Foundation Fear Read Online Free PDF

precise.”
    “Preserve us from precision.”
    He swept her suddenly into his arms, cupped her rump in his hands and, with some effort he
     took trouble to conceal, lifted her. “But this -- this is a fact.”
    “My, my.” She kissed him fiercely. “The man is not all mind.”
    He succumbed to the seductive, multisensic news as he munched. He had grown up on a farm
     and liked big breakfasts. Dors ate sparingly; her twin religions, she said, were exercise
     and Hari Seldon -- the first to preserve her strength for the second. He thumbed his own
     half of the wall to the infinitesimal doings of markets, finding there a better index of
     how Trantor was doing than in the stentorian bluster of the High Council.
    As a mathist, he liked following the details. But after five minutes of it he slapped the
     table in frustration.
    “People have lost their good sense. No First Minister can protect them from their own
     innocence.”
    “My concern is protecting you from them.”
    Hari blanked his holo and watched hers, an ornate 3D of the factions in the High Council.
     Red tracers linked factions there with allies in the Low Council, a bewildering snake pit.
     “You don't think this First Minister thing is going to work, do you?”
    “It could.”
    “They're absolutely right -- I'm not qualified.”
    “Is Cleon?”
    “Well, he has been reared to do the job.”
    “You're ducking the question.”
    “Exactly.” Hari finished his steak and began on the egg-quhili soufflŽ. He had left the
     e-stim on all night to improve his muscle tone and that made him hungry. That, and the
     delightful fact that Dors viewed sex as an athletic opportunity.
    “I suppose your present strategy is best,” Dors said thoughtfully. “Remain a mathist, at a
     lofty remove from the fray.”
    “Right. Nobody assassinates a guy with no power.”
    “But they do 'erase' those who might get in the way of their taking power.”
    Hari hated thinking of such things so early. He dug into the soufflŽ. It was easy to
     forget, amid the tastes specially designed to fit his own well-tabulated likes, that the
     manufacturum built their meal from sewage. Eggs that had never known the belly of a bird.
     Meat appeared without skin or bones or gristle or fat. Carrots arrived without topknots. A
     food-manfac was delicately tuned to reproduce tastes, just short of the ability to
     actually make a live carrot. The minor issue of whether his soufflŽ tasted like a real
     one, made by a fine chef, faded to unimportance compared with the fact that it tasted good
     to him -- the only audience that mattered.
    He realized that Dors had been talking for some moments about High Council maneuverings
     and he had not registered a word. She had advice on how to handle the inevitable news
     people, on how to receive calls, on everything. Everyone did, these days ...
    Hari finished, had some kaff, and felt ready to face the day as a mathist, not as a
     minister. “Reminds me of what my mother used to say. Know how you make God laugh?”
    Dors looked blank, drawn out of her concentration. “How to ... oh, this is humor?”
    “You tell him your plans.”
    She laughed agreeably.
    Outside their apartment they acquired the Specials again. Hari felt they were unnecessary;
     Dors was quite enough. But he could scarcely explain that to Imperial officials. There
     were other Specials on the floors above and below as well, a full-volume defense screen.
     Hari waved to friends he saw on the way across the Streeling campus, but the presence of
     the Specials held them at too great a distance to speak.
    He had a lot of Mathist Department business to tend to, but he followed his instinct and
     put his calculations first. Briskly he retrieved his ideas from the bedside notepad and
     stared at them, doodling absently in air, stirring symbols like a pot of soup, for over an
     hour.
    When he was a teenager the rigid drills of schooling had made him think that