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mathematics
     was just felicity with a particular kind of minutiae, knowing things, a sort of high-grade
     coin collecting. You learned relations and theorems and put them together.
    Only slowly did he glimpse the soaring structures above each discipline. Great spans
     joined the vistas of topology to the infinitesimal intricacies of differentials, or the
     plodding styles of number theory to the shifting sands of group analysis. Only then did he
     see mathematics as a landscape, a territory of the mind to rove and scout.
    To traverse those expanses he worked in mind time -- long stretches of uninterrupted flow
     when he could concentrate utterly on problems, fixing them like flies in timeless amber,
     turning them this way and that to his inspecting light, until they yielded their secrets.
    Phones, people, politics -- all these transpired in real time, snipping his thought train,
     killing mind time. So he let Yugo and Dors and others fend off the world throughout the
     morning.
    But today Yugo himself snipped his concentration. “Just a mo,” he said, slipping through
     the crackling door field. “This paper look right?”
    He and Yugo had developed a plausible cover for the psychohistory project. They regularly
     published research on the nonlinear analysis of “social nuggets and knots,” a subfield
     with an honorable and dull history. Their analysis applied to subgroups and factions in
     Trantor, and occasionally on other worlds.
    The research was in fact useful to psychohistory, serving as a subset of equations to what
     Yugo insisted on calling the full “Seldon Equations.” Hari had given up being irked at
     this term, even though he wished to keep a personal distance from the theory.
    Though scarcely a waking hour passed without his thinking about psychohistory, he did not
     want it to be a template for his own worldview. Nothing rooted in a particular personality
     could hope to describe the horde of saints and rascals revealed by human history. One had
     to take the longest view possible.
    “See,” Yugo said, making lines of print and symbols coalesce on Hari's holo. “I got all
     the analysis of the Dahlite crisis. Neat as you please, huh?”
    “Urn, what's the Dahlite crisis?”
    Yugo's surprise was profound. “We're not bein' represented!”
    “You live in Streeling.”
    “Once a Dahlan, you're always one. Just like you, from Helical.”
    “Helicon. I see, you don't have enough delegates in the Low Council?”
    “Or the High!”
    “The Codes allow -- ”
    “They're out of date.”
    “Dahlites get a proportional share -- ”
    “And our neighbors, the Ratannanahs and the Quippons, they're schemin' against us.”
    “How so?”
    “There're Dahlans in plenty other Sectors. They don't get represented.”
    “You're spoken for by our Streeling -- ”
    “Look, Hari, you're a Helical. Wouldn't understand. Plenty Sectors, they're just places to
     sleep. Dahl is a people.”
    “The Codes set forth rules for accommodating separate subcultures, ethnicities -- ”
    “They're not workin'.”
    Hari saw from Yugo's jutting jaw that this was not a point for graceful debate. He did
     know something of the slowly gathering constitutional crisis. The Codes had maintained a
     balance of forces for millennia, but only by innovative adaptation. Little of that seemed
     available now. “We agree on that. So how does our research bear upon Dahl?”
    “See, I took the socio-factor analysis and -- ”
    Yugo had an intuitive grasp of nonlinear equations. It was always a pleasure to watch his
     big hands cut the air, slicing through points and pounding objections to pulp. And the
     calculations were good, if a bit simple.
    The nuggets-and-knots work attracted little attention. It had made some in mathematics
     write him off as a promising young man who had never risen to his potential. This was
     perfectly all right with Hari. Some mathists guessed that his true core research went