The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (90 page)

The men who are in charge of Terminus, the Board of Trustees of the Encyclopedia Committee, do not perceive this as a problem. They have their attention firmly fixed on their assigned task, the compilation of “ ‘the definitive Encyclopedia of all human knowledge,’ ”
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the first volume of which is just five years from publication.

As far as the Trustees are concerned, this Foundation of theirs has nothing to do with such political maneuverings. It is a harmless scientific project. It was established by authority of the Emperor. It has his personal protection. And that is the end of the matter.

However, there is one man who has a better understanding of practical realities and is able to grasp more of the truth. This is Salvor Hardin, the first Mayor of Terminus City. It was Hardin’s original intention to be “ ‘a psychological engineer,’ ”
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but the Foundation was lacking in the necessary teachers and facilities. So, as the nearest alternative, he has made himself into a politician.

Hardin is able to look at the Galaxy and recognize abundant signs of failure and decay where the Trustees perceive nothing but life as usual.

The Mayor is a practical man, and it bothers him that Empire science—the Foundation project most definitely included—should be content with comparing, categorizing and recapitulating past authority. Men of science no longer bother to gather evidence and conduct experiments. They don’t aim to extend the known and improve upon it.

Hardin can already see one-time knowledge beginning to slip away. The new states of the Periphery have lost their former command of atomic power—and the same thing has even begun to happen inside the Empire.

It is significant to Salvor Hardin, the man of political awareness, that after ruling the Galaxy for thousands of years, the Empire has begun to fray at the edges. The edge of the Galaxy happens to be precisely where Terminus is located. It seems that very shortly the Encyclopedia-makers are going to find themselves all alone in the midst of a gang of petty kingdoms with sharp teeth and grand ambitions.

Already Anacreon has begun to insist that Terminus place itself under its protection, and pay for this service with military bases and estates for its nobles. Terminus is a poor planet with no natural resources, not even the common metals, and no military power. How is it to resist these demands?

And still the Foundation Trustees remain blind to what Hardin sees as plainly evident. They find all the reassurance they require in a visit paid to Terminus by Lord Dorwin, diplomatic representative of the Emperor. When Dorwin insists that Anacreon is not in fact independent of the Empire and its authority, they are ready to believe him. They send a note off to Anacreon refusing its demands and invoking the might of Empire.

But Salvor Hardin doesn’t believe that there is any coercive power left in that particular stick. What the Mayor perceives is an Anacreon that has just been dared to prove its strength, and a Terminus that is about to have its freedom taken away from it.

Soon enough, an answer is received from Anacreon, and Hardin’s précis of it is finally enough to get the attention of the Trustees: “ ‘You give us what we want in a week, or we beat the hell out of you and take it anyway.’ ”
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Now that they finally grasp their true situation, the Trustees have two reactions. There are those who see no alternative but to surrender before the greater strength of Anacreon. But there are others who want to hang on until a time vault opens on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the establishment of the Foundation. They hope for a message from their far-seeing founder, Hari Seldon, anticipating this bind and showing them some way out.

By this time, Salvor Hardin has had quite enough of all this heedlessness and helplessness. He is one man who isn’t afraid to think for himself and to take action when it is necessary to do so. He sets a plot in motion that will throw out the Foundation Trustees—who are not elected and do not represent the interests of most of the million people who live on Terminus—and replace them with a strong mayor system of government. The coup is scheduled to take place while Hardin and the Trustees are in the time vault.

At the proper hour, the lights in the vault go dim. A figure in a wheelchair appears. It is Hari Seldon, and the grand old man does indeed have an assessment of their situation to share. However, it isn’t at all what the Trustees have been hoping to hear. What they are offered is a reorientation very much like the one Campbell had presented to Asimov when he first brought in the idea for this story.

