The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (108 page)

Asimov still had a deep attachment to Seldon and his Plan, and he hadn’t yet completely cast off the spell of Toynbee. He tells us: “I was horrified. No, I said, no, no, no, no. But Campbell said: Yes, yes, yes, yes, and I knew I wasn’t going to sell him a no, no.”
⁸⁹⁶

Asimov wasn’t just being pushed in a direction he didn’t want to go, however. By this time, he had already begun to work his way out of the mood of extreme determinism that had gripped him, and to respond to the new current of non-rational transcendence. This may be seen in the positronic robot story which was the specific stimulus for his trip to New York to see Campbell.

The title of this story is a clue to the role that it had in Asimov’s progression of thought. He called it “Escape.” However, since a story with that title had already appeared in the April 1943
Astounding
—one of the issues that Asimov hadn’t read—when Campbell published it in August 1945, he altered the title to “Paradoxical Escape.”

In this story, U.S. Robot & Mechanical Men is locked in a race with a rival robotic company to develop an interstellar drive, but the data that the other company has fed to its “Super-Thinker” have caused the computer to break down. Now the other company wants to hire U.S. Robot to process the same data with its own thinking machine, “The Brain.”

The people at U.S. Robot suspect that the intention of their rivals is to cause The Brain to break down in the same way just to keep matters even between the two. At the recommendation of robot psychologist Dr. Susan Calvin, however, U.S. Robot agrees to accept the deal. She says:

“Consolidated’s machines, their Super-Thinker among them, are built without personality. They go in for functionalism, you know—they have to, without U.S. Robot’s basic patents for the emotional brain paths. Their Thinker is merely a calculating machine on a grand scale, and a dilemma ruins it instantly.

“However, The Brain, our own machine, has a personality—a child’s personality. It is a supremely deductive brain, but it resembles an
idiot savante.
It doesn’t really understand what it does—it just does it. And because it is really a child, it is more resilient. Life isn’t so serious, you might say.”
⁸⁹⁷

To attack the space-drive problem, the data are broken down into smaller units to try to isolate the area of difficulty. And since it seems that it is a threat to human life that has caused the breakdown of Consolidated’s Super-Thinker, The Brain is instructed to not become excited over that possibility, but just to spit out the problematic sheet when it comes to it.

Contrary to expectation, however, The Brain manages to calculate all factors through to a conclusion. And under its direction, a test interstellar ship is built by robots.

Our old friends, the robotic field-testers Powell and Donovan, are given the assignment of trying out the ship to see if it works. When they do, however, the ship runs away with them.

Susan Calvin suspects that something may have gone wrong with The Brain. It is certainly acting oddly. When she questions it, however, it insists that the men will be all right. But then it adds—“slyly,”
⁸⁹⁸
we are told—that the experience will be an interesting one for Powell and Donovan.

And indeed it is. The ship proves to be set up in such a way that they cannot communicate with Earth. The only food aboard is beans and milk. And when they pass into the space-warp which permits them to travel between the stars, the two men fall into a state that may not be death, but is weirdly hallucinatory and filled with images of death.

After their return, Susan Calvin is finally able to figure out what has happened. She says:

“Strictly speaking . . . this was my fault—all of it. When we first presented this problem to The Brain, as I hope some of you remember, I went to great lengths to impress upon it the importance of rejecting any item of information capable of creating a dilemma. In doing so I said something like ‘Don’t get excited about the death of humans. We don’t mind at all. Just give the sheet back and forget it.’ . . .

“When that item entered its calculations which yielded the equation controlling the length of minimum interval for the interstellar jump—it meant death for humans. That’s where Consolidated’s machine broke down completely. But I had depressed the importance of death to The Brain—not entirely, for the First Law can never be broken—but just sufficiently so that The Brain could take a second look at the equation. Sufficiently to give it time to realize that after the interval was passed through, the men would return to life—just as the matter and energy of the ship itself would return to being. This so-called ‘death,’ in other words, was a strictly temporary phenomenon. You see? . . .

