The World Beyond the Hill: Science Fiction and the Quest for Transcendence (94 page)

The Mayor operates on the basis of his highly limited understanding, on what remains of the initial burst of enthusiasm that struck him upon his first encounter with Hari Seldon, and on continuing faith. As best he can, he tries to imitate the founder’s example, and hopes that what he elects to do will prove to be in accordance with the Plan:

He may not be able to make calculations based upon the essential continuity of human consciousness throughout the Galaxy the way Hari Seldon did—but he can set out to organize the immediate neighborhood.

He may not at first be able to talk to the barbarians about the awesome and wonderful Plan for New Galactic Empire that leads him—but he can teach them the self-control, scientific competence and sense of community that they must have before the subject of the Plan can be raised.

Most of all, Hardin may not be able to duplicate for others the heady rush of insight and conviction that swept over him when he first saw Hari Seldon in the time vault and heard him speak, and caught—beyond the founder’s words and calculations and super-science—a brief unfathomable glimpse of underlying transcendent wholeness. But he can express the essence of his intuitive recognition in terms of a new religion of the Galactic Spirit, and carry the word to the Four Kingdoms.

And thirty years later, these actions by Salvor Hardin would prove to be exactly the right steps to have taken!

From the point of view of Hari Seldon, of course, that would be something of a foregone conclusion. After all, he
knew
with a certainty of 98.4% that if he showed up on the fiftieth anniversary of the Foundation and stimulated the imaginations of those assembled in the time vault with the Cyrus the Great/New Galactic Empire origin-and-destiny story, their reaction would be to start a new religion and carry it to the surrounding barbarians. Seldon is only getting the results he anticipated.

But that kind of assurance has never been available to Salvor Hardin. After his crucial initial decision to found a new religion and use it to tame the wild barbarians, it has been thirty long years of patience and effort and hope. And until everything finally fell into place so neatly and completely, he could never be certain that his religion of the Galactic Spirit would stand up to the test and prove a sufficient answer to the likes of Wienis. From Hardin’s point of view, it has all been a blind leap of faith.

No wonder that on his second appearance in the time vault, Hari Seldon should think it appropriate to treat the Foundation’s successful resolution of this crisis as a triumph of Spiritual Power!

But then, having endorsed Salvor Hardin’s methods and results, Hari Seldon goes on to play a new game of thought modification with those gathered in the time vault. Before he disappears again, he warns that there are crises ahead that Spiritual Power cannot resolve, and he names three sources of potential conflict:

One is other centers of local stellar allegiance, which he terms the force of Regionalism or Nationalism.

Another is the dying giant, the failing but still mighty First Galactic Empire.

As for the third . . . Hari Seldon says: “ ‘And never forget there was
another
Foundation established eighty years ago; a Foundation at the other end of the Galaxy, at Star’s End. They will always be there for consideration.’ ”
⁷⁶⁷

Now whatever is that supposed to mean? Previously, it had always been taken for granted that the two Scientific Refuges were sister organizations devoted to a common purpose. But now, at a word from Hari Seldon, the other Foundation has become transformed into an unknown that must constantly be worried about.

With this concluding set of provocative remarks by Hari Seldon, Isaac Asimov had certainly provided himself with plenty of room for further stories in this series, if and when the time came that he was ready to write them!

Asimov finished “Bridle and Saddle” on Sunday, the 16
^th
of November. And the next day, exactly two months after he had received the check for “Foundation,” he took the long-awaited sequel to Campbell’s office.

So eager was the editor to lay hands on this novelet that he did something he’d never done before in the more than three years that Asimov had been bringing him stories: He sat right down with the manuscript and read it then and there, while Asimov waited to learn what his reaction would be.

In accepting a story that had been deliberately left unfinished, and then trusting that Asimov would come through promptly with an acceptable sequel, John Campbell had put himself out on the end of a very thin limb. Right now, he had a most urgent need to prove to himself that the high opinion of the youngster he’d been expressing lately was really warranted.

