Foundation by Isaac Asimov Page B

that’s where they stick in the future. They’re hopelessly incompetent when it comes to ruling Terminus. Go away now and start things rolling. I want to be alone.”
    He sat down on the corner of his desk and stared at the cup of water.
    Space! If only he were as confident as he pretended! The Anacreonians were landing in two days and what had he to go on but a set of notions and half-guesses as to what Hari Seldon had been driving at these past fifty years? He wasn’t even a real, honest-to-goodness psychologist—just a fumbler with a little training trying to outguess the greatest mind of the age.
    If Fara were right; if Anacreon were all the problem Hari Seldon had foreseen; if the Encyclopedia were all he was interested in preserving—then what price
coup d’état
?
    He shrugged and drank his water.

7
    The Vault was furnished with considerably more than six chairs, as though a larger company had been expected. Hardin noted that thoughtfully and seated himself wearily in a corner just as far from the other five as possible.
    The Board members did not seem to object to that arrangement. They spoke among themselves in whispers, which fell off into sibilant monosyllables, and then into nothing at all. Of them all, only Jord Fara seemed even reasonably calm. He had produced a watch and was staring at it somberly.
    Hardin glanced at his own watch and then at the glass cubicle—absolutely empty—that dominated half the room. It was the only unusual feature of the room, for aside from that there was no indication that somewhere a computer was splitting off instants of time toward that precise moment when a muon stream would flow, a connection be made and—
    The lights went dim!
    They didn’t go out, but merely yellowed and sank with a suddenness that made Hardin jump. He had lifted his eyes to the ceiling lights in startled fashion, and when he brought them down the glass cubicle was no longer empty.
    A figure occupied it—a figure in a wheelchair!
    It said nothing for a few moments, but it closed the book upon its lap and fingered it idly. And then it smiled, and the face seemed all alive.
    It said, “I am Hari Seldon.” The voice was old and soft.
    Hardin almost rose to acknowledge the introduction and stopped himself in the act.
    The voice continued conversationally: “As you see, I am confined to this chair and cannot rise to greet you. Your grandparents left for Terminus a few months back in my time and since then I have suffered a rather inconvenient paralysis. I can’t see you, you know, so I can’t greet you properly. I don’t even know how many of you there are, so all this must be conducted informally. If any of you are standing, please sit down; and if you care to smoke, I wouldn’t mind.” There was a light chuckle. “Why should I? I’m not really here.”
    Hardin fumbled for a cigar almost automatically, but thought better of it.
    Hari Seldon put away his book—as if laying it upon a desk at his side—and when his fingers let go, it disappeared.
    He said: “It is fifty years now since this Foundation was established—fifty years in which the members of the Foundation have been ignorant of what it was they were working toward. It was necessary that they be ignorant, but now the necessity is gone.
    “The Encyclopedia Foundation, to begin with, is a fraud, and always has been!”
    There was a sound of a scramble behind Hardin and one or two muffled exclamations, but he did not turn around.
    Hari Seldon was, of course, undisturbed. He went on: “It is a fraud in the sense that neither I nor my colleagues care at all whether a single volume of the Encyclopedia is ever published. It has served its purpose, since by it we extracted an imperial charter from the Emperor, by it we attracted the hundred thousand humans necessary for our scheme, and by it we managed to keep them preoccupied while events shaped themselves, until it was too late for any of them to draw back.
    “In the fifty years that