A few decades after the death of Wienis, trader Limmar Ponyets receives a message that his good friend, Foundation diplomat Eskel Gorov was arrested on Askone while posing as a trader. Gorov faces death for interfering in local politics. Ignoring Askone’s ban against Foundation guild traders, and despite the loss of the produce that soon will rot in his ship’s hold, Ponyets turns his trading vessel toward the forbidden world of Askone.

It takes Ponyets a week to travel to Askone and another week to work his way through a phalanx of bureaucrats until he gets an appointment with the planet’s ruler. The Grand Master, a small, wrinkled, irritable man, receives Ponyets impatiently. The trader insists that his guild wouldn’t deliberately violate Askone space, where their activities are considered sacrilegious, and that Gorov’s presence there is a “deplorable mistake.” The Grand Master doubts it is an error, and he accuses Ponyets’s associates of planning the whole thing. Gorov is soon to be executed.

Ponyets asserts that he trained as a priest of the Galactic Spirit, the religion of the Foundation. The Grand Master, a pious member of the Askonian religion, relents and allows Ponyets to visit Gorov’s prison cell.