No—no, that was wrong. The power did not lie in the ship, it was inert metal and will-less electronic intellect, a cosmic splinter that without man would spin darkly into eternity. The will, and hence the power, to destroy lay in men—in one man. One gorilla in uniform. One caveman holding a marshal’s baton. One pulsing mass of colloidal tissue, ultimately unstable, not even knowing its own desire.

  Heym scowled and drew heavily on his cigarette. Goram had been soothed into comparative geniality, but his frantic notion of death as panacea was as strong as ever. The creature wasn’t even consistent—one moment talking philosophy of history as if he had brains, the next snarling his mindlessly destructive xenophobia. There was something wrong about Goram—though it might only be my own ignorance of practical psychology, thought Heym. As a research man I’m used to dealing with only one factor at a time. A situation in life is really too complex for me—I don’t have enough rules of thumb. I wish I’d brought a practicing technician along, say Kharva or Junn—they’d soon analyze the mental mechanism of our marshal and push the appropriate buttons.

  The old sickening fear fell anew on him. What if, after all he should fail—what if fifteen hundred years of work were to be sponged out at the arbitrary whim of a superstition-ridden military moron? If I fail, the Empire fails with me—I know it. And it isn’t fair! I should have been told what I was being recalled to Sol for. I should have had a chance to prepare my arguments better. I should have been allowed to take a practical psycho along—but no, they obviously couldn’t permit me to do that or I’d have had everything my own way.

  But couldn’t they see? Can’t they understand? Or has the worship of statism penetrated so deep that it’s like an instinct, a blind need for which everything else must be sacrificed?

  He turned and went heavily toward his cabin to make ready.

  * * *

  Screened by an invisibility field, the lifeboat spiraled down toward the surface. Goram let the robopilot handle the vessel, and spent most of his time peering through a field-penetrating visiscope.

  “Not much sign of habitation,” he said.

  “No, I told you the population was still small,” replied Heym. “After all, only a few thousand were planted originally and the struggle for existence was as hard as with any savages for the first few centuries. Only lately has the population really begun growing.”

  “And you say they have cities now—machines—civilization? It’s hard to believe.”

  “Yes, it is. The whole result has been a triumphant confirmation of the psychotechnic theory of history, but nevertheless the sheer spectacular character of the success has awed us. I can understand it’s a little frightening. One naturally thinks a race which can go from naked savages to mechanized civilization in fifteen hundred years is somehow demonic. Yet they’re humans, fully as human as anyone else in the Galaxy, the same old Earthly stock as all men. They’ve simply enjoyed the advantage of freedom from stupidity.”

  “How many stations are there?”

  “About a hundred—planetary colonies, with colonists in ignorance of their own origin, where various special conditions are maintained. Different environments, for instance, or special human stocks. The progress of history is being observed on all of them, secretly, and invaluable data on mass-psychologic processes are thereby gained. But Seventeen has been by far the most fruitful.”

  Goram wrinkled his low forehead. With concealed distaste, Heym thought how very like an ape he looked—throwback, atavist, cunning in his own narrow field but otherwise barely above moron level—typical militarist, the biped beast who had ridden mankind’s back like some nightmarish vampire through all history—except on the one planet of Valgor’s Star—

  “I don’t quite see the point,” admitted the marshal. “Why spend all that time and money on creating artificial conditions that you’d never meet in real life?”

  “It’s the scientific method,” said Heym, wondering at what elementary level he would have to begin his explanation. How stupid could one be and hold a marshal’s position? “The real world is an interaction of uncounted factors, constantly changing in relation to themselves and each other, far too vast and complex to be understood in its entirety. In order to find casual relationships, the scientist has to perform experiments in which he varies only one factor at a time, observing its effect—and, of course, running control experiments at the same time. From these data he infers similar relationships in the real world. By means of theoretical analysis of observed facts he can proceed to predict new phenomena—if these predictions are borne out by further observation, the theory is probably—though never certainly—right, and can be used as a guide in understanding and controlling the events of the real world.”

  In spite of himself, Heym was warming up to his subject. After all, it was his whole life. He went on in a gathering rush of words:

  “All the evidence shows that reality is not object but process. You yourself are not the same object as an instant ago—physicochemical-psychological changes, the very change of entropy which is ‘time,’ are all continuous. They are rapid in the case of an organism, slow in the case of a rock, say, but always continuous. The object is an abstraction, a set of constant characteristics of a process—more or less constant, I should say, since nothing is permanent, change, process, is always continuous. The grammatical distinction between noun and verb has misled us to think there is a corresponding distinction between what an object is and what it does—completely false, as a moment’s reflection will show.”

  “Hm-m-m.” Gorman looked out the visiscope. The boat was sweeping over a broad plain, yellow with ripening grain. A few primitive villages, houses built of stone and wood and brick, were scattered over the great landscape, a peaceful scene, reminiscent of civilization’s dawn. “The planet looks backward enough,” grunted Goram dubiously.

  “It is,” said Heym eagerly. “I assure you it is.”

