Prelude to Foundation (Foundation, #6)

by Isaac Asimov

I had begun a series of stories that would eventually grow into six volumes and a total of 650,000 words (so far). Nor did I have any idea that it would be unified with my series of short stories and novels involving robots and my novels involving the Galactic Empire for a grand total (so far) of fourteen volumes and a total of about 1,450,000 words.

Naturally, there’s got to be some limit, for I don’t expect to live forever, but I do intend to hang on as long as possible.

“Not all persons would be equally believed, Demerzel. A mathematician, however, who could back his prophecy with mathematical formulas and terminology, might be understood by no one and yet believed by everyone.”

“Nor would you have, Sire. You are not a mathematician, nor a scientist of any kind, nor an artist. There are many fields of knowledge in which others know more than you. It is their task to use their knowledge to serve you. You are the Emperor, which is worth all their specializations put together.”

“Yes, but soldiers who are well-paid would resent having that pay reduced just because there is peace. Admirals resist mothballing ships and having themselves reduced in rank simply because there is less for them to do. So the credits still go—unproductively—to the armed forces and vital areas of the social good are allowed to deteriorate. That’s what I call decay. Don’t you? Don’t you think that eventually you would fit that sort of view into your psychohistorical notions?”

“How harmful overspecialization is. It cuts knowledge at a million points and leaves it bleeding.”

“I imagine,” said Seldon, “that it helps relieve pressure as well. They work off all their resentments, enjoy all the smug self-satisfaction a young revolutionary would have, and by the time they take their place in the Imperial hierarchy, they are ready to settle down into conformity and obedience.”

I’ve seen many people with status, but I’m still looking for a happy one. Status won’t sit still under you; you have to continually fight to keep from sinking.

(If something quite accidental can easily become viewed as a tradition and be made unbreakable or nearly so, thought Seldon, would that be a law of psychohistory?

“We are members of societies that do not tie ourselves to a past that is thousands of years old, making no contact at all with what has existed between that past and ourselves. We live in the present, which we recognize as the product of all the past and not of one long-gone moment of time that we hug to our chests. We realize, intellectually, what the robot may mean to you and we are willing to let it continue to mean that to you. But we can only see it with our own eyes, as you can only see it with yours. To us, it is a dead lump of metal.”

“For one thing, there have been many revolutions in Galactic history that have overthrown tyrannies, sometimes on individual planets, sometimes in groups of them, occasionally in the Empire itself or in the pre-Imperial regional governments. Often, this has only meant a change in tyranny. In other words, one ruling class is replaced by another—sometimes by one that is more efficient and therefore still more capable of maintaining itself—while the poor and downtrodden remain poor and downtrodden or become even worse off.”

“A second point you must remember is that even if you have right on your side, even if justice thunders condemnation, it is usually the tyranny in existence that has the balance of force on its side. There is nothing your knife handlers can do in the way of rioting and demonstrating that will have any permanent effect as long as, in the extremity, there is an army equipped with kinetic, chemical, and neurological weapons that is willing to use them against your people. You can get all the downtrodden and even all the respectables on your side, but you must somehow win over the security forces and the Imperial army or at least seriously weaken their loyalty to the rulers.”

“In that case, I have a second plan in hand. One I have been working on a long time on a separate world in a separate way. It too is very difficult and in some ways even more radical than psychohistory. It may fail too, but there is a greater chance of success if two roads are open than if either one alone was.

“Take my advice, Hari! If the time comes when you are able to set up some device that may act to prevent the worst from happening, see if you can think of two devices, so that if one fails, the other will carry on. The Empire must be steadied or rebuilt on a new foundation. Let there be two such, rather than one, if that is possible.”