Forward the Foundation - Isaac Asimov [53]
"Which twenty billion?" asked Seldon smiling.
"I wish I knew," said Raych darkly. "The trouble is, we can't redo the planet, so we just gotta keep patching."
"I'm afraid so, Raych, but there are some peculiar things about it. Now I want you to check me out. I have some thoughts about this."
He brought a small sphere out of his pocket.
"What's that?" asked Raych.
"It's a map of Trantor, carefully programmed. Do me a favor, Raych, and clear off this tabletop."
Seldon placed the sphere more or less in the middle of the table and placed his hand on a keypad in the arm of his desk chair. He used his thumb to close a contact and the light in the room went out while the tabletop glowed with a soft ivory light that seemed about a centimeter deep. The sphere had flattened and expanded to the edges of the table.
The light slowly darkened in spots and took on a pattern. After some thirty seconds, Raych said in surprise, "It is a map of Trantor."
"Of course. I told you it was. You can't buy anything like this at a sector mall, though. This is one of those gadgets the armed forces play with. It could present Trantor as a sphere, but a planar projection would more clearly show what I want to show."
"And what is it you want to show, Dad?"
"Well, in the last year or two, there have been breakdowns. As you say, it's an old planet and we've got to expect breakdowns, but they've been coming more frequently and they would seem, almost uniformly, to be the result of human error."
"Isn't that reasonable?"
"Yes, of course. Within limits. This is true, even where earthquakes are involved."
"Earthquakes? On Trantor?"
"I admit Trantor is a fairly nonseismic planet-and a good thing, too, because enclosing a world in a dome when the world is going to shake itself badly several times a year and smash a section of that dome would be highly impractical. Your mother says that one of the reasons Trantor, rather than some other world, became the Imperial capital is that it was geologically moribund-that's her unflattering expression. Still, it might be moribund, but it's not dead. There are occasional minor earthquakes -three of them in the last two years."
"I wasn't aware of that, Dad."
"Hardly anyone is. The dome isn't a single object. It exists in hundreds of sections, each one of which can be lifted and set ajar to relieve tensions and compressions in case of an earthquake. Since an earthquake, when one does occur, lasts for only ten seconds to a minute, the opening endures only briefly. It comes and goes so rapidly that the Trantorians beneath are not even aware of it. They are much more aware of a mild tremor and a faint rattling of crockery than of the opening and closing of the dome overhead and the slight intrusion of the outside weather-whatever it is."
"That's good, isn't it?"
"It should be. It's computerized, of course. The onset of an earthquake anywhere sets off the key controls for the opening and closing of that section of the dome so that it opens just before the vibration becomes strong enough to do damage."
"Still good."
"But in the case of the three minor earthquakes over the last two years, the dome controls failed in each case. The dome never opened and, in each case, repairs were required. It took some time, it took some money, and the weather controls were less than optimum for a considerable period of time. Now, what, Raych, are the chances that the equipment would have failed in all three cases?"
"Not high?"
"Not high at all. Less than one in a hundred. One can suppose that someone had gimmicked the controls in advance of an earthquake. Now, about once a century, we have a magma leak, which is far more difficult to control-and I'd hate to think of the results if it went unnoticed until it was too late. Fortunately that hasn't happened and isn't likely to, but consider- Here on this map you will find the location of the breakdowns that have plagued us over the past two years and that seem to be attributable to human error, though we haven't once been able to tell to whom each might be attributed."
"That's