial Security’s abilities that I don’t, I’m afraid. Such monsters as these are like cancers-their talent is for bringing together tumorous organizations and subverting all to their own ends! Truthfully, Hari, what do you hope to accomplish?”