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worlds have fallen without battle, the most recent of them the pleasure world Kalgan. Toran and Bayta are sent to Kalgan to stir up a war between the Mule and the Foundation; in the conflict the small traders on Kalgan hope to win their freedom. A disturbance on the beach leads Toran to intervene on behalf of the Mule's court Fool, Magnifico, who has fled the Mule's cruelty. Toran and Bayta then flee, accompanied by Magnifico and Han Pritcher, a Foundation spy.
The Mule uses the kidnapping of his Fool as a pretext for an attack on the Foundation. He wins battle after battle until finally, at the very moment a projection of Seldon appears in the Time Vault with comments that reveal Seldon had not foreseen this crisis, the Mule conquers Terminus itself. Toran, Bayta, scientist Ebling Mis, and Magnifico escape to Haven, but it too comes under attack. Before Haven falls, the four are sent to Trantor so that Mis can search the ancient Imperial Library for information that might lead to the Second Foundation and then to its help against the Mule. Trantor is in ruins, virtually destroyed by a rebellious general. The four escapees are captured by the heir to what is left of the Empire. Magnifico kills him with the aid of a music-and-image-creating machine called a Visi-Sonor, and they escape to the Library, where an agricultural community has grown up. Mis searches the records, but he is ill and visibly growing weaker. On the verge of death, as he is about to reveal the location of the Second Foundation, Mis is shot and killed by Bayta. Bayta has decided that Magnifico, the Fool, is really the Mule. His mysterious advantage is his ability to adjust people's emotions. Everywhere they have taken him he has sown despair, has adjusted the minds of key leaders to surrender at the crucial moment, and has pushed Mis to discover the location of the Second Foundation so that he can remove that threat as well. His critical mistake was to leave Bayta unadjusted. She had been the only person who had liked him without his interference, and he had valued too highly this natural feeling. The novella ends with the Mule's temporary defeat but his continued determination to find the Second Foundation. Whatever his victories, however, they cannot last beyond his death because, like his namesake, the Mule is sterile.
"Search by the Mule" ("Now You See It . . ." in the January 1948 Astounding) begins the third volume of the Trilogy, titled Second Foundation, which consists of two novellas. "Search by the Mule" picks up about five years after "The Mule.'' The Mule has consolidated his empire while, through an adjusted Han Pritcher, he has continued his search for the Second Foundation. Now he sends Pritcher out again with the capable but unadjusted Bail Channis. For the first time in the

 
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