ditions under which he must work."

"Change them to what?" Her eyes challenged his. He noticed that there
were small gold flecks in the gray. "What does the Institute want?"

"A sane world," he replied.

"I've wondered," she said. "Maybe Bancroft is more nearly right than
you. Maybe I should be on his side after all."

"I take it you favor libertarian government," he said. "In the past
it's always broken down sooner or later and the main reason has been
that there aren't enough people with the intelligence, alertness and
toughness to resist the inevitable encroachments of power on liberty.

"The Institute is trying to do two things--create such a citizenry and
simultaneously to build up a society which itself produces men of that
kind and reinforces those traits in them. It can be done, given time.
Under ideal conditions we estimate it would take about three hundred
years for the whole world. Actually it'll take longer."

"But just what kind of person is needed?" Elena asked coldly. "Who
decides it? _You_ do. You're just the same as all other reformers,
including Meade--hell bent to change the whole human race over to your
particular ideal, whether they like it or not."

"Oh, they'll like it," he smiled. "That's part of the process."

"It's a worse tyranny than whips and barbed wire," she snapped.

"You've never experienced those then."

"You _have_ got that knowledge," she accused. "You have the data and
the equations to be--sociological engineers."

"In theory," he said. "In practice it isn't that easy. The social
forces are so great that--well, we could be overwhelmed before
accomplishing anything. And there are plenty of things we still don't
know. It will take decades, perhaps centuries, to work out a complete
dynamics of man. We're one step beyond the politician's rule of thumb
but not up to the point where we can use slide rules. We have to feel
our way."

"Nevertheless," she said, "you've got the beginnings of a knowledge
which reveals the true structure of society and the processes that
make it. Given that knowledge man could in time build his own
world-order the way he desired it, a stable culture that wouldn't know
the horrors of oppression or collapse. But you've hidden away the very
fact that such information exists. You're using it in secret."

"Because we have to," Dalgetty said. "If it were generally known that
we're putting pressure on here and there and giving advice slanted
just the way