“That has already been arranged,” Daneel said.
This infuriated Mors even more. “I will be so skying glad when you stop anticipating everything and anything!”
“Yes,” Daneel said, and nodded sympathetically. “Do you accept?”
“Bloody bright suns, yes! When the time comes, tell me where to be, but please, no earnest farewells! I never want to see you again!”
Daneel nodded assent. “There will be no need to meet again. All will be ready in two days.”
Mors tried to slam the door behind Daneel, but it was not that kind of door, and would not accept such a dramatic gesture.
86.
The depth of Hari’s funk was so great that Wanda was tempted more than once to try to reach into his thoughts and give them a subtle tweak, an adjustment-but she had never been able to do that with her grandfather. It might have been possible-but it would not have been right.
If Hari Seldon was in despair, and could articulate the reasons for this despair-if his state was not some damage directly inflicted by Vara Liso, a possibility he fervently denied-then he had a right to be this way, and if there was a way out, he would find it…or not.
But Wanda could do no more than let him be what he had always been, a headstrong man. She had to trust his instincts. And if he was right-then they had to reshape their plans.
“I feel almost lighthearted!” Hari said the morning after they brought him to their apartment to recuperate. He sat at the small table beside the curve in the living-room wall that traced the passage of a minor structural brace. “Nobody needs me now.”
“We need you, Grandfather,” Wanda said, with a hint of tears coming.
“Of course-but as a grandfather, not as a savior. To tell the truth, I’ve hated that aspect of my role in all this absurdity. To think-for a time-”And his face grew distant.
Wanda knew all too well that his cheer was false, his relief a cover.
She had been waiting for the proper moment to tell him what had happened during his absence. Stettin had left for the morning to attend to preparations still under way for their departure. All of the Project workers would be leaving Trantor soon, whether or not they had a reason to go, so she and Stettin had seen no reason to stop their own plans.
“Grandfather, we had a visitor before the trial,” she said, and she sat at the table across from Hari.
Hari looked up, and the somewhat simple grin he had chosen to mask his feelings immediately hardened. “I don’t want to know,” he said.
“It was Demerzel,” Wanda said.
Hari closed his eyes. “He won’t come back. I’ve let him down.”
“I think you’re wrong, Grandfather. I got a message this morning, before you woke up. From Demerzel.”
Hari refused to take any hope from this. “A few matters to tidy up, no doubt,” he said.
“There’s to be a meeting. He wants Stettin and me to be there, as well.”
“A secret meeting?”
“Apparently not that secret.”
“That’s right,” Hari said. “Linge Chen no longer cares about whatever it is we do. He’ll ship all the Encyclopedists off Trantor, to Terminus-useless exile!”
“Surely the Encyclopedia will be of some use,” Wanda said. “Most of them don’t know the larger plan. It won’t make any difference to them.”
Hari shrugged that off.
“It must be important, Grandfather.”
“Yes, yes! Of course. It will be important-and it will be final.” He had wanted so much to see Daneel one more time-if only to complain! He had even dreamed of the meeting-but now he dreaded it. How could he explain his failure, the end of the Project, the uselessness of psychohistory?
Daneel would go elsewhere, find someone else, complete his plans another way-
And Hari would die and be forgotten.
Wanda could hardly bring herself to interrupt his reverie. “And we still need to schedule the recordings, Grandfather.”
Hari looked up, and his eyes were terrifyingly empty. Wanda touched him with her mind as lightly as she could, and came away stunned by the bleakness, the barren desert of his emotion.
“Recordings?”
“Your announcements. For the crises. There isn’t much time.”
For a moment, remembering the list of crises predicted by psychohistory for the next few centuries, Hari’s face suffused with rage, and he pounded his fist on the table. “Damn it, doesn’t anybody understand? What is this, a dead momentum? The useless hopes of a hundred thousand workers? Well, of course! There’s been no general announcement, has there? I’ll make one-tonight-to all of them! I’ll tell them it’s over, that they’re all going into exile for no reason!”
Wanda fought back the tears of her own despair. “Please, Grandfather. Meet with Demerzel. Maybe-”
“Yes,” Hari said, subdued and sad again. “With him first.” He looked at the bruised skin on the side of his hand. He had split the skin over one knuckle. His arm ached, and his neck and jaw. Everything ached.
Wanda saw the drop of blood on the table and began to weep, something he had never seen her do before.
He reached across the table with his uninjured hand and took her arm in his fingers, squeezing it gently.
“Forgive me,” Hari said softly. “I really don’t know what it is I do, or why, anymore.”
87.
The high-security wing of the Special Service Detention Center stretched in a half circle around the eastern corner of the Imperial Courts Holding Area, fully ten thousand available cells, of which no more than a few hundred were occupied during any normal time. Thousands of security-interest code prisoners filled the cells in the wake of the riots, which had been used as an excuse by the Specials to round up ringleaders of many troublesome groups around Trantor.
Lodovik remembered many such troubled times, and the advantage both the Specials and the Commission of Public Safety had taken in similar situations to reduce political friction on Trantor and the orbiting stations. Now, he occupied one of these cells himself-cataloged as “unidentified”-And placed under charge of Linge Chen.
His cell was two meters on a side, windowless, with a small info screen mounted in the center of the wall opposite the entrance hatch. The screen showed mild entertainments designed to soothe. To Lodovik, at this stage of his existence, such diversions meant nothing.
Unlike an organic intelligence, he did not require stimulus to maintain normal function. He found the cell disturbing because he could easily conceive of the distress it might cause a human being, not for any such direct effect on himself.
He had used this opportunity to think through a number of interesting problems. First in the list was the nature of the meme-mind that had occupied him, and the possible results of the blast of mentalic emotion delivered by Vara Liso. Lodovik was reasonably convinced that his own mentality had not been harmed, but since that moment, he had not had any communication from Voltaire.
Next in the list was the nature of his treason toward Daneel’s plan, whether or not it was justified, and whether he could find any way around the logical impasse of his liberation from the strict rule of the Three Laws.
He had killed Vara Liso. He could not convince himself it would have been better to do otherwise. In the end, Plussix’s plan to use Klia Asgar to discourage Hari Seldon had failed-so far as he knew-and Daneel had been there to protect Seldon.
The robots, it seemed, had been completely ineffectual in the center of Vara Liso’s mental storm. Yet she had not directed a blast at him-in essence, had left the opening that resulted in her own death.
Had she used Lodovik to end her own misery? Lodovik was curious what Voltaire would have thought…
In all probability both the Calvinian and the Giskardian robots had been captured and their work stopped.
Seventy-five other unidentifieds from the warehouse district were being kept in cells nearby. Lodovik knew very little about them, but surmised they were a mix of the surviving groups of Calvinian robots and the mentalic youngsters gathered by Kallusin and Plussix.