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ISAAC ASIMOV



Contents
Part I The Psychohistorians
Part II The Encyclopedists
Part III The Mayors
Part IV The Traders
Part V The Merchant Princes




PART I
THE PSYCHOHISTORIANS
1.
HARI SELDON-... born in the 11,988th year of the Galactic Era; died 12,069. The
dates are more commonly given in terms of the current Foundational Era as - 79
to the year 1 F.E. Born to middle-class parents on Helicon, Arcturus sector
(where his father, in a legend of doubtful authenticity, was a tobacco grower in
the hydroponic plants of the planet), he early showed amazing ability in
mathematics. Anecdotes concerning his ability are innumerable, and some are
contradictory. At the age of two, he is said to have ...
... Undoubtedly his greatest contributions were in the field of psychohistory.
Seldon found the field little more than a set of vague axioms; he left it a
profound statistical science....
... The best existing authority we have for the details of his life is the
biography written by Gaal Dornick who. as a young man, met Seldon two years
before the great mathematician's death. The story of the meeting ...
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA*
* All quotations from the Encyclopedia Galactica here reproduced are taken from
the 116th Edition published in 1020 F.E. by the Encyclopedia Galactica
Publishing Co., Terminus, with permission of the publishers.
His name was Gaal Dornick and he was just a country boy who had never seen
Trantor before. That is, not in real life. He had seen it many times on the
hyper-video, and occasionally in tremendous three-dimensional newscasts covering
an Imperial Coronation or the opening of a Galactic Council. Even though he had
lived all his life on the world of Synnax, which circled a star at the edges of
the Blue Drift, he was not cut off from civilization, you see. At that time, no
place in the Galaxy was.
There were nearly twenty-five million inhabited planets in the Galaxy then, and
not one but owed allegiance to the Empire whose seat was on Trantor. It was the
last halfcentury in which that could be said.
To Gaal, this trip was the undoubted climax of his young, scholarly life. He had
been in space before so that the trip, as a voyage and nothing more, meant
little to him. To be sure, he had traveled previously only as far as Synnax's
only satellite in order to get the data on the mechanics of meteor driftage
which he needed for his dissertation, but space-travel was all one whether one
travelled half a million miles, or as many light years.
He had steeled himself just a little for the Jump through hyper-space, a
phenomenon one did not experience in simple interplanetary trips. The Jump
remained, and would probably remain forever, the only practical method of
travelling between the stars. Travel through ordinary space could proceed at no
rate more rapid than that of ordinary light (a bit of scientific knowledge that
belonged among the items known since the forgotten dawn of human history), and
that would have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited
systems. Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space
nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the
length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.
Gaal had waited for the first of those Jumps with a little dread curled gently
in his stomach, and it ended in nothing more than a trifling jar, a little
internal kick which ceased an instant before he could be sure he had felt it.
That was all.
And after that, there was only the ship, large and glistening; the cool
production of 12,000 years of Imperial progress; and himself, with his doctorate
in mathematics freshly obtained and an invitation from the great Hari Seldon to
come to Trantor and join the vast and somewhat mysterious Seldon Project.
What Gaal was waiting for after the disappointment of the Jump was that first
sight of Trantor. He haunted the View-room. The steel shutter-lids were rolled
back at announced times and he was always there, watching the hard brilliance of
the stars, enjoying the incredible hazy swarm of a star cluster, like a giant
conglomeration of fire-flies caught in mid-motion and stilled forever, At one
time there was the cold, blue-white smoke of a gaseous nebula within five light
years of the ship, spreading over the window like distant milk, filling the room
with an icy tinge, and disappearing out of sight two hours