Foundation’s Edge PROLOGUE

The first astronomical Empire was falling. It had been decaying and breaking down for centuries and except unmatched man fully established that accompaniment.He was Hari Seldom the last coarse scientist of the rootage Empire, and it was he who perfected psychohistory the erudition of human behavior reduced to numerical equations.The individual human organism is unpredictable, tho the reactions of human mobs, Seldon put up, could be treated statistically. The large the mob, the greater the accuracy that could be achieved. And the size of it of the human masses that Seldon worked with was no less(prenominal) than the population of all the inhabited millions of worlds of the beetleweed.Seldons equations told him that, go forth to itself, the Empire would fall and that. thirty curtilage days of human misery and torture would elapse before a snatch Empire would arise from the ruins. And yet, if superstar could position some of the conditions that existed, that Interre gnum could be decreased to a single millennium just one thousand years.It was to insure this that Seldon set up two colonies of scientists that he called basiss. With deliberate intention, he set them up at icy ends of the Galaxy. The archetypal radical, which centered on somatogenic science, was set up in the provoke daylight of publicity. The existence of the other, the countenance basis, a world of psychohistorical and mentalic scientists, was drowned in silence.In The first appearance Trilogy, the story of the first four centuries of the Interregnum is told. The firstly ft (commonly k straightawayn as solely The asylum, since the existence of a nonher was unknown to close all) began as a comminuted conjunction lost in the emptiness of the placeside Periphery of the Galaxy. Periodically it face up a crisis in which the variables of human intercourse and of the sociable and economic currents of the date constricted roughly it. Its freedom to move lay along o nly one certain frontier and when it moved in that direction a new horizon of development subject before it. All had been planned by Hari Seldon, long dead now.The First Foundation with its superior science, took over the barbarized planets that surrounded it. It faced the anarchic warlords who broke away frog, a dying, empire and beat them. It faced the death of the Empire itself under its last well-knit Emperor and its last strong command and beat it.It seemed as though the Seldon visualize was going through smoothly and that nix would prevent the guerilla Empire from being established or, time and with a token(prenominal) of intermediate devastation.But psychohistory is a statistical science. Always there is a small chance that something will go wrong, and something did something which Hari Seldon could not have foreseen. One man, called the Mule, appeared atom nowhere He had mental powers in a Galaxy that lacked them. He could mold mens emotions and shape their mind s so that his bitterest opponents were made into his devoted(p) servants. Aries could not, would not, fight him. The First Foundation fell and Seldons P1an seemed to lie in ruins. at that place was left mysterious Second Foundation, which had been caught ad-lib by the sudden appearance of the Mule, unless which was now slowly working out a counterattack. Its great defense was the fact of its unknown location. The Mule sought it in order to make his conquest of the Galaxy complete. The faithful of what was left of the First Foundation sought it to obtain help.Neither found it. The Mule was stopped first by the action of a woman, Bayta Darell and that bought enough time for the Second Foundation to organize the seemly action and, with that, to stop the Mule permenently. easy they prepared to reinstate the Seldon Plan.But, in a way, the cover of the Second Foundation was gone. The First Foundation knew of the seconds existence, and the First did not exigency a future in which they , were overseen by the mentalists. The First Foundation was the superior in physical force, while the Second Foundation was hampered not only by that fact, but by being faced by a double task it had not only to stop the First Foundation but had also to regain its anonymity.This the Second Foundation, under its greatest First Speaker, Preem salver, manages to do. The First Foundation was allowed to seem to win, to seems to defeat the Second Foundation, and it moved on to greater and greater strength in the Galaxy, totally brutish that the Second Foundation still existed.It is now four hundred and ninety-eight years after the First Foundation had beat into existence. It is at the peak of its strength, but one man does not accept appearances