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into—“Body time, yes. You are inclined for other purposes.”
    “Trust a scholar to put the proper definition to a word.”
    In the warm, dizzying scuffle that followed there was some laughter, some sudden passion, and best of all, no time to think. He knew this was just what he needed, after the tensions of yesterday, and Dors knew it even better.
    He emerged from the vaporium to the smell of kaff and breakfast, served out by the autos. The news flitted across the far wall and he managed to ignore most of it. Dors came out of her vaporium patting her hair and watched the wall raptly. “Looks like more stalling in the High Council,” she said. “They’re putting off the ritual search for more funding in favor of arguments over Sector sovereignty. If the Dahlites—”
    “Not before I ingest some calories.”
    “But this is just the sort of thing you must keep track of!”
    “Not until I have to.”
    “You know I don’t want you to do anything dangerous, but for now, not paying attention is foolish.”
    “Maneuvering, who’s up and who’s down—spare me. Facts I can face.”
    “Fond of facts, aren’t you?”
    “Of course.”
    “They can be brutal.”
    “Sometimes they’re all we have.” He thought a moment, then grasped her hand. “Facts, and love.”
    “Love is a fact, too.”
    “Mine is. The undying popularity of entertainments devoted to romance suggests that to most people it is not a fact but a goal.”
    “An hypothesis, you mathematicians would say.”
    “Granted. ‘Conjecture,’ to be 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 soufflé. 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 soufflé. 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 soufflé tasted like a real