“So he accepted the item, but not without a certain jar. Even with death temporary and its importance depressed, it was enough to unbalance him very gently.

“He developed a sense of humor—it’s an escape, you see, a method of partial escape from reality. He became a practical joker.”
⁸⁹⁹

In “Escape,” both The Brain and the field-testing team of Powell and Donovan are pressed by circumstances into thinking in ways to which they are not accustomed.

Consolidated’s Super-Thinker, which is merely an overgrown calculator, runs into the gap in continuity represented by passage through a space-warp, takes it for human death, and shorts out. But The Brain’s larger sympathy for men and their goals enables him to suspend judgment and get past the point where he might otherwise have flipped a switch. In the process of dealing with this non-linear problem, he develops a whole new ability—most unmachinelike by any previous standard—to think non-logically. This is represented by his newly acquired sense of humor.

He’s a child. He’s a joker. He’s a
person.
From this point, the robots in Asimov’s stories would become increasingly humanlike until it was all but impossible to tell meat-people and metal-people apart.

Even more significant is the hallucinatory passage between the stars which Donovan and Powell experience as a kind of death and resurrection. One message of “Escape” would seem to be that if men are going to travel to the stars, it will be necessary for them to pass beyond their local Village nature—“to die”—and then to begin to think in new terms.

But the most striking instance of the change in Asimov’s orientation would come in his final Foundation story of the war years—“The Mule” (
Astounding,
Nov.-Dec. 1945). This is the story which resulted from the editorial conference in which John Campbell had insisted that Seldon’s Plan must be overturned.

If Asimov felt pressured by Campbell to write this story, the way he found to get his own back was to make it his longest yet—as long as “The Big and the Little” and “Dead Hand” put together. “The Mule” would not only be his first published serial, it would be the culmination of the ever-widening-and-altering viewpoints which were the true strength of the Foundation series.

In this story, it is another hundred years after “Dead Hand.” It seems that Trantor, the capital planet of the old Galactic Empire, was long ago sacked and ruined by barbarian invaders. The Empire itself, that once-great enterprise encompassing the entire Galaxy, has been reduced to twenty agricultural worlds.

Now it is the Foundation which has become the most advanced and concentrated area of industry remaining within the entire Galaxy. But it, too, has been greatly altered by the passage of time. The Mayoralty of Terminus has become a hereditary office which is now held by a man described as “an excellent bookkeeper born wrong.”
⁹⁰⁰
And there is great strain between the greedy fat-cat manufacturers of the Foundation and the Traders who sell their goods to other worlds.

As one character—a female descendant of Hober Mallow named Bayta—declares:

“ ‘Every vice of the Empire has been repeated in the Foundation. Inertia! Our ruling class knows one law; no change. Despotism! They know one rule; force. Maldistribution! They know one desire; to hold what is theirs.’ ”
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Now, however, a new power has appeared on the Galactic scene—a mysterious general who calls himself the Mule. In time, we learn that he is a mutant, a superman in the new van Vogtian style who has the singular ability to control and direct the emotions of other human beings, even against their will. In the space of only a few years, he has risen from a bandit leader to become the conqueror of many worlds and a threat to the safety and independence of the Foundation itself.

In this latter day, there is one man of the Foundation, Ebling Mis, who has managed to make himself into a psychologist. Though by no means the equal of a high master of Psychohistory like the great Seldon, Mis does have enough of the old knowledge at his command to be able to predict when the climax of the next Seldon Crisis will occur, and to arrange for an audience to be present to hear Hari Seldon speak.

But what Hari Seldon’s shade has to say this time comes as a considerable shock to the people who have gathered—not least because of the serene confidence with which he says it.

As though no one like the Mule had figured in his calculations, he says:

“Let us take up the problem of the moment, then. For the first time, the Foundation has been faced, or perhaps, is in the last stages of facing, civil war. Till now, the attacks from without have been adequately beaten off, and inevitably so, according to the strict laws of psycho-history. The attack at present is that of a too-undisciplined outer group of the Foundation against the too-authoritarian central government. The procedure was necessary, the result obvious.”
⁹⁰²

As he speaks, it becomes clear that what Hari Seldon was able to foresee was the conflict existing between the Independent Traders and the central government of Terminus. And the conclusion that he saw as necessarily occurring was defeat for the Traders—but one which would be followed by a coalition government and an increase in democracy.

