“Which twenty billion?” asked Seldon, smiling.
“I wish I knew,” said Raych darkly. “The trouble is we can't redo the planet, so we just gotta keep patching.”
“I'm afraid so, Raych, but there are some peculiar things about it. Now I want you to check me out. I have some thoughts about this.”
He brought a small sphere out of his pocket.
“What's that?” asked Raych.
“It's a map of Trantor, carefully programmed. Do me a favor, Raych, and clear off this table top.”
Seldon placed the sphere more or less in the middle of the table and placed his hand on a keypad in the arm of his desk chair. He used his thumb to close a contact and the light in the room went out while the table top glowed with a soft ivory light that seemed about a centimeter deep. The sphere had flattened and expanded to the edges of the table.
The light slowly darkened in spots and took on a pattern. After some thirty seconds, Raych said, in surprise, “It is a map of Trantor.”
“Of course. I told you it was. You can't buy anything like this at a sector mall, though. This is one of those gadgets the armed forces play with. It could present Trantor as a sphere, but a planar projection would more clearly show what I want to show.”
“And what is it you want to show, Dad?”
“Well, in the last year or two, there have been breakdowns. As you say, it's an old planet and we've got to expect breakdowns, but they've been coming more frequently and they would seem, almost uniformly, to be the result of human error.”
“Isn't that reasonable?”
“Yes, of course. Within limits. This is true even where earthquakes are involved.”
“Earthquakes? On Trantor?”
“I admit Trantor is a fairly non-seismic planet, and a good thing, too, because enclosing a world in a dome when the world is going to shake itself badly several times a year and smash a section of the dome would be highly impractical. Your mother says that one of the reasons Trantor, rather than some other world, became the Imperial capital is that it was geologically moribund-that's her unflattering expression. Still, it might be moribund, but it's not dead. There are occasional minor earthquakes, three of them in the last two years.”
“I wasn't aware of that, Dad.”
“Hardly anyone is. The dome isn't a single object. It exists in hundreds of sections, each one of which can be lifted and set ajar to relieve tensions and compressions in case of an earthquake. Since an earthquake, when one does occur, lasts for only ten seconds to a minute, the opening endures only briefly. It comes and goes so rapidly that the Trantorians beneath are not even aware of it. They are much more aware of a mild tremor, and a faint rattling of crockery, than of the opening and closing of the dome overhead and the slight intrusion of the outside weather, whatever it is.”
“That's good, isn't it?”
“It should be. It's computerized, of course. The coming of an earthquake anywhere sets off the key controls for the opening and closing of that section of the dome, so that it opens just before the vibration becomes strong enough to do damage.”
“Still good.”
“But in the case of the three minor earthquakes over the last two years, the dome controls failed in each case. The dome never opened, and in each case repairs were required. It took some time, it took some money, and the weather controls were less than optimum for a considerable time. Now what, Raych, are the chances that the equipment would have failed in all three cases?”
“Not high?”
“Not high at all. Less than one in a hundred. One can suppose that someone had gimmicked the controls in advance of an earthquake. Now once a century, we have a magma leak, which is far more difficult to control, and I'd hate to think of the results if it went unnoticed till it was too late. Fortunately that hasn't happened, and isn't likely to, but consider- Here on this map you will find the location of the breakdowns that have plagued us over the past two years and that seem to be attributable to human error, though we haven't once been able to tell to whom it might be attributed.”
“That's because everyone is busy protecting his back.”
“I'm afraid you're right. That's a characteristic of any bureaucracy and Trantor's is the largest in history. -But what do you think of the locations?”
The map had lit up with bright little red markings that looked like small pustules covering the land surface of Trantor.
“Well,” said Raych cautiously. “They seem to be evenly spread.”
“Exactly, and that's what's interesting. One would expect that the older sections of Trantor, the sections longest domed, would have the most decayed infrastructure and would be more liable to events requiring quick human decision and laying the groundwork for possible human error. -I'll superimpose the older sections of Trantor on the map in a bluish color, and you'll notice that the breakdowns don't seem to be taking place on the blue any oftener than on the white.”
“And?”
“And what I think it means, Raych, is that the breakdowns are not of natural origin, but are deliberately caused, and spread out in this fashion to affect as many people as possible, thus creating a dissatisfaction that is as wide-spread as possible.”
“It don't seem likely.”
“No? Then let's look at the breakdowns as spread through time rather than through space.”
The blue areas and the red spots disappeared and, for a time, the map of Trantor was blank, and then the markings began to appear and disappear one at a time, here and there.
“Notice,” said Seldon, “that they don't appear in clumps in time, either. One appears, then another, then another, and so on, almost like the steady ticking of a metronome.”
“Do ya think that's on purpose too?”
“It must be. Whoever is bringing this about wants to cause as much disruption with as little effort as possible, so there's no use doing two at once, where one will partially cancel the other in the news and in the public consciousness. Each incident must stand out in full irritation.”
The map went out, the lights went on. Seldon returned the sphere, shrunken back to its original size, to his pocket.
Raych said, “Who would be doing all this?”
Seldon said thoughtfully, “A few days ago, I received a report of a murder in Wye sector.”
“That's not unusual,” said Raych. “Even though Wye isn't one of your really lawless sectors, there must be lots of murders there every day.”
“Hundreds,” said Seldon, shaking his head. “We've had bad days when the number of deaths by violence in Trantor as a whole approaches the million-a-day mark. Generally, there's not much chance of finding every culprit, every murderer. The dead just enter the books as anonymous statistics.
“This one, however, was unusual. The man had been knifed, but unskillfully. He was still alive when found, just barely. He had time to gasp out one word before he died, and that was, ‘Chief.’
“That roused a certain curiosity and he was actually identified. He works in Anemoria and what he was doing in Wye, we don't know. But then, some worthy officer managed to dig up the fact that he was an old Joranumite. His name was Kaspal Kaspalov, and he is well-known to have been one of the intimates of Laskin Joranum. And now he's dead, knifed.”
Raych frowned, “Are you suspecting a Joranumite conspiracy? There aren't any Joranumites around anymore.”
“It wasn't long ago that your mother asked me if I thought that the Joranumites were still active, and I told her that any odd belief always retained a certain cadre, sometimes for centuries. They're usually not very important; just splinter groups that simply don't count. Still, what if the Joranumites have kept up an organization, what if they have retained a certain strength, what if they are capable of killing someone they consider a traitor in their ranks, and what if they are producing these breakdowns as a preliminary to seizing control?”
“That's an awful lot of ‘if's', Dad.”
“I know that. And I might be totally wrong. The murder happened in Wye and, as it further happens, there have been no infrastructure breakdowns in Wye.”