Elena Casimir bit her lip. A stray breeze slid down the rock wall and rumpled her bright hair. After a long while she said, "Maybe you're right. But America today has, on the whole, a good government. You could let them know."
"Too risky. Sooner or later someone, probably with very idealistic motives, would force the whole thing into the open. So we're keeping hidden the very fact that our most important equations exist—which is why we didn't ask for help when Meade's detectives finally learned that they know."
"How do you know your precious Institute won't become just such an oligarchy as you describe?"
"I don't," Simon said, "but it's improbable. You see, the recruits who are eventually taught everything we know are pretty thoroughly indoctrinated with our own present-day beliefs. And we've learned enough individual psych to do some real indoctrinating! They'll pass it on to the next generation and so on.
"Meanwhile we hope the social structure and the mental climate is being modified in such a way that eventually it would be very difficult, if not impossible, for anyone to impose absolute control by any means. For as I said before, even an ultimately developed psychodynamics can't do everything. Ordinary propaganda, for instance, is quite ineffective on people trained in critical thinking.
"When enough people the world over are sane we can make the knowledge general. Meanwhile we've got to keep it under wraps and quietly prevent anyone else from learning the same things independently. Most such prevention, by the way, consists merely of recruiting promising researchers into our own ranks."
"The world's too big," she said very softly. "You can't foresee all that'll happen. Too many things could go wrong."
"Maybe. It's a chance we've got to take." His own gaze was somber.
They sat for awhile in stillness. Then she said, "It all sounds very pretty. But—what are you, Dalgetty?"
"Simon," he corrected.