The “accidents” were spread all over Trantor. Few would imme­ diately notice the connections…except for—

 “Academician! Happy to see you,” Lamurk said, settling into place opposite Hari. Without so much as a nod they let slip the formality of a handshake.

 “We seem at odds,” Hari said.

 A pleasant, empty comment. He had several more in store and used them, eating up time. Apparently Lamurk had not yet heard that his allies were gone.

 Daneel had said he needed five minutes to “bring off the effect,” whatever that meant.

 He parried with Lamurk as more moments slipped by. He carefully used a nonaggressive body posture and mild tones to calm Lamurk; such skills he now understood, after the pans.

 They were in a Council House near the palace, ringed by their guard parties. Lamurk had selected the room and its elaborate floral decorations. Usually it served as a lounge for representatives of rural-style Zones and so was lush with greenery. Unusually for Trantor, insects buzzed about, servicing the plants.

 Daneel had something planned. But how could he possibly get anything in place at an arbitrary point? And elude the myriad sensors and snoopers?

 Lamurk’s ostensible purpose was to confer on the tiktok crisis. Beneath this lurked the subtext of their rivalry for the First Minis­ tership. Everyone knew that Lamurk would force a vote within days.

 “We have evidence that something’s propagating viruses in the tiktoks,” Lamurk said.

 “Undoubtedly,” Hari said. He waved away a buzzing insect.

 “But it’s a funny one. My tech people say it’s like a little submind, not just a virus.”

 “A whole disease.”

 “Uh, yes. Mighty close to what they call ‘sentient sickness.’ ”

 “I believe it to be a self-organized set of beliefs, not a simple di­ gital disease.”

 Lamurk looked surprised. “All this tiktok talk about the ‘moral imperative’ of not eating anything living, not even plants or yeasts—”

 “Is sincerely felt.”

 “Pretty damn strange.”

 “You have no idea. Unless we stop it, we will have to convert Trantor to a wholly artificial diet.”

 Lamurk frowned. “No grains, no faux-flesh?”

 “And it will soon spread throughout the Empire.”

 “You’re sure?” Lamurk looked genuinely concerned.

 Hari hesitated. He had to remember that others had ideals, quite lofty ones. Perhaps Lamurk did…

 Then he remembered hanging by his fingernails under the e-lift. “Quite sure.”

 “Do you think this is just a sign, a symptom? Of the Em-pire…coming apart?”

 “Not necessarily. The tiktoks are a separate problem from general social decline.”

 “You know why I want to be First Minister? I want to save the Empire, Professor Seldon.”

 “So do I. But your way, playing political games—that’s not enough.”

 “How about this psychohistory of yours? If I used that—”

 “It’s mine, and it’s not ready yet.” Hari didn’t say that Lamurk would be the last person he would give psychohistory to.

 “We should work together on this, no matter what happens with the First Ministership.” Lamurk smiled, obviously quite sure of what would happen.

 “Even though you’ve tried to kill me several times?”

 “What? Say, I heard about some attempts, but surely you don’t think—”

 “I just wondered why this post meant so much to you.”

 Lamurk dropped his surprised-innocence mask. His lip turned up in a derisive sneer. “Only an amateur would even ask.”

 “Power alone?”

 “What else is there?”

 “People.”

 “Ha! Your equations ignore individuals.”

 “But I don’t do it in life.”

 “Which proves you’re an amateur. One life here or there doesn’t matter. To lead, to really lead, you have to be above sentimentality.”

 “You could be right.” He had seen all this before, in the panlike pyramid of the Empire, in the great game of endless jockeying among the gentry. He sighed.

 Something deflected his attention, a small voice. He turned his head slightly, sitting back.

 The tinny voice came from an insect hovering by his ear.

 Walk ’way, it repeated, Walk ’way.

 “Glad you’re coming to your senses,” Lamurk said. “If you were to step out right now, not force things to a vote—”

 “Why would I do that?”

 Hari got up and strolled to one of the man-sized flowers, hands behind his back. Best to look as though he were feeling out a deal.

 “People close to you could get hurt.”

 “Like Yugo?”

 “Small stuff. Just a way of leaving my calling card.”

 “A broken leg.”

 Lamurk shrugged. “Could be worse.”

 “And Panucopia? Was Vaddo your man?”

 Lamurk waved one hand. “I don’t keep up with details. My people worked with the Academic Potentate on that operation, I know that.”

 “You went to a lot of trouble over me.”

 Lamurk’s eyes narrowed shrewdly. “I want a big vote behind me. I try every avenue.”

 “A bigger vote than you’ve got.”

 “With you throwing support to me—right.”

 Two insects left a big rosy flower and hovered beside Lamurk. He glanced at them, swatted at one. It whirred away. “Could be something in it for you, too.”

 “Other than my life?”

 Lamurk smiled. “And your wife’s, don’t forget her.”

 “I never forget threats against my wife.”

 “A man’s got to be realistic.”