Hari Seldon tells them:

“The Encyclopedia Foundation, to begin with, is a fraud, and always has been! . . . Neither I nor my colleagues care at all whether a single volume of the Encyclopedia is ever published. It has served its purpose, since by it we attracted the hundred thousand humans necessary for our scheme, and by it we managed to keep them preoccupied while events shaped themselves, until it was too late for any of them to draw back.

“In the fifty years that you have worked on this fraudulent project—there is no use in softening phrases—your retreat has been cut off, and you have no choice but to proceed on the infinitely more important project that was, and is, our real plan.”
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Then, for the first time, Hari Seldon explains the true situation to them—that future historians will come to place the Fall of the Galactic Empire at some point during the past fifty years. He talks of the psychohistorians’ hope to shorten the period of Barbarism to a thousand years, and of the role that Terminus and its companion Foundation are to play as founders of a Second Galactic Empire.

Seldon says:

“To that end we have placed you on such a planet and at such a time that in fifty years you were maneuvered to the point where you no longer have freedom of action. From now on, and into the centuries, the path you must take is inevitable. You will be faced with a series of crises, as you are now faced with the first, and in each case your freedom of action will become similarly circumscribed so that you will be forced along one, and only one path. . . .

“This, by the way, is a rather straightforward crisis, much simpler than many of those that are ahead. To reduce it to its fundamentals, it is this: You are a planet suddenly cut off from the still-civilized centers of the Galaxy, and threatened by your stronger neighbors. You are a small world of scientists surrounded by vast and rapidly expanding reaches of barbarism. You are an island of atomic power in a growing ocean of more primitive energy; but are helpless despite that, because of your lack of metals.

“You see, then, that you are faced by hard necessity, and that action is forced on you. The nature of that action—that is, the solution to your dilemma—is, of course, obvious!”
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But Hari Seldon doesn’t reveal this solution. He simply repeats that no matter how convoluted the way may seem, the path has been marked out, and at the end of it lies the Second Galactic Empire. Then his image disappears and the lights come up.

The only person in the time vault who doesn’t have to begin radically revising his thinking, the one person with any idea of what must be done next, is Salvor Hardin. He doesn’t need someone else to tell him how to cope with this crisis. The first spaceships from Anacreon may be landing on Terminus tomorrow, but the Mayor is confident that he will have them off the planet again within six months.

The story ends with him affirming to himself: “The solution to this first crisis was obvious. Obvious as hell!”
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However, he doesn’t reveal the solution, either. And neither does Asimov-the-narrator. The story simply ends with old Hari Seldon and Salvor Hardin, fifty years apart in time, both knowing the answer and us not. What a strange, unresolved conclusion!

But that’s the way that Asimov had it. And John Campbell bought the story. Its acceptance was the sealing of a bargain between them.

We may remember that Asimov began “Foundation” after resolving that he was going to write one self-sufficient story and only worry about sequels at some later time. But while he was at work on “Foundation,” he changed his mind.

From the moment that Asimov had first started writing science fiction and submitting it to John Campbell, he had yearned to establish an ongoing story series in
Astounding.
When “Reason” and “Liar” clicked with the editor, he had thought himself on top of the world. But it was only as he was working on “Foundation” that it finally sank in that to every appearance, Campbell had now committed himself to two different Asimov story series!

Once this thought had crossed his mind, he couldn’t rest easy until he had confirmed the reality of this dream come true. And leaving the conclusion of “Foundation” dangling was a way of testing whether he did indeed have an open door at
Astounding
for a new series of stories.

As Asimov would come to say (with a certain note of wry bemusement at the machinations of his younger self): “The idea was that Campbell would have to let me write the sequel now, and would, moreover, have to take it. How clever of me!”
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When his scheme worked, and Asimov got Campbell’s acceptance and a check for “Foundation” on September 17, he couldn’t help feeling pleased with himself. Just recently, he had received a congratulatory note from Robert Heinlein upon the publication of “Nightfall.” And the very next night following receipt of the check for “Foundation,” he would see the colored streamers of the Northern Lights hanging in the sky over Brooklyn for the first time in his life. At the moment, it seemed to Asimov that he had the universe by the tail.

