Foundation Fear (40 page)

In Hari's studies he had discovered a curious little law. Now he turned it in his favor.
Bureaucracy increases as a doubling function in time, given the resources. At the personal
level, the cause was the persistent desire of every manager to hire at least one
assistant. This provided the time constant for growth.

Eventually this collided with the carrying capacity of society. Given the time constant
and the capacity, one could predict a plateau level of bureaucratic overhead -- or else,
if growth persisted, the date of collapse. Predictions of the longevity of
bureaucracy-driven societies fit a precise curve. Surprisingly, the same scaling laws
worked for microsocieties such as large agencies.

The corpulent Imperial bureaus on Sark could not move swiftly. Sector General Divenex's
squadron had to stay in planetary space, since it was paying a purely formal visit.
Niceties were still observed. Divenex did not want to use brute force when a waiting game
would work.

“I see. That gives us a few days, ” Dors concluded.

Hari nodded. He had done the required speaking, negotiating, dealing, promising favors --
all activities he disliked intensely. Dors had done the background digging. “To ... ?”

“Train.”

Wormholes were labyrinths, not mere tunnels with two ends. The large ones held firm for
perhaps billions of years -- none larger than a hundred meters across had yet collapsed.
The smallest could sometimes last only hours, at best a year. In the thinner worms, flexes
in the wormwalls during passage could alter the end point of a traveler's trajectory.

Worse, worms in their last stages spawned transient, doomed young -- the wild worms. As
defor-mations in space-time, supported by negative energy-density “struts, ” wormholes
were inherently rickety. As they failed, smaller deformations twisted away.

Sark had seven wormholes. One was dying. It hung a light-hour away, spitting out wild
worms that ranged from a hand's-width size, up to several meters.

A fairly sizable wild worm had sprouted out of the side of the dying worm several months
before. The Imperial squadron did not know of this, of course. All worms were taxed, so a
free wormhole was a bonanza. Reporting their existence, well, often a planet simply didn't
get around to that until the wild worm had fizzled away in a spray of subatomic surf.

Until then, pilots carried cargo through them. That wild worms could evaporate with only
seconds' warning made their trade dangerous, highly paid, and legendary.

Wormriders were the sort of people who as children liked to ride their bicycles no-handed,
but with a difference -- they rode off rooftops.

By an odd logic, that kind of child grew up and got trained and even paid taxes -- but
inside, they stayed the same.

Only risk takers could power through the chaotic flux of a transient worm and take the
risks that worked, not take those that didn't, and live. They had elevated bravado to its
finer points.

“This wild worm, it's tricky, ” a grizzled woman told Hari and Dors. “No room for a pilot
if you both go.”

“We must stay together, ” Dors said with finality.

“Then you'll have to pilot.”

“We don't know how, ” Hari said.

“You're in luck. ” The lined woman grinned without humor. “This wildy's short, easy.”

“What are the risks?” Dors demanded stiffly.

“I'm not an insurance agent, lady.”

“I insist that we know -- ”

“Look, lady, we'll teach you. That's the deal.”

“I had hoped for a more -- ”

“Give it a rest, or it's no deal at all.”

In the men's room, above the urinal he used, Hari saw a small gold plaque: Senior Pilot
Joquan Beunn relieved himself here Octdent 4, 13, 435.

Every urinal had a similar plaque. There was a washing machine in the locker room with a
large plaque over it, reading The entire 43rd Pilot Corps relieved themselves here Marlass
18, 13, 675.

Pilot humor. It turned out to be absolutely predictive. He messed himself on his first
training run.

As if to make the absolutely fatal length of a closing wormhole less daunting, the worm
flyers had escape plans. These could only work in the fringing fields of the worm, where
gravity was beginning to warp, and space-time was only mildly curved. Under the seat was a
small, powerful rocket that propelled the entire cockpit out, automatically heading away
from the worm.

