The friend of a conqueror is but the last victim. - Isaac Asimov

Haven't we forgotten something, gentlemen?' 'What?' asked Pirenne, peevishly. 'That in a month we celebrate our fiftieth anniversary.' Fara had a trick of uttering the most obvious platitudes with great profundity. 'What of it?' 'And on that anniversary,' continued Fara, placidly, 'Hari Seldon's Vault will open. Have you ever considered what might be in the Vault?' 'I don't know. Routine matters. A stock speech of congratulations, perhaps. I don't think any significance need be placed on the Vault – though the Journal' – and he glared at Hardin, who grinned back – 'did try to make an issue of it. I put a stop to that.' 'Ah,' said Fara, 'but perhaps you are wrong. Doesn't it strike you' – he paused and put a finger to his round little nose – 'that the Vault is opening at a very convenient time?

Since I do not believe in so many things, it is not difficult for me to disbelieve in the Fall as well, so that I am entirely convinced I will be telling the truth to the people.

He had steeled himself just a little for the Jump through hyper-space, a phenomenon one did not experience in simple interplanetary trips. The Jump remained, and would probably remain forever, the only practical method of travelling between the stars. Travel through ordinary space could proceed at no rate more rapid than that of ordinary light (a bit of scientific knowledge that belonged among the items known since the forgotten dawn of human history), and that would have meant years of travel between even the nearest of inhabited systems. Through hyper-space, that unimaginable region that was neither space nor time, matter nor energy, something nor nothing, one could traverse the length of the Galaxy in the interval between two neighboring instants of time.