Did “Bridle and Saddle” get the job done? Did it complete “Foundation” satisfactorily and then carry the tale of the rise of New Galactic Empire on another step?

Could Campbell buy this story and put it right into the schedule as it stood, or was he in for even more delay while he waited for Asimov to rewrite?

What if this novelet turned out to be a complete disaster? What was the editor to do then?

As he settled to reading the manuscript, Campbell wasn’t looking for nits to pick. His only concern was for the effectiveness of the whole as a whole: Did the story work, or didn’t it?

However, we ought to be aware that if he had been actively interested in identifying points in “Bridle and Saddle” that deserved to be questioned, he could most certainly have found some. That is, this story, like both of Asimov’s previous important thought experiments, “Reason” and “Nightfall,” was built on a whole series of relatively unlikely premises.

As one instance of this, we are told in “Bridle and Saddle” that atomic power had been forgotten by Anacreon until it was reintroduced by the priests of the Galactic Spirit. And it is further revealed in the course of the story that Anacreon lacks the power of instantaneous interstellar communication.

But if Anacreon didn’t have atomic power or some even more sophisticated mode of propulsion, how was it able to send a fleet of spaceships between the stars to occupy Terminus? And if it doesn’t have the ultrawave relay, or some other system just like it, how does it coordinate its military forces and maintain its control over twenty-five different stellar systems?

We are also informed that right after the conclusion of the events of “Foundation,” a coalition of the other Kingdoms confronted Anacreon and compelled it to withdraw its men and ships from Terminus. Does it really seem likely that on the heels of such a forced retreat, Anacreon’s barbarian rulers—arrogant, small-minded and suspicious at the best of times—would be in any mood to receive “priests” from Terminus bearing some religion newly invented by Salvor Hardin, the architect of their great humiliation? Would they then give this doubtful lot permission to meddle as they pleased in every important aspect of society, or would they hedge them about as tightly as possible with regulations, ordinances and customs, stupidity, inaction and refusal, while carefully scrutinizing their every move? Can we believe that they would be so anxious to have the false prestige lent by halos and flying thrones that they would allow these red-robed intruders to make off with the allegiance of the people in the space of only thirty years?

There are questions that might be asked, too, about the immediate cause of the Foundation’s second crisis, the battle cruiser Wienis. How likely is it that at the conclusion of some great space battle of yesteryear, an Imperial Navy warship two miles long, in readily repairable condition, would have gone unaccounted for, allowed to gently drift out of the realm of human ken and be forgotten among the stars? What are we to suppose happened to its crew?

And further, how probable is it that after being invisible, or misplaced, or nonexistent for three hundred years, this derelict should come floating back into history at precisely the right moment to foment a long-predicted psychohistorical crisis? If this is a random stroke of fortune, it is an altogether marvelous one. Or was it somehow prearranged to happen by Hari Seldon and his gang of psychohistorical guardian angels?

We might also wonder what Prince Regent Wienis could possibly have been thinking about to insist that the people of the Foundation repair this mighty battle cruiser for him so that he may turn right around and attack them with it—and then neglect to oversee and double-check every last detail of the work performed by the Foundation’s technician-priests. It seems strangely trustful of him.

Finally, there is the peculiar periodicity of the crises faced by the Foundation. The fact that one of these coincides with the fiftieth anniversary of the Scientific Refuge, and the other takes place on the eightieth, makes them appear to have been specially timed to occur by someone with an eye to the calendar and a sense of what dates might seem significant to the yokels of Terminus, and not the result of cosmic and historical forces operating according to their own dynamic. Does Hari Seldon really enjoy that kind of fine control over the course of events?

Of these different points that we’ve raised for possible question in “Bridle and Saddle,” none is wholly impossible or beyond explanation. What we really do need to note, however, is that added all together, they amount to a case that is fully as special in its own way as, say, the unique set of circumstances presented in “Nightfall.”

This wasn’t important to John Campbell. The relative probability or improbability of the various premises of Asimov’s thought experiments didn’t concern him.

