Preem Palver

Preem Palver is a fictional character, part of Isaac Asimov's Foundation Series. Palver is portrayed as a rather loud and jolly simple farmer. However, in reality he is the mastermind behind the plot to restore Hari Seldon's plan to its original course after the disruption by the Mule. This required meticulous planning, giving the Foundation a believable solution to the enigma of the Second Foundation. Preem Palver is the nineteenth First Speaker of the Second Foundation and direct descendant of Stettin Palver, another character in the Foundation universe. (In fact, Palver's name seems to mean "First Speaker"; Preem sounds like prime and Palver sounds like palaver. This is probably meant as a foreshadowing hint to the reader, since his identity as First Speaker is not revealed until the last sentence of Second Foundation.)

Fictional history

He and his wife were leaving Kalgan where they had negotiated a trade agreement. They met up with Arkady Darell who was fleeing from Lord Stettin, the ruler of Kalgan, at the spaceport. They helped her evade capture and took her to Trantor, his homeworld.

Arkady then solved the riddle of the Second Foundation's location in a believable answer, and used Palver to pass it on to her father Toran Darell II in a coded message: "A circle has no end". This implied that the Second Foundation was on Terminus, because Hari Seldon had said that the Foundations were at "opposite ends of the Galaxy", and the Galaxy is a flat disc.

Preem Palver arranged for Kalgan to declare war on the Foundation through his agent Lady Callia, who was mentally manipulating Kalgan's ruler, Lord Stettin. Kalgan lost the war, and so restored the Foundation's confidence in its purpose.

In his guise as a farmer/trader, he also negotiated to supply the Foundation with needed supplies at the close of the war, at which time he passed on Arkady's message. Dr. Darell, in the meantime, had pioneered an electronic "Mind Static" device that emitted a strong mental field using the brain's radio-wave composition. Successfully finding an undercover agent of the Second Foundation among them, Dr. Darell and his associates interrogate him and find the Second Foundation on Terminus. The Second Foundation is then "eradicated" by the First Foundation, which now believes itself to be the only Foundation left, and can establish the second galactic empire without interference.

It is later revealed by Preem Palver, in the last chapter, that Terminus, the homeworld of the Foundation, is not, in fact, the real location of the Second Foundation. The physical scientists of the First Foundation were fooled by Seldon's phrasing, "opposite end of the Galaxy" and "Stars End". They believed that Seldon's meaning was the physical opposite end, but Seldon was a social scientist. The social opposite end of the Galaxy from Terminus was Trantor, because Trantor was where the entire First Empire was governed from, while Terminus was an impoverished, abandoned planet on the Outer Rim. As a quote from the novel reads "All roads lead to Trantor, and that is where all stars end". A small group of Second Foundationers was dispatched to Terminus from Trantor in order to fool the physical scientists into thinking that the real Second Foundation was there, and has been defeated. This ensures a return to the original Seldon Plan, where the Second Foundation is not a force to be feared by the First Foundation.

One of Preem Palver's most noted accomplishments is his exemplary guiding of the Second Foundation through the crisis. Seldon's psychohistory was useful only when dealing with large groups, so Palver had to rely on manipulation of individuals, whose behavior cannot be predicted statistically with such high confidence.