But Seldon has completely failed to anticipate the appearance of an emotion-controlling mutant conqueror like the Mule. And this significant blind spot in Seldon’s omniscience fills his audience with panic and dread.

However, just as in “Nightfall,” this might not necessarily be so for us as readers. Rather, it could be that after suffering the immense weight of Seldon’s dead hand in Asimov’s last Foundation story, what we actually feel is relief and even glee in seeing that eternal know-it-all, Hari Seldon, speaking from his wheelchair-throne of prophecy and being caught out in a whoppingly inadequate assessment.

All due respect to Seldon as a mighty mighty man, the one and only Psychohistorian, as marvelous and special in his own way as Isher/de Lany/Hedrock or the ur-Gilbert Gosseyn . . . but surely John Campbell was right in his editorial command: For the sake of freshness of story and the continued viability of Asimov’s series, as much as for the larger cause of free action and human possibility, Seldon’s Plan did have to be overturned. Yes, yes, yes, yes.

And give Asimov full credit. Having decided to go along with Campbell’s suggestion, he did a thoroughgoing job of it: In his story, hardly has the image of Hari Seldon faded from view when the sound of sirens is heard. Just that quickly, Terminus has come under attack by the forces of the Mule!

Now that it is bereft of the protection hitherto afforded it by Hari Seldon’s infallible foreknowledge, it seems that the Foundation—that seed of New Galactic Empire—is fair game for the mutant general. And very soon it falls.

Before it does, however, four people manage to escape from Terminus in a spaceship. These are the psychologist, Ebling Mis; Hober Mallow’s descendant, Bayta; her husband Toran; and a strange, ungainly character named Magnifico Giganticus, or Bobo, once a clown for the Mule, but now a runaway.

Mis maintains that it should yet be possible to defeat the Mule by attacking his weaknesses. He says:

“A mutant means a ‘superman’ to the ignoramuses of humanity. Nothing of the sort.

“It’s been estimated that several million mutants are born in the Galaxy every day. Of the several millions, all but one or two percent can be detected only by means of microscopes and chemistry. Of the one or two percent macromutants, that is, those with mutations detectable to the naked eye or naked mind, all but one or two percent are freaks, fit for the amusement centers, the laboratories, and death. Of the few macromutants whose differences are to the good, almost all are harmless curiosities, unusual in some single respect, normal-and often subnormal-in most others. . . .

“Supposing the Mule to be a mutant then, we can assume that he has some attribute, undoubtedly mental, which can be used to conquer worlds. In other respects, he undoubtedly has his shortcomings, which we must locate. He would not be so secretive, so shy of others’ eyes, if these shortcomings were not apparent and fatal.”
⁹⁰³

After this shrewd analysis of the Mule and his limits, the party decides that their best hope of overturning him has to lie in finding the Second Foundation, wherever it may be, and enlisting its resources in the struggle against the mutant general. Consequently, they travel to Trantor, the old capital planet of the Empire, hoping to locate records there that will offer them clues toward discovering the nature and location of the Second Foundation.

Ebling Mis is the one person capable of solving this puzzle, but in the course of their journey he turns into a declining, dying man. Nonetheless, when they arrive, the old psychologist insists on setting himself up in the twisted ruins of Trantor, with only poor Magnifico as a companion and helper, and begins to sift through the records for information about the Second Foundation.

The first thing he becomes certain of is that while establishment of the First Foundation on Terminus was an openly known fact, all that was ever given out about the Second Foundation and its nature and purposes is that such an organization did come into existence. Mis takes this difference as meaningful. He says:

“ ‘Its significance—and all about it—are better hidden, better obscured. Don’t you see? It’s the more important of the two. It’s the critical one;
the one that counts!
And I’ve got the minutes of the Seldon Conference. The Mule hasn’t won yet—’ ”
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