There is a limit to how much self-actuated tech one can pack into a small cockpit, though.
Worse, worm mouths were alive with electrodynamic “weather” -- writhing forks of
lightning, blue discharges, red magnetic whorls like tornadoes. Electrical gear didn't
work well if a bad storm was brewing at the mouth. Most of the emergency controls were
manual. Hopelessly archaic, but unavoidable.

So he and Dors went through a training program. Quite soon it was clear that if he used
the Eject.

“Hari, we were -- what's wrong?” Dors rushed over to him.

“I, I don't know. The sky -- ”

“Ah, a common symptom, ” a woman's booming voice cut in. “You Trantorians do have to
adjust, you know.”

He looked up shakily into the broad, beaming face of Buta Fyrnix, the Principal Matron of
Sark. “I ... I was all right before.”

“Yes, it's quite an odd ailment, ” Fyrnix said archly. “You Trantorians are used to
enclosed city, of course. And you can often take well to absolutely open spaces, if you
were reared on such worlds -- ”

“As he was, ” Dors put in sharply. “Come, sit.”

Hari's pride was already recovering. “No, I'm fine.”

He straightened and thrust his shoulders back. Look firm, even if you don't feel it.

Fyrnix went on. “But a place in between, like Sarkonia's ten-kliek tall towers -- somehow
that excites a vertigo we have not understood.”

Hari understood it all too well, in his lurching stomach. He had often thought that the
price of living in Trantor was a gathering fear of large spaces, but Panucopia had seemed
to dispel that idea. Now he felt the contrast. The tall buildings had evoked Trantor for
him. But they drew his gaze upward, along steepening perspectives, into a sky that had
suddenly seemed like a huge plunging weight.

Not rational, of course. Panucopia had taught him that man was not merely a reasoning
machine. This sudden panic had demonstrated how a fundamentally unnatural condition --
living inside Trantor for decades -- could warp the mind.

“Let's ... go up, ” he said weakly.

The lift seemed comforting, even though the press of acceleration and popping ears as they
climbed several klicks should -- by mere logic -- have unsettled him. you can explain to
me the details of your Creativity Creation program? I've heard so much about it ... "

Hari gave her a slight smile of thanks for distracting Fyrnix. He instinctively disliked
the brand of rampant self-assurance common on Sark. It was headed for a crackup, of that
he was sure. He ached to get back to his full psychohistorical resources, to simulate this
Sark case. His earlier work needed refinement. He had secretly gathered fresh data here
and yearned to apply it.

“I do hope you're not worried about the wild worm. Academician?” Fymix spoke to him again,
brow furrowed.

“It's a right fit, ” he said.

They had to fly in a slender cylinder, Dors copilot-ing. Splitting the job had proved the
only way to get them up to a barely competent level.

“I think it's marvelous, how courageous you two are.”

“We have little choice, ” Dors said. This was artful understatement. Another day and the
sector general's officers would have Hari and Dors under arrest.

“Riding in a little pencil ship. Such primitive means!”

“Uh, time to go, ” Hari said behind a fixed smile. She was wearing thin again.

“/ agree with the Emperor. Any technology distinguishable from magic is insufficiently
advanced.”

So the Emperor's ghost-written remark had already spread here. Minor sayings moved fast,
with Imperial muscle behind it.

Still, Hari felt his stomach flutter with dread. “You've got a point.”

He had brushed off the remark. Four hours later, closing at high velocity with the big
wormhole complex, he saw her side of it.

“They do seem odd ... ”

“Odd? Their ideas are dangerous, radical. ” He spoke with real outrage. “Class confusions,
shifting power axes. They're shrugging off the very damping mechanisms that keep the
Empire orderly.”

“There was a certain, well, joy in the streets.”

“And did you see those tiktoks? Fully autonomous!”

“Yes, that was disturbing.”

“They're part and parcel of the resurrection of sims. Artificial minds are no longer taboo
here! Their tiktoks will get more advanced. Soon -- ”

“I'm more concerned with the immediate level of disruption, ” Dors said.

