Foundation Fear by Gregory Benford Read Free Book Online

electrostatic fields supported him through
     intricate charge imbalances. He could feel them playing in his hair, small twinges skating
     across his skin, as the field configurations handed him off to each other, each lowering
     his mass infinitesimally down the chute.
    When they left the wedge, thirteen floors higher, Dors passed a charge-programmed comb
     through her hair. It crackled and snapped obediently into its style: “smart” hair.
    They entered a broad passageway lined with shops. Hari liked being in a place where he
     could see farther than a hundred meters.
    Movement was quick because there was no cross traffic for any conveyance. A slidewalk ran
     at the center, going their way, but they stayed near the shop windows and browsed as they
     ambled.
    To move laterally, one simply went up or down a level by elevator or escalator, then
     stepped on a moving belt or entered a robopod. In the corridors to both sides the slideway
     ran opposite. With no left or right turns, traffic mishaps were rare. Most people walked
     wherever was practical, for the exercise and for the indefinable exhilaration of Trantor
     itself. People who came here wanted the constant stimulation of humanity, ideas, and
     cultures rubbing against each other in productive friction. Hari was not immune to it,
     though it lost some savor if overdone.
    People in the squares and park-hexagons wore fashions from the twenty-five million worlds.
     He saw self-shaping “leathers” from animals who could not possibly have resembled the
     mythical horse. A man sauntered by with leggings slit to his hip, exposing blue-striped
     skin that bunched and slid in a perpetual show. An angular woman sported a bodice of
     open-mouthed faces, each swallowing ivory-nippled breasts; he had to look twice to believe
     they weren't real. Girls in outrageously cut pomp-vestments paraded noisily. A child -- or
     was it a normal inhabitant of a strong-grav world? -- played a photozither, strumming its
     laser beams.
    The Specials fanned out and their captain came trotting over. “We can't cover you well
     here, Academician sir.”
    “These are ordinary people, not assassins. They had no way of predicting that I'd be here.”
    “Emperor says cover you, we cover you.”
    Dors rapped back smartly, “I'll handle the close-in threats. I'm able, I assure you.”
    The captain's mouth twisted sourly, but he gave himself a moment before saying, “I heard
     something about that. Still -- ”
    “Have your men use their range detectors vertically. A shaped charge on the layers below
     and above could catch us.”
    “Uh, yes'm.” He trotted off.
    They passed by the jigsaw walls of the Farhahal Quadrant. A wealthy ancient had become
     obsessed with the notion that as long as his estate was unfinished, he would not himself
     finish -- that is, die. Whenever an addition neared completion, he ordered up more.
     Eventually the tangle of rooms, runways, vaults, bridges and gardens became an incoherent
     motley stuck into every cranny of the original, rather simple design. When Farhahal
     eventually did “finish,” a tower half built, bickering by his heirs and lawyerly
     plundering of the estate for their fees brought the quadrant low. Now it was a fetid
     warren, visited only by the predatory and the unwary.
    The Specials pulled in tight and the captain urged them to get into a robo. Hari
     grudgingly agreed. Dors had the concentrated look that meant she was worried. They sped in
     silence through shadowy tunnels. There were two stops and in the brilliantly lit stations
     Hari saw rats scurrying for shelter as the pod eased to a halt. He silently pointed them
     out to Dors.
    “Brrrr,” she said. “One would think that at the very center of the Empire we could
     eliminate pests.”
    “Not these days,” Hari said, though he suspected the rats had thrived even at the height
     of Empire. Rodents cared little for grandeur.
    “I suppose they've