Prelude to Foundation

He looked out the window at the rise and fall of the domes, at the general green in this area of the planet, the occasional patches of what were little less than jungles, the arms of the sea they occasionally passed over, with its leaden waters taking on a sudden all-too-brief sparkle when the sun peeped out momentarily from the heavy cloud layer.

An hour or so into the flight, Dors, who was viewing a new historical novel without much in the way of apparent enjoyment, clicked it off and said, "I wish I knew where we were going."

"If you can’t tell," said Seldon, "then I certainly can’t. You’ve been on Trantor longer than I have."

"Yes, but only on the inside," said Dors. "Out here, with only Upperside below me, I’m as lost as an unborn infant would be."

"Oh well.-Presumably, Hummin knows what he’s doing."

"I’m sure he does," replied Dors rather tartly, "but that may have nothing to do with the present situation. Why do you continue to assume any of this represents his initiative?"

Seldon’s eyebrows lifted. "Now that you ask, I don’t know. I just assumed it. Why shouldn’t this be his?"

"Because whoever arranged it didn’t specify that I be taken along with you. I simply don’t see Hummin forgetting my existence. And because he didn’t come himself, as he did at Streeling and at Mycogen."

"You can’t always expect him to, Dors. He might well be occupied. The astonishing thing is not that he didn’t come on this occasion but that he did come on the previous ones."

"Assuming he didn’t come himself, would he send a conspicuous and lavish flying palace like this?" She gestured around her at the large luxurious jet.

"It might simply have been available. And he might have reasoned that no one would expect something as noticeable as this to be carrying fugitives who were desperately trying to avoid detection. The well-known double-double-cross."

"Too well-known, in my opinion. And would he send an idiot like Sergeant Thalus in his place?"

"The sergeant is no idiot. He’s simply been trained to complete obedience. With proper instructions, he could be utterly reliable."

"There you are, Hari. We come back to that. Why didn’t he get proper instructions? It’s inconceivable to me that Chetter Hummin would tell him to carry you out of Dahl and not say a word about me. Inconceivable."

And to that Seldon had no answer and his spirits sank.

Another hour passed and Dors said, "It looks as if it’s getting colder outside. The green of Upperside is turning brown and I believe the heaters have turned on."

"What does that signify?"

"Dahl is in the tropic zone so obviously we’re going either north or south-and a considerable distance too. If I had some notion in which direction the nightline was I could tell which."

Eventually, they passed over a section of shoreline where there was a rim of ice hugging the domes where they were rimmed by the sea. And then, quite unexpectedly, the air-jet angled downward.

Raych screamed, "We’re goin’ to hit! We’re goin’ to smash up!"

Seldon’s abdominal muscles tightened and he clutched the arms of his seat. Dors seemed unaffected.

She said, "The pilots up front don’t seem alarmed. We’ll be tunneling."

And, as she said so, the jet’s wings swept backward and under it and, like a bullet, the air-jet entered a tunnel. Blackness swept back over them in an instant and a moment later the lighting system in the tunnel turned on. The walls of the tunnel snaked past the jet on either side.

"I don’t suppose I’ll ever be sure they know the tunnel isn’t already occupied," muttered Seldon.

"I’m sure they had reassurance of a clear tunnel some dozens of kilometers earlier," said Dors. "At any rate, I presume this is the last stage of the journey and soon we’ll know where we are."

She paused and then added, "And I further presume we won’t like the knowledge when we have it."

84.

The air-jet sped out of the tunnel and onto a long runway with a roof so high that it seemed closer to true daylight than anything Seldon had seen since he had left the Imperial Sector.

They came to a halt in a shorter time than Seldon would have expected, but at the price of an uncomfortable pressure forward. Raych, in particular, was crushed against the seat before him and was finding it difficult to breathe till Dors’s hand on his shoulder pulled him back slightly.

Sergeant Thalus, impressive and erect, left the jet and moved to the rear, where he opened the door of the passenger compartment and helped the three out, one by one.

Seldon was last. He half-turned as he passed the sergeant, saying, "It was a pleasant trip, Sergeant."

A slow smile spread over the sergeant’s large face and lifted his mustachioed upper lip. He touched the visor of his cap in what was half a salute and said, "Thank you again, Doctor."

They were then ushered into the backseat of a ground-car of lavish design and the sergeant himself pushed into the front seat and drove the vehicle with a surprisingly light touch.

They passed through wide roadways, flanked by tall, well-designed buildings, all glistening in broad daylight. As elsewhere on Trantor, they heard the distant drone of an Expressway. The walkways were crowded with what were, for the most part, well-dressed people. The surroundings were remarkably-almost excessively-clean.

Seldon’s sense of security sank further. Dors’s misgivings concerning their destination now seemed justified after all. He leaned toward her and said, "Do you think we are back in the Imperial Sector?"

She said, "No, the buildings are more rococo in the Imperial Sector and there’s less Imperial parkishness to this sector-if you know what I mean."