The old sickening fear fell anew on him. What if, after all he should fail—what if fifteen hundred years of work were to be sponged out at the arbitrary whim of a superstition-ridden military moron? If I fail, the Empire fails with me—I know it. And it isn’t fair! I should have been told what I was being recalled to Sol for. I should have had a chance to prepare my arguments better. I should have been allowed to take a practical psycho along—but no, they obviously couldn’t permit me to do that or I’d have had everything my own way.
But couldn’t they see? Can’t they understand? Or has the worship of statism penetrated so deep that it’s like an instinct, a blind need for which everything else must be sacrificed?
He turned and went heavily toward his cabin to make ready.
Screened by an invisibility field, the lifeboat spiraled down toward the surface. Goram let the robopilot handle the vessel, and spent most of his time peering through a field-penetrating visiscope.
«Not much sign of habitation,» he said.
«No, I told you the population was still small,» replied Heym. «After all, only a few thousand were planted originally and the struggle for existence was as hard as with any savages for the first few centuries. Only lately has the population really begun growing.»
«And you say they have cities now—machines—civilization? It’s hard to believe.»
«Yes, it is. The whole result has been a triumphant confirmation of the psychotechnic theory of history, but nevertheless the sheer spectacular character of the success has awed us. I can understand it’s a little frightening. One naturally thinks a race which can go from naked savages to mechanized civilization in fifteen hundred years is somehow demonic. Yet they’re humans, fully as human as anyone else in the Galaxy, the same old Earthly stock as all men. They’ve simply enjoyed the advantage of freedom from stupidity.»
«How many stations are there?»
«About a hundred—planetary colonies, with colonists in ignorance of their own origin, where various special conditions are maintained. Different environments, for instance, or special human stocks. The progress of history is being observed on all of them, secretly, and invaluable data on mass-psychologic processes are thereby gained. But Seventeen has been by far the most fruitful.»
Goram wrinkled his low forehead. With concealed distaste, Heym thought how very like an ape he looked—throwback, atavist, cunning in his own narrow field but otherwise barely above moron level—typical militarist, the biped beast who had ridden mankind’s back like some nightmarish vampire through all history—except on the one planet of Valgor’s Star—
«I don’t quite see the point,» admitted the marshal. «Why spend all that time and money on creating artificial conditions that you’d never meet in real life?»
«It’s the scientific method,» said Heym, wondering at what elementary level he would have to begin his explanation. How stupid could one be and hold a marshal’s position? «The real world is an interaction of uncounted factors, constantly changing in relation to themselves and each other, far too vast and complex to be understood in its entirety. In order to find casual relationships, the scientist has to perform experiments in which he varies only one factor at a time, observing its effect—and, of course, running control experiments at the same time. From these data he infers similar relationships in the real world. By means of theoretical analysis of observed facts he can proceed to predict new phenomena—if these predictions are borne out by further observation, the theory is probably—though never certainly—right, and can be used as a guide in understanding and controlling the events of the real world.»
In spite of himself, Heym was warming up to his subject. After all, it was his whole life. He went on in a gathering rush of words:
«All the evidence shows that reality is not object but process. You yourself are not the same object as an instant ago—physicochemical-psychological changes, the very change of entropy which is ‘time,’ are all continuous. They are rapid in the case of an organism, slow in the case of a rock, say, but always continuous. The object is an abstraction, a set of constant characteristics of a process—more or less constant, I should say, since nothing is permanent, change, process, is always continuous. The grammatical distinction between noun and verb has misled us to think there is a corresponding distinction between what an object is and what it does—completely false, as a moment’s reflection will show.»
«Hm-m-m» Gorman looked out the visiscope. The boat was sweeping over a broad plain, yellow with ripening grain. A few primitive villages, houses built of stone and wood and brick, were scattered over the great landscape, a peaceful scene, reminiscent of civilization’s dawn. «The planet looks backward enough,» grunted Goram dubiously.
«It is,» said Heym eagerly. «I assure you it is.»
«Well… you were saying—» Goram didn’t look at all sure of what Heym had been saying. «Get to the point.»
«Civilization—history, if you will—is a process like all else,» resumed the scientist. «A nation is not a concrete object, a giant man, a god or All-Father to whom one owes fanatical loyalty and unquestioning obedience. How much misery could have been prevented if men had seen that simple, common sense fact! A nation is part of a culture, and a culture is an interaction of certain peoples with themselves, their neighbors, and their ‘natural’ environment over a space-time region. When the process has lost its distinctive characteristics, its continuity of development, we say the culture is dead, but that is only a convenient figure of speech. Actually causality is indefinitely extended. We are still influenced by events that occurred in prehistoric ages.
«The early students of culture were struck by the similarity of development of different civilizations, as if man went along one inevitable historic path. And in a way he did—because one thing leads to another. The expanding units of culture clash, there are ever fiercer wars, old fears and grudges intensify, economic breakdowns increase the misery, finally, and usually unwittingly and even unwillingly, one nation overcomes all others to protect itself and founds a ‘universal state’ which brings a certain peace of exhaustion but eventually decays and collapses of its own weaknesses or under the impact of alien invaders. That’s exactly what happened to mankind as a whole, when he exploded into the Galaxy—only this time the fearful scale and resources of the wars all but shattered the civilization; and the Solarian Empire, the passive rigidity solving the problems of the time of troubles by force, has lasted immensely longer than most preceding universal states, because its rulers have enough knowledge of mass-psychologic processes to have a certain control over them and all the power of a hundred thousand planetary systems to back their decisions.»
Goram looked a little dazed. «I still don’t see what this has to do with the Foundation and its stations,» he complained.
«Simply this,» said Heym, «that though history is a natural process, like anything else, it is peculiarly hard to understand and hence almost impossible to control. This is not only because of the very complex character of the interactions but because we ourselves are concerned in it—the observer is part of the phenomenon. And also, it had long been impossible to conduct controlled experiments in history and thus separate out causal factors and observe their unhindered working. On the basis of thousands of years of history as revealed—usually quite incompletely—by records and by archeology, and of extrapolations from individual and mob psychological knowledge, and whatever other data were available, the scientists of the period preceding the Empire worked out a semi-mathematical theory of history which gave some idea of the nature of the processes involved—causal factors and the manner of their action. This theory made possible qualitative predictions of the behavior of masses of men under certain conditions. Thus the early emperors knew what factors to vary in order to control their provinces. They could tell whether a certain measure might, say, precipitate a revolt, or just what phrasing to use in proclamations for the desired effect. If you want a man to do something for you, you don’t usually slap him in the face—it’s much more effective to appeal to his vanity or his prejudices, best of all to convince him it’s what he himself wants to do. But once in a while, a face slapping becomes necessary. Why, even today the barbarians are held at bay more by subtle psychological and economic pressures dividing them against each other and putting them in awe of us than by actual military might.»