“We need the reports from our recruitment cells,” Stettin said quietly. “Next, I’ll give my report on mathematical and psychological training-to bring our candidates up to speed with the other groups preparing for the mission-then we’ll discuss the attrition.”

“We need to discuss the murders now!” said a young woman historian with thick black hair cut in a wide bowl. Her green eyes blazed at Stettin and Wanda.

Wanda deflected the woman’s automatic whip of persuasion. Her neck itched fiercely.

The woman continued, voice calm but inner emotions raging. “Every recruit for the last three months-”

“There’s a traitor among us!” interrupted a man from the back.

Stettin pressed his lips together grimly and held up his hand again. “We know who the so-called traitor is,” he said softly. “Her name is Vara Liso.”

The crowd instantly quieted. Wanda observed the waves of turmoil and calm with an intense but somehow distant interest. This is how we are. Grandfather chose us because we are this way-didn’t he?

“Perhaps we know her name, now,” the young historian said. “But what good does that do us? She is stronger than any of us here.” She could barely be heard.

“No one can persuade her,” said another voice, Wanda could not tell where in the crowd.

“She smells us out like a tracker!”

“We must assassinate her-”

“Persuade somebody to kill her!”

“Someone who is expendable-”

Stettin waited for the suggestions to stop. Again, the crowd became unnaturally quiet. Even the ripples of persuasion seemed to still. All their lives, these people had used their talents to make their way in life. Finally, they were among their own kind, among equals, and their “luck” was distressingly ineffectual here.

“Wanda has asked Professor Seldon for help,” Stettin said. “And he has gone to the Emperor himself…but we do not yet know the outcome of his visit. We should plan for the possibility of failure. We may have to do something we’ve only tried once before.”

“What?” several asked.

“A massed effort. Wanda and I once unwittingly pooled our talents, with some success…But only against a normal.”

A judge, Wanda remembered. When Grandfather got in trouble with young toughs.

“I think it is possible that ten or twenty of us, trained to operate in unison, may be effective against this woman.”

The crowd of candidates absorbed this for a few seconds. “To kill her?” the black-haired historian asked.

“That may not be necessary,” Wanda said. She and Stettin had argued this through early in the evening, with some heat. Stettin had maintained that killing Vara Liso was the only safe option. Wanda had maintained with equal force that murder could enervate their cause, drive them one against the other. The balance of so many persuaders was already delicate.

Even her own marriage was fraught with difficulties. Two persuaders, placed in proximity for years, intimate for hours on end, could find many unique ways to irritate and stymie each other.

“I will not kill another human being, much less one of my own kind,” the young historian said firmly, eyes brimming with emotion at her own idealism. “No matter how much we may be endangered.”

Stettin set his jaw. “That would be a last resort. We must begin training volunteers for such an effort. I have a list of those whose work puts them in places where they might encounter Liso…”

Wanda listened as Stettin read out the names. The named stepped forward like guilty children, and Stettin took them to a separate room.

“The rest of us have other matters to discuss,” Wanda said, hoping to distract the remainder. “There are more travel questions to be answered-health questions, family and financial situations to be tied up, and, of course, training in the Seldon disciplines-”

The group calmed and focused on these matters with some relief, glad to be done with the problem of Liso, for the time being. Eager to look the other way.

They were all like children, Wanda thought, every one of them, and the group as a whole: no better than awkward adolescents, stumbling along through life with powers they have only now recognized, for the first time fully aware of weaknesses they have never had to confront before.

Weaknesses hidden by persuasion.

We are all cripples! She kept her face calm, but her insides churned at the coming conflicts, so many and so dangerous. How could Hari have chosen such a strange and disorganized group to safeguard all of human history!

Sometimes, Wanda felt as if she were wandering through a dream. Not even Stettin could reassure her at those times, and she was close to despair.

Of course, she never confessed that to Hari.

Klia Asgar emerged during the main sleep period. ten kilometers from where she had descended to the two rivers. The ceil above this neighborhood of Dahl glowed twilight blue-gray, and the streets were filled only with night laborers, about a third of the volume of waking maximum. Nobody challenged her.

Rather than simply contact the number on the card given to her by the man in dusty green, Klia persuaded a small-time security scrambler in south Dahl to break the card’s code. The card then gave her an address and acted as a guide, glowing and humming faint directions as she took transit and taxi to Pentare, a small municipality in the shadow of Streeling. She bought an Imperial-grade filmbook reader, hooked it to a general communicator, and fed it material from public files, using data credits she had amassed on two small jobs months ago. She read up on Hari Seldon and his granddaughter, Wanda. Seldon. it seemed, was not a persuader, yet the man in dusty green had said that his granddaughter was. Where did she get her powers, then? Klia looked up Wanda Seldon Palver’s father: Raych. A Dahlite.

This caused her a moment of both concern and wonder, and even momentary pride. She had always known Dahlites were special.

The woman’s family connection with a Dahlite was not enough to dispel Klia’s suspicions about people connected to the Palace.

Still, Hari Seldon predicted the end of the Empire, the destruction of Trantor; he had established quite a reputation as a doomsayer. That might put him in opposition to the Palace; there were even rumors that he was to be put on trial for treason.

Yet Klia had an instinctive dislike for such visionary twaddle. Too often visionaries were trying to organize their own small cadres of totally obedient acolytes, little personal empires in the middle of a unimaginably bigger and almost completely impersonal Galactic Empire.

She had heard of a spectacular incident just last year, in Temblar, on the equator. Fifty thousand followers of a schismatic Mycogenian had committed suicide, claiming to get messages telling them of Trantor’s imminent destruction. The messages had supposedly come from nonhuman intelligences parasitizing Imperial defense and information platforms in orbit around Trantor.

Klia knew nothing about the defense platforms, but she was smart enough to see that Seldon was clearly akin to these fanatics, and would do someone like her no good at all.

As the man in dusty green had indicated…

At the card’s direction, Klia took a small slideway from the transit platform to a pedwalk artery dubiously called Brommus Fair. This led halfway across a district where goods were housed before distribution to retail shops, agoras, and markets around Streeling and the Imperial Sector.

She approached a large warehouse that reached to the edge of the ceil, where it met its supporting wall; a less than desirable neighborhood, but clean and orderly. There were even fewer people about at this early-morning hour than there had been in south Dahl. Still, she kept her senses keenly tuned.