Branno said, "You know you cannot do as you say."
"Do you, then, wish to risk the consequences I have described?" asked Gendibal with an air of cool indifference.
Kodell leaned over and whispered, "For Seldon's sake, Mayor..."
Gendibal said (not exactly at once, for it took light - and everything at light-speed - a little over one second to travel from one vessel to the other), "I follow your thoughts, Kodell. No need to whisper. I also follow the Mayor's thoughts. She is irresolute, so you have no need to panic just yet. And the mere fact that I know this is ample evidence that your shield leaks."
"It can be strengthened," said the Mayor defiantly.
"So can my mentalic force," said Gendibal.
"But I sit here at my ease, consuming merely physical energy to maintain the shield, and I have enough to maintain that shield for very long periods of time. You must use mentalic energy to penetrate the shield and you will tire."
"I am not tired," said Gendibal. "At the present moment, neither of you is capable of giving any order to any member of the crew of your ship or to any crewman on any other ship. I can manage so much without any harm to you, but do not make any unusual effort to escape this control, for if I match that by increasing my own force, as I will have to do, you will be damaged as I have said."
"I will wait," said Branno, placing her hands in her lap with every sign of solid patience. "You will tire and when you do, the orders that will go out will not be to destroy you, for you will then be harmless. The orders will be to send the main Foundation Fleet against Trantor. If you wish to save your world - surrender. A second orgy of destruction will not leave your organization untouched, as the first one did at the time of the Great Sack."
"Don't you see that if I feel myself tiring, Mayor, which I won't, I can save my world very simply by destroying you before my strength to do so is gone?"
"You won't do that. Your main task is to maintain the Seldon Plan. To destroy the Mayor of Terminus and thus to strike a blow at the prestige and confidence of the First Foundation, producing a staggering setback to its power and encouraging its enemies everywhere, will produce such a disruption to the Plan that it will be almost as bad for you as the destruction of Trantor. You might as well surrender."
"Are you willing to gamble on my reluctance to destroy you?"
Branno's chest heaved as she took a deep breath and let it out slowly. She then said firmly, "Yes!"
Kodell, sitting at her side, paled.
Gendibal stared at the figure of Branno, superimposed upon the volume of room just in front of the wall. It was a little flickery and hazy thanks to the interference of the shield. The man next to her was almost featureless with haze, for Gendibal had no energy to waste on him. He had to concentrate on the Mayor.
To be sure, she had no image of him in return. She had no way of knowing that he too had a companion, for instance. She could make no judgment from his expressions, from his body language. In this respect, she was at a disadvantage.
Everything he had said was true. He could smash her at the cost of an enormous expenditure of mentalic force - and in so doing, he could scarcely avoid disrupting her mind irreparably.
Yet everything she had said was true as well. Destroying her would damage the Plan as much as the Mule himself had damaged it. Indeed, the new damage might be more serious, since it was now later in the game and there would be less time to retrieve the misstep.
Worse still, there was Gaia, which was still an unknown quantity - with its mentalic field remaining at the faint and tantalizing edge of detection.
For a moment, he touched Novi's mind to make sure that the flow was still there. It was, and it was unchanged.
She could not have sensed that touch in any way, but she turned to him and in an awed whisper said, "Master, there is a faint mist there. Is it to that you talk?"
She must have sensed the mist through the small connection between their two minds. Gendibal put a finger to his lips. "Have no fear, Novi. Close your eyes and rest."
He raised his voice. "Mayor Branno, your gamble is a good one in this respect. I do not wish to destroy you at once, since I think that if I explain something to you, you will listen to reason and there will then be no need to destroy in either direction.
"Suppose, Mayor, that you win out and that I surrender. What follows? In an orgy of self-confidence and in undue reliance on your mentalic shield, you and your successors will attempt to spread your power over the Galaxy with undue haste. In doing so, you will actually postpone the establishment of the Second Empire, because you will also destroy the Seldon Plan."
Branno said, "I am not surprised that you do not wish to destroy me at once and I think that, as you sit there, you will be forced to realize that you do not dare to destroy me at all."
Gendibal said, "Do not deceive yourself with self-congratulatory folly. Listen to me. The majority of the Galaxy is still non-Foundation and, to a great extent, anti-Foundation. There are even portions of the Foundation Federation itself that have not forgotten their days of independence. If the Foundation moves too quickly in the wake of my surrender, it will deprive the rest of the Galaxy of its greatest weakness - its disunity and indecision. You will force them to unite by fear and you will feed the tendency toward rebellion within."
"You are threatening with clubs of straw," said Branno. "We have the power to win easily against all enemies, even if every world in the non-Foundation Galaxy combined against us, and even if these were helped by a rebellion in half the worlds of the Federation itself. There would be no problem."