“That must grow. Remember my N-dimensional plots of psychohistorical space? I ran the Sark
case on my pocket computer, coming down from orbit. If they keep on this way with their
New Renaissance, this whole planet will whirl away in sparks. Seen in N-dimensions, the
flames will be bright and quick, lurid -- then smolder into ash. Then they'll vanish from
my model entirely, into a blur -- the static of unpredictability.”

She put a hand on his arm. “Calm down. They'll notice.”

He had not realized that he felt so deeply. The Empire was order, and here --

“Academician Seldon, do us the honor of gathering with some of our leading New Renaissance
leaders. ” Buta Fyrnix grasped his sleeve and tugged him back to the ornate reception.
“They have so much to tell you!”

And he had wanted to come here! To learn why the dampers that kept worlds stable had
failed here. To see the ferment, pick up the scent of change. There was plenty of
passionate argument, of soaring art, of eccentric men and women wedded to their grand
projects. He had seen these at dizzying speed.

But it was all too much. Something in him rebelled. The nausea he had suffered in the open
streets was a symptom of some deeper revulsion, gut-deep and dark.

Buta Fyrnix had been nattering on. “ -- and some of our most brilliant minds are waiting
to meet you! Do come!”

He suppressed a groan and looked beseechingly at Dors. She smiled and shook her head. From
this haz-wd she could not save him. existence pale ... beside the fact of existence. Yes,
my love. Living is bigger than any talk about it."

A yellow-green sun greeted them. And soon enough, an Imperial picket craft.

They ducked and ran. A quick swerve, and they angled into the traffic train headed for a
large worm-hole mouth. The commercial charge-computers accepted his Imperial override
without a murmur. Hari had learned well. Dors corrected him if he got mixed up.

Their second hyperspace jump took a mere three minutes. They popped out far from a dim red
dwarf.

By the fourth jump they knew the drill. Having the code-status of Cleon's court banished
objections.

But being on the run meant that they had to take whatever wormhole mouths they could get.
Lamurk's people could not be too far behind.

A wormhole could take traffic only one way at a time. High-velocity ships plowed down the
worm-hole throats, which could vary from a finger's length to a star's diameter.

Hari had known the numbers, of course. There were a few billion wormholes in the Galactic
disk. The average Imperial Zone was about fifty light-years in radius. A jump could bring
you out many years from a far-flung world.

This influenced psychohistory. Some verdant planets were green fortresses against an
isolation quite profound. For them the Empire was a remote dream, the source of exotic
products and odd ideas.

Hyperships flitted through wormholes in mere seconds, then exhausted themselves hauling
their cargoes across empty voids, years and decades in the labor.

The worm web had many openings near inhabitable worlds, but also many near mysteriously
useless solar systems. The Empire had positioned the smaller worm mouths -- those massing
perhaps as much as a mountain range -- near rich planets. But some worm mouths of
gargantuan mass orbited near solar systems as barren and pointless as any surveyed.

Was this random, or a network left by some earlier civilization? Certainly the wormholes
themselves were leftovers from the Great Emergence, when space and time alike began. They
linked distant realms which had once been nearby, when the galaxy was young and smaller.

They developed a rhythm. Pop though a worm mouth, make comm contact, get in line for the
next departure. Imperial watchdogs would not pull anyone of high Trantorian class from a
queue. So their most dangerous moments came as they negotiated clearance.

At this Dors became adept. She sent the WormMaster computers blurts of data and -- whisk
-- they were edging into orbital vectors, bound for their next jump.

Domains that encompassed thousands of light-years, spanning the width of a spiral arm,
were essentially networks of overlapping worms, all organized for transfer and shipping.

Matter could flow only one way at a time in a wormhole. The few experiments with
simultaneous two-way transport ended in disaster. No matter how ingenious engineers tried
to steer ships around each other, the sheer flexibility of worm tunnels spelled doom. Each
worm mouth kept the other “informed” of what it had just eaten. This information flowed as
a wave, not in physical matter, but in the tension of the wormhole itself -- a ripple in
the “stress tensor, ” as physicists termed it.