Foundation's Edge - Isaac Asimov [104]
"I will remain in Sayshell. And you'll stay here, too. You can't navigate the ship without me, so if Compor has influenced you, he has influenced the wrong one."
"Very well, Golan. We'll stay in Sayshell until we have independent reasons to leave. The worst thing we can do, after all--worse than either staying or going--is to fall out with each other. Come, old chap, if I had been influenced, would I be able to change my mind and go along with you cheerfully, as I plan to do now?"
Trevize thought for a moment and then, as though with an inner shake, smiled and held out his hand. "Agreed, Janov. Now let's get back to the ship and make another start tomorrow. --If we can think of one."
5.
MUNN LI COMPOR DID NOT REMEMBER WHEN HE had been recruited. For one thing, he had been a child at the time; for another, the agents of the Second Foundation were meticulous in removing their traces as far as possible.
Compor was an "Observer" and, to a Second Foundationer, he was instantly recognizable as such.
It meant that Compor was acquainted with mentalics and could converse with Second Foundationers in their own fashion to a degree, but he was in the lowest rank of the hierarchy. He could catch glimpses of minds, but he could not adjust them. The education he had received had never gone that far. He was an Observer, not a Doer.
It made him second-class at best, but he did not mind--much. He knew his importance in the scheme of things.
During the early centuries of the Second Foundation, it had underestimated the task before it. It had imagined that its handful of members could monitor the entire Galaxy and that Seldon's Plan, to be maintained, would require only the most occasional, the lightest touch, here and there.
The Mule had stripped them of these delusions. Coming from nowhere, he had caught the Second Foundation (and, of course, the First--though that didn't matter) utterly by surprise and had left them helpless. It took five years before a counterattack could be organized, and then only at the cost of a number of lives.
With Palver a full recovery was made, again at a distressing cost, and he finally took the appropriate measures. The operations of the Second Foundation, he decided, must be enormously expanded without at the same time increasing the chances of detection unduly, so he instituted the corps of Observers.
Compor did not know how many Observers were in the Galaxy or even how many there were on Terminus. It was not his business to know. Ideally there should be no detectable connection between any two Observers, so that the loss of one would not entail the loss of any other. All connections were with the upper echelons on Trantor.
It was Compor's ambition to go to Trantor someday. Though he thought it extremely unlikely, he knew that occasionally an Observer might be brought to Trantor and promoted, but that was rare. The qualities that made for a good Observer were not those that pointed toward the Table.
There was Gendibal, for instance, who was four years younger than Compor. He must have been recruited as a boy, just as Compor was, but he had been taken directly to Trantor and was now a Speaker. Compor had no illusions as to why that should be. He had been much in contact with Gendibal of late and he had experienced the power of that young man's mind. He could not have stood up against it for a second.
Compor was not often conscious of a lowly status. There was almost never occasion to consider it. After all (as in the case of other Observers, he imagined) it was only lowly by the standards of Trantor. On their own non-Trantorian worlds, in their own non-mentalic societies, it was easy for Observers to obtain high status.
Compor, for instance, had never had trouble getting into good schools or finding good company. He had been able to use his mentalics in a simple way to enhance his natural intuitive ability (that natural ability had been why he had been recruited in the first place, he was sure) and, in this way, to prove himself a star at hyperspatial