He is in reality 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.

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 at the spaceport. They helped her evade capture and took her to Trantor.

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 Callias mental manipulation of 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. Sucessfully finding an undercover agent of the Second Foundation among them, Dr. Darell and his associates interrogate him and find the Second Foundation on Terminus.

It is later revealed by Preem Palver, in the last chapter, that Terminus 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". 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 planed on the Outer Rim. 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.

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, which has very low probabilities.

Preem Palver is the nineteenth First Speaker of the Second Foundation and direct descendent of Stettin Palver, another character in the Foundation universe. In fact, Palver's name literally means 'first speaker'.