"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 'knowhow' 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.