  “Well…you were saying—” Goram didn’t look at all sure of what Heym had been saying. “Get to the point.”

  “Civilization—history, if you will —is a process like all else,” resumed the scientist. “A nation is not a concrete object, a giant man, a god or All-Father to whom one owes fanatical loyalty and unquestioning obedience. How much misery could have been prevented if men had seen that simple, common sense fact! A nation is part of a culture, and a culture is an interaction of certain peoples with themselves, their neighbors, and their ‘natural’ environment over a space-time region. When the process has lost its distinctive characteristics, its continuity of development, we say the culture is dead, but that is only a convenient figure of speech. Actually causality is indefinitely extended. We are still influenced by events that occurred in prehistoric ages.

  “The early students of culture were struck by the similarity of development of different civilizations, as if man went along one inevitable historic path. And in a way he did—because one thing leads to another. The expanding units of culture clash, there are ever fiercer wars, old fears and grudges intensify, economic breakdowns increase the misery, finally, and usually unwittingly and even unwillingly, one nation overcomes all others to protect itself and founds a ‘universal state’ which brings a certain peace of exhaustion but eventually decays and collapses of its own weaknesses or under the impact of alien invaders. That’s exactly what happened to mankind as a whole, when he exploded into the Galaxy—only this time the fearful scale and resources of the wars all but shattered the civilization; and the Solarian Empire, the passive rigidity solving the problems of the time of troubles by force, has lasted immensely longer than most preceding universal states, because its rulers have enough knowledge of mass-psychologic processes to have a certain control over them and all the power of a hundred thousand planetary systems to back their decisions.”

  Goram looked a little dazed. “I still don’t see what this has to do with the Foundation and its stations,” he complained.

  “Simply this,” said Heym, “that though history is a natural process, like anything else, it is peculiarly hard to understand and hence almost impossible to control. This is not only because of the very complex character of the interactions but because we ourselves are concerned in it—the observer is part of the phenomenon. And also, it had long been impossible to conduct controlled experiments in history and thus separate out causal factors and observe their unhindered working. On the basis of thousands of years of history as revealed—usually quite incompletely—by records and by archeology, and of extrapolations from individual and mob psychological knowledge, and whatever other data were available, the scientists of the period preceding the Empire worked out a semi-mathematical theory of history which gave some idea of the nature of the processes involved—causal factors and the manner of their action. This theory made possible qualitative predictions of the behavior of masses of men under certain conditions. Thus the early emperors knew what factors to vary in order to control their provinces. They could tell whether a certain measure might, say, precipitate a revolt, or just what phrasing to use in proclamations for the desired effect. If you want a man to do something for you, you don’t usually slap him in the face—it’s much more effective to appeal to his vanity or his prejudices, best of all to convince him it’s what he himself wants to do. But once in a while, a face slapping becomes necessary. Why, even today the barbarians are held at bay more by subtle psychological and economic pressures dividing them against each other and putting them in awe of us than by actual military might.”

  An ocean rolled beneath the boat, gray and green, shaking its white mane out on the restless horizon. “Swing northeast,” said Heym. “The planet’s greatest city lies that way, on a large island.”

  “Good. A city’s a good place to observe a people. Can we go around incognito?”

  “Naturally. I know the language well enough to pass for a traveler from some other part of the world, There’s a lot of intercourse between continents. The cities are quite cosmopolitan.”

  “Well—go on. You’ve still not explained why the station and all this rigmarole of secrecy.”

  “I was laying the background,” said Heym, unable to keep all the tiredness out of his voice. Can I really talk this moron over? Can anyone? Reason is wasted on an ape. “It’s really very simple. The crude psychotechnology available made it possible for the early emperors to conquer most of the human-inhabited Galaxy, hold it together, and reach an uneasy truce with the Taranian and Comi Empires. Our military might can hold off the barbarians and the Magellanic raiders, and have sufficient power left over to police the three hundred trillion citizens.

  “Yet our science is primitive. On that vast scale, it can only deal with the simplest possible situations. It’s all we can do to keep the Empire stable. If it should develop on the colossal scale of which it is capable and with all the unpredictable erraticism of the free human mind, It would simply run away from us. We have trouble enough keeping industry and commerce flowing smoothly when we know exactly how it should work. If we permitted free invention and progress, there’d be an industrial revolution every year—there is never a large proportion of discoverers, but with the present population the number would be immense. Our carefully evolved techniques of control would become obsolete, there’d be economic anarchy, conflict, suffering, individuals rising to power outside the present social framework and threatening the co-ordinating authority—with planet-smashing power to back both sides and all our enemies on the watch for a moment’s instability.

  “That’s only one example. It applies to any field. Science, philosophy—we can control known religions, channel the impulses to safe directions—but a new religion, rousing discontent, containing unknown elements—a billion fanatics going to war—No! We have to keep status quo, which we understand, at the cost of an uncontrollable advance into the unknown.

