Айзек Азимов

Foundation and Empire


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       Copyright

      HarperVoyager

      An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd

      1 London Bridge Street

      London SE1 9GF

       www.harpercollins.co.uk

      First published in Great Britain by Panther (Granada Publishing) 1962

      Copyright © Isaac Asimov 1952

      Foundation and Empire is based upon published material originally copyrighted by Smith & Street Publications Inc.

      Cover design and illustration by Mike Topping © HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd 2016

      Isaac Asimov asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.

      A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.

      This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.

      All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the non-exclusive, non-transferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, down-loaded, decompiled, reverse engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins.

      Source ISBN: 9780008117504

      Ebook Edition © March 2018 ISBN: 9780007381142

      Version: 2018-04-18

       Dedication

       To Mary and Henry for patience and endurance

      Contents

       Cover

       Title Page

      Copyright

      Dedication

       Prologue

      Part I: The General

      Chapter 1: Search for Magicians

      Chapter 2: The Magicians

      Chapter 7: Bribery

      Chapter 8: To Trantor

      Chapter 9: On Trantor

      Chapter 10: The War Ends

      Chapter 11: Bride and Groom

      Chapter 12: Captain and Mayor

      Chapter 13: Lieutenant and Clown

       Chapter 14: The Mutant

       Chapter 15: The Psychologist

       Chapter 16: Conference

       Chapter 17: The Visi-Sonor

       Chapter 18: Fall of the Foundation

       Chapter 19: Start of the Search

       Chapter 20: Conspirator

       Chapter 21: Interlude in Space

       Chapter 22: Death on Neotrantor

       Chapter 23: The Ruins of Trantor

       Chapter 24: Convert

       Chapter 25: Death of A Psychologist

       Chapter 26: End of the Search

       Footnote

       About the Author

       By the Same Author

       About the Publisher

       Prologue

      The Galactic Empire was falling.

      It was a colossal Empire, stretching across millions of worlds from arm-end to arm-end of the mighty double-spiral that was the Milky Way. Its fall was colossal, too – and a long one, for it had a long way to go.

      It had been falling for centuries before one man became really aware of that fall. That man was Hari Seldon, the man who represented the one spark of creative effort left among the gathering decay. He developed and brought to its highest pitch the science of psycho-history.

      Psycho-history dealt not with man, but with man-masses. It was the science of mobs; mobs in their billions. It could forecast reactions to stimuli with something of the accuracy that a lesser science could bring to the forecast of are bound of a billiard ball. The reaction of one man could be forecast by no known mathematics; the reaction of a billion is something else again.

      Hari Seldon plotted the social and economic trends of the time, sighted along the curves and foresaw the continuing and accelerating fall of civilization and the gap of thirty thousand years that must elapse before a struggling new Empire could emerge from the ruins.

      It was too late to stop that fall, but not too late to close the gap of barbarism. Seldon established two Foundations at ‘opposite ends of the Galaxy’ and their location was so designed that in one short millennium events would knit and mesh so as to force out of them a stronger, more permanent, more quickly appearing Second Empire.

      Foundation (Gnome Press, 1951) has told the story of one of those Foundations during the first two centuries of life.

      It began as a settlement of physical scientists on Terminus, a planet at the extreme end of one of the spiral arms of the Galaxy. Separated from the turmoil of the Empire, they worked as compilers of a universal compendium of knowledge, the Encyclopedia Galactica, unaware of the deeper role planned for them by the already-dead Seldon.

      As the Empire rotted, the outer regions fell into the hands of independent ‘kings’. The Foundation was threatened by them. However, by playing one petty ruler against another, under the leadership of their first mayor, Salvor Hardin, they maintained a precarious independence. As sole possessors of atomic power among worlds which were losing their sciences and falling back on coal and oil, they even established an ascendancy. The Foundation became the ‘religious’ centre of the neighbouring kingdoms.