 Both insects were back. “So I keep hearing.”

 Lamurk smirked and sat back, sure of himself now. He opened

 his mouth—

 Lightning connected the insects—through Lamurk’s head.

 Hari hit the floor as the burnt-yellow electrical discharge snaked and popped in the air. Lamurk half rose. The bolt arced into both ears. His eyes bulged. A thin cry escaped his gaping mouth.

 Then it was gone. The insects fell like exhausted cinders.

 Lamurk toppled forward. As he fell his arms reached out. His hands opened and closed convulsively. They failed to grasp any­ thing. The body thumped and sprawled on the carpet. Arm muscles still jumped and twitched.

 Frozen, Hari realized that even in Lamurk’s last moment the man had been reaching out to grab at him.

 13.

 He hovered in an N-dimensional space, far from politics.

 As soon as Hari returned to Streeling, he went into seclusion. The pandemonium following Lamurk’s assassination were the worst hours he had ever spent.

 Daneel’s advice had proved useful—“No matter what I do, remain in your role: a mathist, troubled but above the fray.” But the fray was jarring anarchy. Shouts, accusations, panics. Hari had endured fingers pointed at him, threats. Lamurk’s personal escort drew weapons when Hari finally left the assassination room. His Specials stunned five of them.

 Now all of Trantor, and soon enough the Empire, would be rife with rage and speculation. The insect-shockers had carried energies stored in tiny positronic traps, a technology thought to be extinct. Attempts to trace it led nowhere.

 In any case, there was no link to Hari. Yet.

 By tradition, assassinations were kept at a distance, done by in­ termediaries. They were also safer that way. Hari’s presence was thus an argument against his involvement—just as Daneel had predicted. Hari liked that aspect of the matter particularly: a predic­ tion holding true. In the mob hysteria which followed, no one as­ sumed he was implicated.

 Hari also knew his limits, and here they were. He could not deal with such chaos, except in the broader context of mathematics.

 So it was to his familiar, supple abstractions that he fled.

 He fanned through dimensions, watching the planes of psycho­ history evolve. The entire Galaxy spread before him, not in its awesome spiral, but in parameter-space. Fitness peaks rose like ridges and crests. Here were societies which lasted, while those dwelling in the valleys perished.

 Sark. He close-upped the Sark Zone and stepped the dynamical equations at blurring speed. The New Renaissance would effervesce into lurid cultural eruptions. Conflicts arose like orange spikes in the fitness-landscape. Stable peaks collapsed. Runoff from them clogged the valleys, making paths between peaks impassable.

 This meant that not merely people but whole planets would be unable to evolve out of a depressive valley. Those worlds would steep in the mire, trapped for eons. Then—

 Crimson flares. Nova triggers. Once used, these made war far more dangerous.

 A solar system could be “cleansed”—a horrifyingly bland term used by ancient aggressors—by inducing a mild nova burst in a balmy sun. This roasted worlds just enough to kill all but those who could swiftly find caverns and store food for the few years of the nova stage.

 Hari froze with horror. He had fled into his abstract spaces, but death and irrationality dogged him even here.

 In the value-free parameter spaces of the equations, war itself was simply another way to decide among paths. It was wasteful, certainly, highly centralized—and quick.

 If war increased the “throughput efficiency” parameters, then the Galactic system would have selected for more wars. Instead, Zonal wars had sputtered along, becoming less frequent. In Sark’s future, glaring red war-stains shrank as time stepped forward, jumping whole years in a flicker. Pink and soft yellow splashes replaced them.

 These were more continuous, decentralized decision-trees, oper­ ating to defuse conflicts. Microscopic bringers of peace, these pro­ cesses. Yet the people involved probably never guessed that the long, slow undulations were bettering their lives. They never glimpsed vast agencies outside the blunt agonies and ecstasy of human life.

 The “expected utility” model failed to predict this outcome. In that view, each war arose from a perfectly rational calculation by Zonal “actors,” independent of previous experience. Yet wars be­ came unusual, so the Sarkian Zonal system was learning.

 It came to him in a flash. Societies were an intricate set of parallel processors.

 Each working on its own problem. Each linked to the other.

 But no single processor would know that it was learning.

 As Sark, so the Empire. The Empire could “know” things that no person grasped. And far more—know things that no organization, no planet, no Zone knew.

 Until now. Until psychohistory.

 This was new, profound.

 It meant that for all these millennia, the Empire had grown a kind of self-knowing unlike any way of comprehending that a mere human had—or even could have. A deep knowing other than the self-consciousness which humans bore.

 Hari panted with surprise. He tried to see if he could possibly be wrong…

 After all, feedback loops were scarcely new. Hari knew the gen­ eral theorem, ancient beyond measure: If all variables in a system are tightly coupled, and you can change one of them precisely, then you can indirectly control all of them. The system could be guided to an exact outcome through its myriad internal feedback loops. Spontaneously, the system ordered itself—and obeyed.