"Asimov, Isaac - Cleon the Emperor" - читать интересную книгу автора (Asimov Isaac)

УI'm certain he can, Sire, but he likes his present job. It keeps him out in the open in all kinds of weathers.Ф

УA peculiar recommendation for a job. I'm sure he can get used to administration, and I do need someone for some sort of renewal of the grounds. Hmmm. I must think upon this. Your friend Gruber may be just the man I need. ЧBy the way, Seldon, what did you mean by saying it's been very quiet?Ф

УI merely meant, Sire, that there has been no sign of discord at the Imperial Court. The unavoidable tendency to intrigue seems to be as near a minimum as it is ever likely to get.Ф

УYou wouldn't say that if you were Emperor, Seldon, and had to contend with all these officials and their complaints.Ф

УThey should bring these complaints to me, Sire.Ф

УThey know my soft heart, Seldon, and avoid your harshness.Ф

УSire!Ф

УJust joking. However, that's not what I mean. How can you tell me things are quiet when reports seem to reach me every other week of some serious breakdown here and there on Trantor?Ф

УThese things are bound to happen.Ф

УI don't recall that such things happened so frequently in previous years.Ф

УPerhaps that was because they didn't, Sire. The infrastructure grows older with time. To make the necessary repairs properly would take time, labor, and enormous expense. This is not a time when a rise in taxes will be looked on favorably.Ф

УThere's never any such time. I gather that the people are experiencing serious dissatisfaction over these breakdowns. It must stop and you must see to it, Seldon. What does Psychohistory say?Ф

УIt says what common sense says, that everything is growing older.Ф

УWell, all this is quite spoiling the pleasant day for me. I leave it in your hands, Seldon.Ф

УYes, Sire,Ф said Seldon submissively.

The Emperor strode off and Seldon thought that it was all spoiling the pleasant day for him, too. This breakdown at the center was the alternative he didn't want. But how was he to prevent it and switch the crisis to the Periphery?

Psychohistory didn't say.


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7.

Raych Seldon felt extraordinarily contented, for it was the first dinner en famille that he had had in some months with the two people he thought of as his father and mother. He knew perfectly well that they were not his parents in any biological sense, but it didn't matter. He merely smiled at them in complete love.

The surroundings were not as warm as they had been at Streeling in the old days, when their home had been small and intimate, and had sat like a comfortable gem in the larger setting of the university. Now, unfortunately, nothing could hide the grandeur of a Palace suite.

Raych sometimes stared at himself in the mirror and wondered how it could be. He was not tall, only 163 centimeters in height, distinctly shorter than either parent. He was rather stocky, but muscular, and not fat, with black hair and the distinctive Dahlite mustache that he kept as dark and as thick as possible.

In the mirror, he could still see the street-urchin he had once been before the chanciest of great chances had dictated his meeting with Seldon and Venabili. Seldon had been much younger then, and his appearance now made it plain that Raych himself was almost as old now as Seldon had been when they met.

Amazingly, his mother, Dors, had hardly changed at all. She was as sleek and fit as the day she and Hari were accosted by young Raych and his fellow Billibotton gang members. And he, Raych, born to poverty and misery, was now a member of the civil service, a small cog in the Ministry of Populations.