What he did care about was the results. As an editor who had a magazine to put out every month, he needed to know whether the story was sound enough to publish. And, as a man with an agenda in his head, he wanted to know if it advanced his program of imagining the establishment of human control over the stars, including the overturning of the force of cyclical history on the galactic scale.

In these matters, Campbell wasn’t disappointed. “Bridle and Saddle” did everything the editor expected of it and more:

It did work as a story, moving along so smoothly and hanging together with such apparent plausibility that—as it was told—it seemed a highly realistic view of the possible human future, particularly when compared with previous galactic stories such as Doc Smith’s Lensman series and Jack Williamson’s “After World’s End.”

And it did advance Campbell’s cause. It rounded off the dangling conclusion of “Foundation,” with its initial problem of ensuring the independent existence of the Scientific Refuge on Terminus in the face of barbarian threat, and then presented a further stage of development in which the local stellar neighborhood gets drawn together to form the nucleus of the greater galactic community to come. That was exactly the sort of thing that Campbell wanted to see.

But this wasn’t all that Asimov’s novelet had to offer the editor. In “Bridle and Saddle,” a crucial Campbellian tenet was restated, refined and extended. Again and again, first in one way and then in another, the story asserted that the fate of mankind isn’t ultimately determined by material objects, but rather by human attitudes, knowledge and states of mind.

We may recall Campbell stating in his March 1938 editorial, six months after assuming control of
Astounding:
“We presuppose, in these stories, two things: that there is yet to be learned infinitely more than is now known, and that Man can learn it.”

Only a few months later, young Isaac Asimov, who would be John Campbell’s most attentive and diligent pupil, began to sit at the master’s knee and absorb his new beliefs—that humanity can learn and change; that one stage after another of human advance is possible; and that the arrow of future human development points away from matter and toward mind.

Now, in “Bridle and Saddle,” Asimov was handing these ideas back to his teacher, but with an important difference. That difference was Asimov’s sense of the stars as a locus of future human history.

Campbell’s late scientifiction story, “Forgetfulness,” had been visionary in nature, but not historical. It leaped ahead ten million years to show us a glimpse of potential future man—not Wells’s grotesque Big Brain flopping about futilely in a pool filled with nutrient broth, but mental man, outwardly simple and ordinary, even backward, but inwardly mature and masterful. This novelet didn’t have much to say about the details of how we were to get from here to there; it just asserted that it was possible for us to do.

As an early modern science fiction story however, Asimov’s “Bridle and Saddle” was specifically concerned with the method, process and context that were absent from Campbell’s “Forgetfulness.” Asimov’s story took a much smaller leap into the future—only fifty thousand years—to show us men far more like ourselves than like Campbell’s advanced men of mind as they strive to rise from their current fallen condition to create a New Galactic Empire free of the weaknesses that caused the First Empire to fail. In the dynamics of their struggle, much is revealed.

We can see, for instance, that in the contention between Mayor Salvor Hardin and Prince Regent Wienis which occupies so much of the foreground of “Bridle and Saddle,” Hardin is the representative of the evolutionary power of mind, while Wienis stands for the more rigid and static power of matter.

In the Prince Regent’s frame of reference, the only things that count are brute force and will. He thinks that a two-mile-long spaceship with mighty atom blasts is all the license he needs to seize control of the universe and make everybody else bow down before him and his progeny.

It is intriguing to note that even so dedicated a non-believer as Wienis has been touched by the new transcendence-of-many-names which guides both Hari Seldon and Salvor Hardin. The end they desire and the end he desires are one and the same. This becomes clear when the Prince Regent, seeking to influence young King Lepold, suggests to his ward: “ ‘Together we will recreate an empire—not just the kingdom of Anacreon—but one comprising every one of the billions of suns of the Galaxy.’ ”
⁷⁶⁸

However, Wienis resolutely rejects the religious and scientific and psychohistorical pathway that would eventually ready him—or, more likely, some descendant of his—to become a participant in New Galactic Empire. It seems to be his assumption that having a lust for the goal and a willingness to kick aside anything that stands in his way is all the self-preparation he requires to become Emperor of the Galaxy.