There was only one thing that he was failing to take into account. This was the two-way nature of the tacit deal he’d just made. The acceptance of “Foundation” as it stood didn’t merely mean that he had John Campbell in a position where he had to take a sequel and couldn’t back out. It also meant that Asimov had committed himself to sitting down and writing this companion story, and that the editor was expecting to see it delivered pretty damn quick.

With its incomplete ending, “Foundation” could only be published after the sequel was on hand, so that the two stories could be scheduled for consecutive issues. Together they would make a rough short novel, with a cliff-hanger at the end of the first installment.

It was a sign of real trust on Campbell’s part, and also a measure of how much he wanted to see this particular series, that he could be willing to buy “Foundation”—a story that as it stood was unpublishable—and be confident that Asimov was not going to let him down. By this time, however, the editor had begun to count Asimov as one of his major new authors, even if he wasn’t yet telling him so.

But Campbell wouldn’t be shy about telling others. In a letter to Jack Williamson a few weeks after the acceptance of “Foundation,” he was ready to say:

At present, the strongest science-fiction writers are Heinlein and van Vogt—two brand-new men. Asimov is really pushing upward, too. Reason, I think, is that neither of the first two ever really liked the early scf styles—they were free to roll their own. . . . Asimov, a little later, has actually formed his stuff on theirs.
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What a mixture of truth and non-truth this was!

It wasn’t true, for instance, that neither Heinlein nor van Vogt had ever really liked the early science fiction styles. A.E. van Vogt loved A. Merritt’s vivid and sensuous use of language, and had a desire to make great pulp music of his own. And such was Robert Heinlein’s passion for H.G. Wells that in 1935, when he ought to have been in bed recovering from tuberculosis, he’d made a pilgrimage to hear Wells speak in California, and taken along his treasured copy of
The Sleeper Awakes
for Wells to autograph.

Neither was it strictly true that Asimov had specifically modeled his work on that of Heinlein and van Vogt. He had certainly learned much from Heinlein, and absorbed something from van Vogt, as well—as these two writers in turn would find stimulation in Asimov’s science fiction. But where fundamental influence was concerned, it would be a lot closer to the mark to suggest that it was the most imaginative (and also the most humanistic) writers of the Thirties—not the least important among them John W. Campbell and Jack Williamson—whom Asimov was really aiming to integrate, answer and extend in his stories.

At this moment, however, Campbell was less interested in speaking with absolute accuracy than in having a desired effect. And in the letters he was sending to Jack Williamson just now, the editor was attempting to convince this senior SF writer—who was still only 33 years old, one year younger than Heinlein—to rid himself of his remaining Techno Age storytelling habits and make himself over as a modern science fiction writer in the emerging style.

Williamson took this instruction with good grace, even gratitude. He was aware that science fiction was changing rapidly under Campbell’s direction, and that he wasn’t yet fully in tune with the new, more rigorous SF.

He replied to Campbell that while living in Los Angeles this past year, he had been paying close attention to Heinlein’s ideas about the writing of science fiction at gatherings of the Mañana Literary Society. And he was trying to apply them now in a novel that he was writing about the Fall of a Galactic Empire: “Bob has been commenting on the inadequate social and cultural backgrounds of Doc’s interstellar stories, and I hope to do something better.”
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What a wonderful coincidence we have here! It would seem that the very same idea of a failing Galactic Empire had struck two different writers at almost the same exact moment!

During the summer, Williamson had been writing a novelet, “Breakdown,” which Campbell would make the cover story of the January 1942
Astounding
. Here, an empire that encompasses our Solar System has reached its climax and is now collapsing. But, as its culminating achievement, it has produced a spaceship which will preserve something of human civilization and plant the seed of man among the stars.