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PROLOGUE

The first Galactic E down for centuries and only one man fully realized that fact

He was Hari Seldoreat scientist of the First Empire, and it was he who perfected psychohistory - the science of human behavior reduced to mathematical equations

The individual hu is unpredictable, but the reactions of human er the reater the accuracy that could be achieved And the size of the human masses that Seldon worked as no less than the population of all the inhabited millions of worlds of the Galaxy

Seldon's equations told him that, left to itself, the Empire would fall and that thirty thousand years of huony would elapse before a Second Empire would arise from the ruins And yet, if one could adjust sonule millennium - just one thousand years

It was to insure this that Seldon set up two colonies of scientists that he called "Foundations" With deliberate intention, he set them up "at opposite ends of the Galaxy" The First Foundation, which centered on physical science, was set up in the fuel daylight of publicity The existence of the other, the Second Foundation, a world of psychohistorical and "mentalic" scientists, was drowned in silence

In The Foundation Trilogy, the story of the first four centuries of the Interregnum is told The First Foundation (commonly known as simply "The Foundation," since the existence of another was unknown to alan as a small community lost in the emptiness of the Outer Periphery of the Galaxy Periodically it faced a crisis in which the variables of human intercourse - and of the social and economic currents of the ti only one certain line and when it moved in that direction a new horizon of development opened 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 re Eeneral - and beat it

It seeh s would prevent the Second E established or, time - and with a minimum of intermediate devastation

But psychohistory is a statistical science Always there is a s did - so 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 men's emotions and shape their minds so that his bitterest opponents were made into his devoted servants Aries could not, would not, fight him The First Foundation fell and Seldon's P1an seemed to lie in ruins

There was left ht unprepared by the sudden appearance of the Mule, but which was noorking 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 as left of the First Foundation sought it to obtain help

Neither found it The Mule was stopped first by the action of a woh tianize the proper action and, with that, to stop the Mule permenently Slowly 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 second's existence, and the First did not want a future in which they, were overseen by the mentalists The First Foundation was the superior in physical force, while the Second Foundation was ha 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," Preees to do The First Foundation was allowed to seem to win, to seereater and greater strength in the Galaxy, totally ignorant that the Second Foundation still existed

It is now four hundred and ninety-eight years after the First Foundation had coth, but one man does not accept appearances -