Foundation's Fear Read Online Free PDF

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 hehad 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 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?”
    “Um, 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