The Fall of Terminus to the Mule
The Vault opens, Seldon talks about the wrong crisis, and the lights go out.
As the Mule advances in Isaac Asimov's Foundation and Empire, the Foundation's leaders assume that Hari Seldon foresaw the attack and that his scheduled hologram in the Time Vault will tell them how to win.
Quick Facts
- Part of
- Foundation and Empire, "The Mule"
Lore & Background
When the Vault opens, Seldon speaks of a civil war with the Traders, not of the Mule. The recording stops when Terminus loses all power in a Mule attack, and the Foundation falls.
Reader's Guide
The Mule's rule over the Foundation ends in Second Foundation, when the First Speaker takes control of his mind and sends him back to Kalgan to live out his life as a peaceful despot.
Toran and Bayta Darell, the psychologist Ebling Mis and Magnifico Giganticus, a clown who has fled the Mule's service, travel the Foundation worlds and on to the Great Library of Trantor, hoping to find the Second Foundation. Mis works himself to death; as he is about to name the Second Foundation's location, Bayta kills him, having realised that Magnifico is the Mule himself.
More in Narrative Arcs & Events
Elsewhere in Foundation
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