Second Foundation - Isaac Asimov [26]
“And then I summoned you to take over this expedition and it didn’t set you back. I watched your emotions. It didn’t bother you. You overplayed the confidence there, Channis. No man of real competence could have avoided a dash of uncertainty at a job like that. Since your mind did avoid it, it was either a foolish one or a controlled one.
“It was easy to test the alternatives. I seized your mind at a moment of relaxation and filled it with grief for an instant and then removed it. You were angry afterwards with such accomplished art that I could have sworn it was a natural reaction, but for that which went first. For when I wrenched at your emotions, for just one instant, for one tiny instant before you could catch yourself your mind resisted. It was all I needed to know.
“No one could have resisted me, even for that tiny instant, without control similar to mine.”
Channis’ voice was low and bitter: “Well, then? Now what?”
“And now you die—as a Second Foundationer. Quite necessary, as I believe you realize.”
And once again Channis stared into the muzzle of a blaster. A muzzle guided this time by a mind, not like Pritcher’s capable of offhand twisting to suit himself, but by one as mature as his own and as resistant to force as his own.
And the period of time allotted him for a correction of events was small.
What followed thereafter is difficult to describe by one with the normal complement of senses and the normal incapacity for emotional control.
Essentially, this is what Channis realized in the tiny space of time involved in the pushing of the Mule’s thumb upon the trigger-contact.
The Mule’s current emotional makeup was one of a hard and polished determination, unmisted by hesitation in the least. Had Channis been sufficiently interested afterward to calculate the time involved from the determination to shoot to the arrival of the disintegrating energies, he might have realized that his leeway was about one-fifth of a second.
That was barely time.
What the Mule realized in that same tiny space of time was that the emotional potential of Channis’ brain had surged suddenly upwards without his own mind feeling any impact and that, simultaneously, a flood of pure, thrilling hatred cascaded upon him from an unexpected direction.
It was that new emotional element that jerked his thumb off the contact. Nothing else could have done it, and almost together with his change of action came complete realization of the new situation.
It was a tableau that endured far less than the significance adhering to it should require from a dramatic standpoint. There was the Mule, thumb off the blaster, staring intently upon Channis. There was Channis, taut, not quite daring to breathe yet. And there was Pritcher, convulsed in his chair; every muscle at a spasmodic breaking point; every tendon writhing in an effort to hurl forward; his face twisted at last out of schooled woodenness into an unrecognizable death mask of horrid hate; and his eyes only and entirely and supremely upon the Mule.
Only a word or two passed between Channis and the Mule—only a word or two and that utterly revealing stream of emotional consciousness that remains forever the true interplay of understanding between such as they. For the sake of our own limits, it is necessary to translate into words what went on, then, and thenceforward.
Channis said, tensely: “You’re between two fires, First Citizen. You can’t control two minds simultaneously, not when one of them is mine—so you have your choice. Pritcher is free of your Conversion now. I’ve snapped the bonds. He’s the old Pritcher; the one who tried to kill you once; the one who thinks you’re the enemy of all that is free and right and holy; and he’s the one besides who knows that you’ve debased him to helpless adulation for five years. I’m holding him back now by suppressing his will, but if you kill me that ends, and in considerably less time than you could shift