  “The Empire really exists only to simplify the psychotechnic problem of co-ordination. Enforcement of population stability—good, we don’t have to worry about controlling trillions of new births, there’s no land hunger. Stable industry, ossified physical science, state religion, totalitarian control of the entire life span—good, we know exactly what we’re dealing with and our decisions will be obeyed—imagine the situation if three hundred trillion people were free to do exactly as they pleased in the Galaxy! Subjugation of nonhuman aborigines, or outright extermination—good, we only have to deal with human-type minds and needs, which are complex enough, not with a million or a trillion psychologies and past histories as wildly different as the planets of origin. Heym shrugged. “Why go on? You know as well as I do that the Empire is only an answer to a problem of survival—not a good answer, but the best our limited knowledge can make.”

  “Hah!” Goram’s exclamation was triumphant. “And you want to turn a world of unpredictable geniuses loose in that!”

  “If I thought for an instant there was any danger of this people’s becoming a disrupting factor, I’d be the very first to advocate sterilization,” said Heym. “After all I want to live, too. But there’s nothing to fear. Instead, there is—hope.”

  “What hope?” snorted Goram, “Personally, I can’t see what you want, anyway. For three thousand years, we’ve kept man satisfied. Who’d want to change it?”

  Heym bit back his temper. “Aside from the fact that the contentment is like death,” he said, “history shows that universal states don’t endure forever. Sooner or later, we’ll face something that will overwhelm us. Unless we’ve evolved ourselves. But safe evolution is only possible when we know enough psychotechnics to keep the process orderly and peaceful—when our science is really quantitative. The Stations, and especially Seventeen, are giving us the information we must have to develop such a science.”

  * * *

  The island lay a few kilometers north of the great northern continent. A warm stream in the ocean made the climate equable, so that the land lay green in the gray immensity of sea, but polar air swept south with fog and rain and snow, storms roaring over the horizon and the sun stabbing bright lances down through a mightily stooping sky of restless clouds and galloping winds. Heym thought that the stimulating weather had as much to do as the favorable location along the northern trade routes with the islanders’ leadership in the planet’s civilization.

  Many villages lay in the fields and valleys and on the edges of the forest that still filled the interior, but there was only one city, on an estuary not far from the southern coast. From the air, it was not impressive to one who had seen the world cities of Sol and Sirius and Antares, a sprawling collection of primitive, often thatch-roofed, dwellings that could hardly have housed more than a million, the narrow cobbled streets crowded with pedestrians and animal-drawn vehicles, the harbor where a few steam- or oil-driven vessels were all but lost in the throng of wind-powered ships, the almost prehistoric airport—but the place had the character, subtle and unmistakable, of a city, a community knowing of more than its own horizon inclosed and influencing events beyond the bounds of sight.

  “Can we land without being detected?” inquired Goram.

  Heym laughed. “An odd question for a military man to ask. This boat is so well screened that the finest instruments of the Imperial navy would have trouble locating us. Oh, yes, we observers have been landing from time to time all through the station’s history.”

  “I must say the place looks backward enough,” said Coram dubiously. “The existence of cities is certainly evidence of crude transportation.”

  “Well”—honesty forced Heym to argue—“not necessarily. The city, that is, the multi-purpose community, is one criterion of whether a society is civilized or merely barbaric, in the technical anthropological sense. It’s true that cities as definite centers disappeared on Earth after the Atomic Revolution, but that was simply because such closely spaced buildings were no longer necessary. In the sense of close relation to the rest of mankind and of resultant co-ordination, Earth’s people kept right on having cities. And today the older planets of the Empire have become so heavily populated that the crowded structures are reappearing—in effect, the whole world becomes one vast city. But I will agree that the particular stage of city evolution existing here on Seventeen is primitive.”

  Goram set the boat down in a vacant field outside the community’s limits. “What now?” he asked

  “Well, I suppose you’ll want to spend a time just walking around the place.” Heym fumbled in a bag. “I brought the proper equipment, clothes and money of the local type. Planetary type, that is—since a universal coinage was established at the same time as a common language was adopted for international use and nobody cares what sort of dress you wear.” He unfolded the brief summer garments, shorts and sandals and tunic of bleached and woven plant fiber. Funny thing,” he mused, “how man has always made a virtue of necessity. The lands threatened with foreign invasion came to glorify militarism and war. The people who had to work hard considered idleness disgraceful. Dwellers in a northern climate, who had to wear clothes, made nudity immoral. But our colonists here are free of that need for compensation and self-justification You can work, think, marry, eat, dress, whatever you want to do, just as you please, and if you aren’t stepping on someone else’s toes too hard nobody cares. Which indicates that intolerance is characteristic of stupidity, while the true intellectual is naturally inclined to live and let live.”

  Goram struggled awkwardly and distastefully into the archaic garments. “How about weapons?” he asked.

  “No need to carry them. No one does, except in places where wild animals might be dangerous. In fact, arms are about the only thing in which the colonists’ inventiveness has lagged. They never got past the bow and arrow. Aside from a few man-to-man duels in the early stages of their history, and now abandoned, they’ve never fought each other.”