Prelude to Foundation - Isaac Asimov [37]
She smiled and later did surprisingly well on the tennis court. "Are you sure you never played tennis?" he said, puffing, after one session.
"Positive," she said.
The other set of embarrassments was more private. He learned the necessary techniques of historical research and then burned-in privateat his earlier attempts to make use of the computer's memory. It was simply an entirely different mind-set from that used in mathematics. It was equally logical, he supposed, since it could be used, consistently and without error, to move in whatever direction he wanted to, but it was a substantially different brand of logic from that to which he was accustomed.
But with or without instructions, whether he stumbled or moved in swiftly, he simply didn't get any results.
His annoyance made itself felt on the tennis court. Dors quickly reached the stage where it was no longer necessary to lob easy balls at her to give her time to judge direction and distance. That made it easy to forget that she was just a beginner and he expressed his anger in his swing, firing the ball back at her as though it were a laser beam made solid.
She came trotting up to the net and said, "I can understand your wanting to kill me, since it must annoy you to watch me miss the shots so often. How is it, though, that you managed to miss my head by about three centimeters that time? I mean, you didn't even nick me. Can't you do better than that?"
Seldon, horrified, tried to explain, but only managed to sound incoherent.
She said, "Look. I'm not going to face any other returns of yours today, so why don't we shower and then get together for some tea and whatever and you can tell me just what you were trying to kill. If it wasn't my poor head and if you don't get the real victim off your chest, you'll be entirely too dangerous on the other side of the net for me to want to serve as a target."
Over tea he said, "Dors, I've scanned history after history; just scanned, browsed. I haven't had time for deep study yet. Even so, it's become obvious. All the book-films concentrate on the same few events."
"Crucial ones. History-making ones."
"That's just an excuse. They're copying each other. There are twentyfive million worlds out there and there's significant mention of perhaps twenty-five."
Dors said, "You're reading general Galactic histories only. Look up the special histories of some of the minor worlds. On every world, however small, the children are taught local histories before they ever find out there's a great big Galaxy outside. Don't you yourself know more about Helicon, right now, than you know about the rise of Trantor or of the Great Interstellar War?"
"That sort of knowledge is limited too," said Seldon gloomily. "I know Heliconian geography and the stories of its settlement and of the malfeasance and misfeasance of the planet Jennisek-that's our traditional enemy, though our teachers carefully told us that we ought to say 'traditional rival.' But I never learned anything about the contributions of Helicon to general Galactic history."
"Maybe there weren't any."
"Don't be silly. Of course there were. There may not have been great, huge space battles involving Helicon or crucial rebellions or peace treaties. There may not have been some Imperial competitor making his base on Helicon. But there must have been subtle influences. Surely, nothing can happen anywhere without affecting everywhere else. Yet there's nothing I can find' to help me. wee here, Dors. In mathematics, all can be found in the computer; everything we know or have found out in twenty thousand years. In history, that's not so. Historians pick and choose and every one of them picks and chooses the same thing."
"But, Hari," said Dors, "mathematics is an orderly thing of human invention. One thing follows from another. There are definitions and axioms, all of which are known. It is . . . it is . . . all one piece. History is different. It is the unconscious working out of the deeds and thoughts