“But this nightsiding, as you call it, wouldn’t prevent them from doing something. It would only mean they couldn’t profit by it.”

He nodded. “That’s about it. It’s a chance we have to take.”

Ron Moosic stared at the man. “Why?”

Riggs chuckled. “Because, throughout history, you can’t uninvent something. Oh, you can suppress it for a while, but it’s funny that lots of discoveries of the same tiling seem to happen around the same time, whenever the technology of the world will allow it.”

“The Greeks invented the steam engine but didn’t do anything with it,” the younger man pointed out.

“That they did—but they invented it in a closed society that kept their discoveries not only from non-Greeks but from the bulk of their own people. Silverberg will go on and on telling you that science is a collective and not really an individual sport these days. Oh, sure, Einstein dreamed up all that stuff on his own—but did he, really? Or did he take a lot of stuff discovered and discussed by a bunch of scientists in a lot of countries and put it all together to see something they missed? What if Einstein didn’t have a way to get that stuff from the others? No mass-produced books, no international postal system, no way to know what all those guys were thinking or finding out? And even if he did—what if all Einstein’s theories were written down on paper and filed away in one spot in just a single hand-written book? Who’d know it to make use of it, except by accident? The Greeks had that kind of problem. Lots of brains working, but nobody telling anybody else. Not like now. This whole project can be traced to a hundred different teams working in half a dozen countries on different stuff. Let just one word leak out that we’re doing this and others can put the same information together through mass communications, computer searches, and stuff like that.