"Now the first crisis came fifty years after the establishment of the Foundation, and the second, thirty years later than that. Almost seventy-five years have gone since. It's time, Manlio, it's time."
Manlio rubbed his nose uncertainly, "And you've made your plans to meet this crisis?"
Sutt nodded.
"And I," continued Manlio, "am to play a part in it?"
Sutt nodded again, "Before we can meet the foreign threat of atomic power, we've got to put our own house in order. These traders"
"Ah!" The primate stiffened, and his eyes grew sharp.
"That's right. These traders. They are useful, but they are too strong and too uncontrolled. They are Outlanders, educated apart from religion. On the one hand, we put knowledge into their hands, and on the other, we remove our strongest hold upon them."
"If we can prove treachery?"
"If we could, direct action would be simple and sufficient. But that doesn't signify in the least. Even if treason among them did not exist, they would form an uncertain element in our society. They wouldn't be bound to us by patriotism or common descent, or even by religious awe. Under their secular leadership, the outer provinces, which, since Hardin's time, look to us as the Holy Planet, might break away."
"I see all that, but the cure"
"The cure must come quickly, before the Seldon Crisis becomes acute. If nuclear weapons are without and disaffection within, the odds might be too great." Sutt put down the empty glass he had been fingering, "This is obviously your job."
"Mine?"
"I can't do it. My office is appointive and has no legislative standing."
"The mayor"
"Impossible. His personality is entirely negative. He is energetic only in evading responsibility. But if an independent party arose that might endanger re-election, he might allow himself to be led."
"But, Sutt, I lack the aptitude for practical politics."
"Leave that to me. Who knows, Manlio? Since Salvor Hardin's time, the primacy and the mayoralty have never been combined in a single person. But it might happen now if your job were well done."
3.
And at the other end of town, in homelier surroundings, Hober Mallow kept a second appointment. He had listened long, and now he said cautiously, "Yes, I've heard of your campaigns to get trader representation in the council. But why me, Twer?"
Jaim Twer, who would remind you any time, asked or unasked, that he was in the first group of Outlanders to receive a lay education at the Foundation, beamed.
"I know what I'm doing," he said. "Remember when I met you first, last year."
"At the Trader's Convention."
"Right. You ran the meeting. You had those red-necked oxen planted in their seats, then put them in your shirtpocket and walked off with them. And you're all right with the Foundation masses, too. You've got glamor or, at any rate, solid adventure-publicity, which is the same thing."
"Very good," said Mallow, dryly. "But why now?"
'Because now's our chance. Do you know that the Secretary of Education has handed in his resignation? It's not out in the open yet, but it will be."
"How do you know?"
"That never mind" He waved a disgusted hand. "It's so. The Actionist party is splitting wide open, and we can murder it right now on a straight question of equal rights for traders; or, rather, democracy, pro- and anti-."
Mallow lounged back in his chair and stared at his thick fingers, "Uh-uh. Sorry, Twer. I'm leaving next week on business. You'll have to get someone else."
Twer stared, "Business? What kind of business?"
"Very super-secret. Triple-A priority. All that, you know. Had a talk with the mayor's own secretary."
"Snake Sutt?" Jaim Twer grew excited. "A trick. The son-of-a-spacer is getting rid of you. Mallow"
"Hold on!" Mallow's hand fell on the other's balled fist. "Don't go into a blaze. If it's a trick, I'll be back some day for the reckoning. if it isn't, your snake, Sutt, is playing into our hands. Listen, there's a Seldon crisis coming up."
Mallow waited for a reaction but it never came. Twer merely stared. "What's a Seldon crisis?"
"Galaxy!" Mallow exploded angrily at the anticlimax, "What the blue blazes did you do when you went to school? What do you mean anyway by a fool question like that?"
The elder man frowned, "If you'll explain"
There was a long pause, then, "I'll explain." Mallow's eyebrows lowered, and he spoke slowly. "When the Galactic Empire began to die at the edges, and when the ends of the Galaxy reverted to barbarism and dropped away, Hari Seldon and his band of psychologists planted a colony, the Foundation, out here in the middle of the mess, so that we could incubate art, science, and technology, and form the nucleus of the Second Empire."
"Oh, yes, yes"
"I'm not finished," said the trader, coldly. "The future course of the Foundation was plotted according to the science of psychohistory, then highly developed, and conditions arranged so as to bring about a series of crises that will force us most rapidly along the route to future Empire. Each crisis, each Seldon crisis, marks an epoch in our history. We're approaching one now our third."
Twer shrugged. "I suppose this was mentioned in school, but I've been out of school a long time longer than you."
"I suppose so. Forget it. What matters is that I'm being sent out into the middle of the development of this crisis. There's no telling what I'll have when I come back, and there is a council election every year."