Foundation Fear by Gregory Benford

to his men to arm
     with anamorphine. They all bristled with weapons.
    Smoke paled the overhead phosphors. Through the muggy haze Hari saw a solid wall of people
     hammering toward them. They came out of side alleys and doorways and all seemed to bear
     down on him. The Specials fired a volley into the mass. Some went down. The captain threw
     a canister and gas blossomed farther away. He had judged it expertly; air circulation
     carried the fumes into the mob, not toward Hari.
    But anamorphine wasn't going to stop them. Two women rushed by Hari, carrying cobblestones
     ripped from the street. A third jabbed at Hari with a knife and the captain shot her with
     a dart. Then more Dahlites rushed at the Specials and Hari caught what they were shouting:
     incoherent rage against tiktoks.
    The idea seemed so unlikely to him at first he thought he could not have heard rightly.
     That deflected his attention, and when he looked back toward the streaming crowd the
     captain was down and a man was advancing, holding a knife.
    What any of this had to do with tiktoks was mysterious, but Hari did not have time to do
     anything except step to the side and kick the man squarely in the knee.
    A bottle bounced painfully off his shoulder and smashed on the walkway. A man whirled a
     chain around and around and then toward Hari's head. Duck. It whistled by and Hari dove at
     the man, tackling him solidly. They went down with two others in a swearing, punching
     mass. Hari took a slug in the gut.
    He rolled over and gasped for air and clearly, only a few feet away, saw a man kill
     another with a long, curved knife.
    Jab, slash, jab. It happened silently, like a dream. Hari gasped, shaken, his world in
     slow motion. He should be responding boldly, he knew that. But it was so overwhelming --
    -- and then he was standing, with no memory of getting there, wrestling with a man who had
     not bothered with bathing for quite some while.
    Then the man was gone, abruptly yanked away by the seethe of the crowd.
    Another sudden jump -- and Specials were all around him. Bodies sprawled lifeless on the
     walkway. Others held their bloody heads. Shouts, thumps --
    He did not have time to figure out what weapon had done that to them before the Specials
     were whisking him and Yugo along and the whole incident fled into obscurity, like a 3D
     program glimpsed and impatiently passed by.
    The captain wanted to return to Streeling. “Even better, the palace.”
    “This wasn't about us,” Hari said as they took a slideway.
    “Can't be sure of that, sir.”
    10.
    Hari batted away all suggestions that they discontinue their journey. The incident had
     apparently begun when some tiktoks malfed.
    “Somebody accused Dahlites of causing it,” Yugo related. “So our people stood up for
     themselves and, well, things got out of hand.”
    Everyone near them was alive with excitement, faces glowing, eyes white and darting. He
     thought suddenly of his father's wry saying, Never underestimate the power of boredom.
    In human affairs, spirited action relieved dry tedium. He remembered seeing two women
     pummel a Spook, slamming away at the spindly, bleached-white man as though he were no more
     than a responsive exercise machine. A simple phobia against sunlight meant that he was of
     the hated Other, and thus fair game.
    Murder was a primal urge. Even the most civilized felt tempted by it in moments of rage.
     But nearly all resisted and were better for the resistance. Civilization was a defense
     against nature's raw power.
    That was a crucial variable, one never considered by the economists with their gross
     products per capita, or the political theorists with their representative quotients, or
     the sociosavants and their security indices.
    “I'll have to keep that in, too,” he muttered to himself.
    “Keep what?” Yugo asked. He, too, was still agitated.
    “Things as basic as murder. We get all tied up in Trantor's economics and