Cities in Flight

“I’ve been burned already,” Paige said hotly. “How the hell can I stand back now? And tolerating a spy isn’t just politics. It’s treason, not only by rumor, but in fact. Are you deliberately putting everyone’s head in the noose?”

“Quite deliberately. Paige, this project is for everyone—every man, woman and child on the Earth and in space. The fact that the West is putting up the money is incidental. What we’re doing here is in every respect just as anti-West as it is anti-Soviet. We’re out to lick death for human beings, not just for the armed forces of some one military coalition. What do we care who gets it first? We want everyone to have it.”

“Does Gunn agree with that?”

“It’s company policy. It may even have been Hal’s own idea, though he has different reasons, different justifications. Have you any idea what will happen when a death-curing drug hits a totalitarian society—a drug available in limited quantities only? It won’t prove fatal to the Soviets, of course, but it ought to make the struggle for succession over there considerably bloodier than it is already. That’s essentially the way Hal seems to look at it.”

“And you don’t,” Paige said grimly.

“No, Paige, I don’t. I can see well enough what’s going to happen right here at home when this thing gets out. Think for a moment of what it will do to the religious people alone. What happens to the after-life if you never need to leave this one? Look at the Believers. They believe in the literal truth of everything in the Bible—that’s why they revise the book every year. And this story is going to break before their Jubilee year is over. Did you know that their motto is: ‘Millions now living will never die’? They mean themselves, but what if it turns out to be everybody?

“And that’s only the beginning. Think of what the insurance companies are going to say. And what’s going to happen to the whole structure of compound interest. Wells’s old yarn about the man who lived so long that his savings came to dominate the world’s whole financial structure— When the Sleeper Wakes, wasn’t it?—well, that’s going to be theoretically possible for everybody with the patience and the capital to let his money sit still. Or think of the whole corpus of the inheritance laws. It’s going to be the biggest; blackest social explosion the West ever had to take. We’ll be much too busy digging in to care about what’s happening to the Central Committee in Moscow.”

“You seem to care enough to be protecting the Central Committee’s interests, or at least that they probably think of as their interests,” Paige said slowly. “After all, there is a possibility of keeping the secret, instead of letting it leak.”

“There is no such possibility,” Anne said. “Natural laws can’t be kept secret. Once you give a scientist the idea that a certain goal can be reached, you’ve given him more than half of the information he needs. Once he gets the idea that the conquest of death is possible, no power on Earth can stop him from finding out how it’s done—the ‘know-how’ we make so many fatuous noises about is the most minor part of research; it’s even a matter of total indifference to the essence of the question.”

“I don’t see that.”

“Then let’s go back to the fission bomb again for a moment. The only way we could have kept that a secret was to have failed to drop it at all, or even test-fire it. Once the secret was out that the bomb existed—and you’ll remember that we announced that before hundreds of thousands of people in Hiroshima—we had no secrets in that field worth protecting. The biggest mystery in the Smyth report was the specific method by which uranium slugs were ‘canned’ in a protective jacket; it was one of the toughest problems the project had to lick, but at the same time it’s exactly the kind of problem you’d assign to an engineer, and confidently expect a solution within a year.

“The fact of the matter, Paige, is that you can’t keep scientific matters a secret from yourself. A scientific secret is something that some other scientist can’t contribute to, any more than he can profit by it. Contrariwise, if you arm yourself through discoveries in natural law, you also arm the other guy. Either you give him the information, or you cut your own throat; there aren’t any other courses possible.