"Ought to be?" Dors's eyes narrowed. It was clear that she suddenly understood. "Do you mean-"

"Yes, I do mean. He's from the past-centered, mythology-ridden Mycogen Sector of Trantor. That's what he's been laboring to hide."

Dors Venabili thought coolly about the matter. It was her only mode of thought-cool. Not for her the hot flashes of emotion.

She closed her eyes to concentrate. It had been eight years since she and Hari had visited Mycogen and they hadn't been there long. There had been little to admire there except the food.

The pictures arose. The harsh, puritanical, male-centered society; the emphasis on the past; the removal of all body hair, a painful process deliberately self-imposed to make themselves different so that they would "know who they were"; their legends; their memories (or fancies) of a time when they ruled the Galaxy, when their lives were prolonged, when robots existed.

Dors opened her eyes and said, "Why, Hari?"

"Why what, dear?"

"Why should he pretend not to be from Mycogen?"

She didn't think he would remember Mycogen in greater detail than she; in fact, she knew he wouldn't, but his mind was better than hers-different, certainly. Hers was a mind that only remembered and drew the obvious inferences in the fashion of a mathematic line of deduction. He had a mind that leaped unexpectedly. Seldon liked to pretend that intuition was solely the province of his assistant, Yugo Amaryl, but Dors was not fooled by that. Seldon liked to pose as the unworldly mathematician who stared at the world out of perpetually wondering eyes, but she was not fooled by that, either.

"Why should he pretend not to be from Mycogen?" she repeated as he sat there, his eyes lost in an inward look that Dors always associated with his attempt to squeeze one more tiny drop of usefulness and validity out of the concepts of psycho-history.