ANXIETY

Poli placed the breakfast on the table, keeping one eye on the table news-recorder which quietly disgorged the bulletins of the day. It could be done easily enough without loss of efficiency, this one-eye-absent business. Since all items of food were sterilely packed in containers which served as discardable cooking units, her duties vis-à-vis breakfast consisted of nothing more than choosing the menu, placing the items on the table, and removing the residue thereafter.

She clacked her tongue at what she saw and moaned softly in retrospect.

“Oh, people are so wicked,” she said, and Darell merely hemmed in reply.

Her voice took on the high-pitched rasp which she automatically assumed when about to bewail the evil of the world. “Now why do these terrible Kalganese”—she accented the second syllable and gave it a long “a”—“do like that? You’d think they’d give a body peace. But no, it’s just trouble, trouble, all the time.

“Now look at that headline: ‘Mobs Riot Before Foundation Consulate.’ Oh, would I like to give them a piece of my mind if I could. That’s the trouble with people; they just don’t remember. They just don’t remember, Dr. Darell—got no memory at all. Look at the last war after the Mule died—of course I was just a little girl then—and oh, the fuss and trouble. My own uncle was killed, him being just in his twenties and only two years married, with a baby girl. I remember him even yet—blond hair he had, and a dimple in his chin. I have a trimensional cube of him somewheres—

“And now his baby girl has a son of her own in the navy and most likely if anything happens—

“And we had the bombardment patrols, and all the old men taking turns in the stratospheric defense—I could imagine what they would have been able to do if the Kalganese had come that far. My mother used to tell us children about the food rationing and the prices and taxes. A body could hardly make ends meet—

“You’d think if they had sense people would just never want to start it again; just have nothing to do with it. And I suppose it’s not people that do it, either; I suppose even Kalganese would rather sit at home with their families and not go fooling around in ships and getting killed. It’s that awful man, Stettin. It’s a wonder people like that are let live. He kills the old man—what’s his name—Thallos, and now he’s just spoiling to be boss of everything.

“And why he wants to fight us, I don’t know. He’s bound to lose—like they always do. Maybe it’s all in the Plan, but sometimes I’m sure it must be a wicked Plan to have so much fighting and killing in it, though to be sure I haven’t a word to say about Hari Seldon, who I’m sure knows much more about that than I do and perhaps I’m a fool to question him. And