"It's too late. That's the assignment for the next civilization." He just looked at me. After a while, I went on. "You birds say that knowledge is power--yet all your knowledge turns into impotence when you want it used for human harmony and peace. What is the power, then?" "Let me guess. Instinct. You see--as an old Wylie reader--" I heaved a cushion at him and enjoyed a little of my second cup of coffee. "Instinct. You dumb bastards! If you were really dedicated to science, as you say, the last war would never have happened. And the next one wouldn't be forever imminent. You say you believe that scientific knowledge should be free to all. Freedom of knowledge, you say, to put it backwards, is essential to science. But every time the nations get miffed at each other--you lice lock yourselves up in the national labs and go to war against each other as much as any soldier. The old herd instinct. The old ego. Intellectual fealty to scientific principles? You have none!" "I kind of resent that," Paul said slowly. "You resent the accusation. We who are about to die of the fact resent your behavior. Or should. If you pure scientists were pure guys purely devoted to science, Hitler could never have hired a dozen of the lot of you in Germany, or Stalin coerced six. If you had insisted on keeping science free--the Wehrmacht could never have been armed. If you had been scientific men, not men practicing science--even granting you felt it necessary to wipe out the Axis--when the deed was done, you could simply have published all the atomic facts and be damned to the politicians and the so-called patriots. Left mankind to work out its destinies in a climate where knowledge was still free. As it is--Russia knows enough to wipe up America in a few more years--the patriots and politicians are living in a fool's paradise--your _Bulletin_ sweats monthly to explain that sinister fact--and all you gained by assenting to the current lockup of freedom of knowledge is a bureaucratic sweatbox to do your work in--and a terrible endless case of jitters. You don't understand behavior well enough to predict the results of your own. Others do. And by far the most probable result of the failure of pure scientists to behave purely toward science will be the end of the possibility of further top-level scientific investigation for a century or two." "You think I should sit down and write out all the atomic secrets I know and print them and scatter them from a plane?"