"Asimov, Isaac - 1. Foundation" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

shades. A ticket was shoved into Gaal's hands. It glowed faintly.
The Supervisor said, "One point twelve."
Gaal fumbled for the coins. He said, "Where do I go?"
"Follow the light. The ticket will keep glowing as long as you're pointed in the
tight direction."
Gaal looked up and began walking. There were hundreds creeping across the vast
floor, following their individual trails, sifting and straining themselves
through intersection points to arrive at their respective destinations.
His own trail ended. A man in glaring blue and yellow uniform, shining and new
in unstainable plasto-textile, reached for his two bags.
"Direct line to the Luxor," he said.
The man who followed Gaal heard that. He also heard Gaal say, "Fine," and
watched him enter the blunt-nosed vehicle.
The taxi lifted straight up. Gaal stared out the curved, transparent window,
marvelling at the sensation of airflight within an enclosed structure and
clutching instinctively at the back of the driver's seat. The vastness
contracted and the people became ants in random distribution. The scene
contracted further and began to slide backward.
There was a wall ahead. It began high in the air and extended upward out of
sight. It was riddled with holes that were the mouths of tunnels. Gaal's taxi
moved toward one then plunged into it. For a moment, Gaal wondered idly how his
driver could pick out one among so many.
There was now only blackness, with nothing but the past-flashing of a colored
signal light to relieve the gloom. The air was full of a rushing sound.
Gaal leaned forward against deceleration then and the taxi popped out of the
tunnel and descended to ground-level once more.
"The Luxor Hotel," said the driver, unnecessarily. He helped Gaal with his
baggage, accepted a tenth-credit tip with a businesslike air, picked up a
waiting passenger, and was rising again.
In all this, from the moment of debarkation, there had been no glimpse of sky.

3.
TRANTORЦ...At the beginning of the thirteenth millennium, this tendency reached
its climax. As the center of the Imperial Government for unbroken hundreds of
generations and located, as it was, toward the central regions of the Galaxy
among the most densely populated and industrially advanced worlds of the system,
it could scarcely help being the densest and richest clot of humanity the Race
had ever seen.
Its urbanization, progressing steadily, had finally reached the ultimate. All
the land surface of Trantor, 75,000,000 square miles in extent, was a single
city. The population, at its height, was well in excess of forty billions. This
enormous population was devoted almost entirely to the administrative
necessities of Empire, and found themselves all too few for the complications of
the task. (It is to be remembered that the impossibility of proper
administration of the Galactic Empire under the uninspired leadership of the
later Emperors was a considerable factor in the Fall.) Daily, fleets of ships in
the tens of thousands brought the produce of twenty agricultural worlds to the
dinner tables of Trantor....
Its dependence upon the outer worlds for food and, indeed, for all necessities
of life, made Trantor increasingly vulnerable to conquest by siege. In the last