“This wild place makes me o’comfortable, Doc. Surely you don’ like the breeze gustin’ like this?”

Hari had been told that Kantun’s parents arrived on Trantor as young Greys-members of the bureaucratic caste-expecting to spend a few years’ service on the capital planet, training in monkish dormitories, then heading back out to the galaxy as administrators in the vast civil service. But flukes of talent and promotion intervened to keep them here, raising a son amid the steel caverns they hated. Kers inherited his parents’ famed Valmoril sense of duty-or else Daneel Olivaw would never have chosen the fellow to tend Hari in these final days.

I may no longer be useful, but some people still think I’m worth looking after.

In Hari’s mind, the word “person” applied to R. Daneel Olivaw, perhaps more than most of thehumans he ever knew.

For decades, Hari had carefully kept secret the existence of “eternals”-robots who had shepherded human destiny for twenty thousand years-immortal machines that helped create the first Galactic Empire, then encouraged Hari to plan a successor. Indeed, Hari spent the happiest part of his life married to one of them. Without the affection of Dors Venabili-or the aid and protection of Daneel Olivaw-he could never have created psychohistory, setting in motion the Seldon Plan.

Or discovered how useless it would all turn out to be, in the long run.

Wind in the surrounding trees seemed to mock Hari. In that sound, he heard hollow echoes of his own doubts.

The Foundation cannot achieve the task set before it. Somewhere, sometime during the next thousand years, a perturbation will nudge the psychohistorical parameters, rocking the statistical momentum, knocking your Plan off course.