Chapter 14 Chapter Six

Mayor Harding was biting his cigar, completely oblivious to the fact that the cigar had been extinguished.He hadn't slept all night last night, and he was sure he wouldn't be able to sleep tonight either, and it could be seen in his eyes. He said in a tired voice, "Is that all right?" "I don't think so," John Lee stroked his chin with one hand, "What do you think?" "Not bad, it's got to be risky like this, you understand? That means there can't be any hesitation, and there's no room for them to grasp the situation. Once we can start giving orders, ha, give orders in the most skillful way possible, they You will definitely obey habitually, this is the basic principle of the coup d'état."

"If the council remains indecisive..." "Council? Don't worry about them. After tomorrow, their influence on Terminus is less than half a broken copper plate." John nodded slowly: "But I still wonder why they haven't tried to stop us until now? You said that they weren't completely kept in the dark." "Farrah got a little bit of an edge, he worries me a little bit sometimes, and Pihaner was already suspicious of me when I got elected. But, you know, they never got the hang of my real intentions. These guys The training is all authoritarian, they trust the emperor to be omnipotent just because he is the emperor; they believe that the council cannot be suspended only because the council acts in the name of the emperor. No one can see the coup d'état Possibilities, that helped us a lot.”

Harding got up from his chair, walked to the water cooler, and continued, "John, they're actually not that bad. I mean when they put their whole heart and soul into the encyclopedia—that's their only job in the future. But let They rule Terminus, it seems too naive and incompetent. Now go, start everything, I want to be alone." Harding sat on a corner of the desk, looking at the glass of water in his hand and meditating. God!He thought, if only he was as confident as he pretended to be!The Anacreonians were going to land in two days, and what he was going to do now was only based on his speculations and guesses about the arrangements Seldon had made for the past fifty years.I can't even call myself a real psychologist, just a half-tongue who has been trained for a few days, and now he is trying to see through the greatest mind of modern times.

If Farah was right, if Anacreon was the only problem Seldon had foreseen, if all Seldon wanted to protect was the Encyclopedia—what good was a military coup? He shrugged and drank the water in one gulp.