General Tennar stared at Hari Seldon in a rather pop-eyed manner and his fingers tapped lightly at the desk where he sat.

“Thirty years,” he said. “Thirty years and you are telling me you still have nothing to show for it?”

“Actually, General, twenty-eight years.”

Tennar ignored that. “And all at government expense. Do you know how many billions of credits have been invested in your Project, Professor?”

“I haven’t kept up, General, but we have records that could give me the answer to your question in seconds.”

“And so have we. The government, Professor, is not an endless source of funds. These are not the old times. We don’t have Cleon’s old free-and-easy attitude toward finances. Raising taxes is hard and we need credits for many things. I have called you here, hoping that you can benefit us in some way with your psychohistory. If you cannot, then I must tell you, quite frankly, that we will have to shut off the faucet. If you can continue your research without government funding, do so, for unless you show me something that would make the expense worth it, you will have to do just that.”

“General, you make a demand I cannot meet, but, if in response, you end government support, you will be throwing away the future. Give me time and eventually—”

“Various governments have heard that ‘eventually’ from you for decades. Isn’t it true, Professor, that you say your psychohistory predicts that the junta is unstable, that my rule is unstable, that in a short time it will collapse?”

Seldon frowned. “The technique is not yet firm enough for me to say that this is something that psychohistory states.”

“I put it to you that psychohistory does state it and that this is common knowledge within your Project.”

“No,” said Seldon warmly. “No such thing. It is possible that some among us have interpreted some relationships to indicate that the junta may be an unstable form of government, but there are other relationships that may easily be interpreted to show it is stable. That is the reason why we must continue our work. At the present moment it is all too easy to use incomplete data and imperfect reasoning to reach any conclusion we wish.”

“But if you decide to present the conclusion that the government is unstable and say that psychohistory warrants it—even if it does not actually do so—will it not add to the instability?”

“It may very well do that, General. And if we announced that the government is stable, it may well add to the stability. I have had this very same discussion with Emperor Cleon on a number of occasions. It is possible to use psychohistory as a tool to manipulate the emotions of the people and achieve short-term effects. In the long run, however, the predictions are quite likely to prove incomplete or downright erroneous and psychohistory will lose all its credibility and it will be as though it had never existed.”