Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov [115]
Hummin said, "Are you sure you could trust what you heard? After many thousands of years, would you be willing to rely on the robot's early memories? How much distortion would have entered into them?"
"That's right," said Dors suddenly. "It would be like the computerized records I told you of, Hari. Slowly, those robot memories would be discarded, lost, erased, distorted. You can only go back so far and the farther you go back, the less reliable the information becomes-no matter what you do."
Hummin nodded. "I've heard it referred to as a kind of uncertainty principle in information."
"But wouldn't it be possible," said Seldon thoughtfully, "that some information, for special reasons, would be preserved? Parts of the Mycogenian Book may well refer to events of twenty thousand years ago and yet be very largely as it had been originally. The more valued and the more carefully preserved particular information is, the more long-lasting and accurate it may be."
"The key word is 'particular.' What the Book may care to preserve may not be what you wish to have preserved and what a robot may remember best may be what you wish him to remember least."
Seldon said in despair, "In whatever direction I turn to seek a way of working out psychohistory, matters so arrange themselves as to make it impossible. Why bother trying?"
"It might seem hopeless now," said Hummin unemotionally, "but given the necessary genius, a route to psychohistory may be found that none of us would at this moment expect. Give yourself more time. -But we're coming to a rest area. Let us pull off and have dinner."
Over the lamb patties on rather tasteless bread (most unpalatable after the fare at Mycogen), Seldon said, "You seem to assume, Hummin, that I am the possessor of 'the necessary genius.' I may not be, you know."
Hummin said, "That's true. You may not be. However, I know of no alternate candidate for the post, so I must cling to you."
And Seldon sighed and said, "Well, I'll try, but I'm out of any spark of hope. Possible but not practical, I said to begin with, and I'm more convinced of that now than I ever was before."
* * *
Heatsink
AMARYL, YUGO- . . . A mathematician who, next to Hari Seldon himself, may be considered most responsible for working out the details of psychohistory. It was he who . . .
. . . Yet the conditions under which he began life are almost more dramatic than his mathematical accomplishments. Born into the hopeless poverty of the lower classes of Dahl, a sector of ancient Tractor, he might have passed his life in utter obscurity were it not for the fact that Seldon, quite by accident, encountered him in the course of . . .
ENCYCLOPEDIA GALACTICA
61.
The Emperor of all the Galaxy felt weary-physically weary. His lips ached from the gracious smile he had had to place on his face at careful intervals. His neck was stiff from having inclined his head this way and that in a feigned show of interest. His ears pained from having to listen. His whole body throbbed from having to rise and to sit and to turn and to hold out his hand and to nod.
It was merely a state function where one had to meet Mayors and Viceroys and Ministers and their wives or husbands from here and there in Trantor and (worse) from here and there in the Galaxy. There were nearly a thousand present, all in costumes that varied from the ornate to the downright outlandish, and he had had to listen to a babble of different accents made the worse by an effort to speak the Emperor's Galactic as spoken at the Galactic University. Worst of all, the Emperor had had to remember to avoid making commitments of substance, while freely applying the lotion of words without substance.
All had been recorded, sight and sound-very discreetly-and Eto Demerzel would go over it to see if Cleon, First of that Name, had behaved himself. That, of course, was only the way that the Emperor put it to himself. Demerzel would surely say that he