hummin and seldon sat at lunch that day, quite alone, a pall of quiet between them for the most part. it was toward the end of the meal that seldon stirred and said in a lively voice, "well, sir, how do i address you? i think of you as chester hummin still, but even if i accept you in your other persona, i surely cannot address you as eto demerzel. in that capacity, you have a title and i dont know the proper usage. instruct me."
the other said gravely, "call me hummin--if you dont mind. or chetter. yes, i am eto demerzel, but with respect to you i am hummin. as a matter of fact, the two are not distinct. i told you that the empire is decaying and failing. i believe that to be true in both my capacities. i told you that i wanted psychohistory as a way of preventing that decay and failure or of bringing about a renewal and reinvigoration if the decay and failure must run its course. i believe that in both my capacities too."
"but you had me in your grip--i presume you were in the vicinity when i had my meeting with his imperial majesty."
"with cleon. yes, of course."
"and you might have spoken to me, then, exactly as you later did as hummin."
"and accomplished what? as demerzel, i have enormous tasks. i have to handle cleon, a well-meaning but not very capable ruler, and prevent him, insofar as i can, from making mistakes. i have to do my bit in governing trantor and the empire too. and, as you see, i had to spend a great deal of time in preventing wye from doing harm."
"yes, i know," murmured seldon.
"it wasnt easy and i nearly lost out. i have spent years sparring carefully with mannix, learning to understand his thinking and planning a countermove to his every move. i did not think, at any time, that while he was still alive he would pass on his powers to his daughter. i had not studied her and i was not prepared for her utter lack of caution. unlike her father, she has been brought up to take power for granted and had no clear idea of its limitations. so she got you and forced me to act before i was quite ready."
"you almost lost me as a result. i faced the muzzle of a blaster twice."
"i know," said hummin, nodding. "and we might have lost you upperside too--another accident i could not foresee."
"but you havent really answered my question. why did you send me chasing all over the face of trantor to escape from demerzel when you yourself were demerzel?"
"you told cleon that psychohistory was a purely theoretical concept, a kind of mathematical game that made no practical sense. that might indeed have been so, but if i approached you officially, i was sure you would merely have maintained your belief. yet i was attracted to the notion of psychohistory. i wondered whether it might not be, after all, just a game. you must understand that i didnt want merely to use you, i wanted a real and practical psychohistory.
"so i sent you, as you put it, chasing all over the face of trantor with the dreaded demerzel close on your heels at all times. that, i felt, would concentrate your mind powerfully. it would make psychohistory something exciting and much more than a mathematical game. you would try to work it out for the sincere idealist hummin, where you would not for the imperial flunky demerzel. also, you would get a glimpse of various sides of trantor and that too would be helpful--certainly more helpful than living in an ivory tower on a far-off planet, surrounded entirely by fellow mathematicians. was i right? have you made progress?"
seldon said, "in psychohistory? yes, i did, hummin. i thought you knew."
"how should i know?"
"i told dors."
"but you hadnt told me. nevertheless, you tell me so now. that is good news."
"not entirely," said seldon. "i have made only the barest beginning. but it is a beginning."
"is it the kind of beginning that can be explained to a nonmathematician?"
"i think so. you see, hummin, from the start i have seen psychohistory as a science that depends on the interaction of twenty-five million worlds, each with an average population of four thousand million. its too much. theres no way of handling something that complex. if i was to succeed at all, if there was to be any way of finding a useful psychohistory, i would first have to find a simpler system.
"so i thought i would go back in time and deal with a single world, a world that was the only one occupied by humanity in the dim age before the colonization of the galaxy. in mycogen they spoke of an original world of aurora and in dahl i heard word of an original world of earth. i thought they might be the same world under different names, but they were sufficiently different in one key point, at least, to make that impossible. and it didnt matter. so little was known of either one, and that little so obscured by myth and legend, that there was no hope of making use of psychohistory in connection with them."
he paused to sip at his cold juice, keeping his eyes firmly on hummins face.
hummin said, "well? what then?"
"meanwhile, dors had told me something i call the hand-on-thigh story. it was of no innate significance, merely a humorous and entirely trivial tale. as a result, though, dors mentioned the different sex mores on various worlds and in various sectors of trantor. it occurred to me that she treated the different trantorian sectors as though they were separate worlds. i thought, idly, that instead of twenty-five million different worlds, i had twenty-five million plus eight hundred to deal with. it seemed a trivial difference, so i forgot it and thought no more about it.
"but as i traveled from the imperial sector to streeling to mycogen to dahl to wye, i observed for myself how different each was. the thought of trantor--not as a world but as a complex of worlds--grew stronger, but still i didnt see the crucial point.
"it was only when i listened to rashelle--you see, it was good that i was finally captured by wye and it was good that rashelles rashness drove her into the grandiose schemes that she imparted to me--when i listened to rashelle, as i said, she told me that all she wanted was trantor and some immediately adjacent worlds. it was an empire in itself, she said, and dismissed the outer worlds as distant nothings.
"it was then that, in a moment, i saw what i must have been harboring in my hidden thoughts for a considerable time. on the one hand, trantor possessed an extraordinarily complex social system, being a populous world made up of eight hundred smaller worlds. it was in itself a system complex enough to make psychohistory meaningful and yet it was simple enough, compared to the empire as a whole, to make psychohistory perhaps practical.
"and the outer worlds, the twenty-five million of them? they were distant nothings. of course, they affected trantor and were affected by trantor, but these were second-order effects. if i could make psychohistory work as a first approximation for trantor alone, then the minor effects of the outer worlds could be added as later modifications. do you see what i mean? i was searching for a single world on which to establish a practical science of psychohistory and i was searching for it in the far past, when all the time the single world i wanted was under my feet now."
hummin said with obvious relief and pleasure, "wonderful!"
"but its all left to do, hummin. i must study trantor in sufficient detail. i must devise the necessary mathematics to deal with it. if i am lucky and live out a full lifetime, i may have the answers before i die. if not, my successors will have to follow me. conceivably, the empire may have fallen and splintered before psychohistory becomes a useful technique."
"i will do everything i can to help you."
"i know it," said seldon.
"you trust me, then, despite the fact i am demerzel?"
"entirely. absolutely. but i do so because you are not demerzel."
"but i am," insisted hummin.
"but you are not. your persona as demerzel is as far removed from the truth as is your persona as hummin."
"what do you mean?" hummins eyes grew wide and he backed away slightly from seldon.
"i mean that you probably chose the name hummin out of a wry sense of what was fitting. hummin is a mispronunciation of human, isnt it?" hummin made no response. he continued to stare at seldon.
and finally seldon said, "because youre not human, are you, hummin/demerzel? youre a robot."
dors
seldon, hari-- ... it is customary to think of hari seldon only in connection with psychohistory, to see him only as mathematics and social change personified. there is no doubt that he himself encouraged this for at no time in his formal writings did he give any hint as to how he came to solve the various problems of psychohistory. his leaps of thought might have all been plucked from air, for all he tells us. nor does he tell us of the blind alleys into which he crept or the wrong turnings he may have made. ...
as for his private life, it is a blank. concerning his parents and siblings, we know a handful of factors, no more. his only son, raych seldon, is known to have been adopted, but how that came about is not known. concerning his wife, we only know that she existed. clearly, seldon wanted to be a cipher except where psychohistory was concerned. it is as though he felt--or wanted it to be felt--that he did not live, he merely psychohistorified.
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