Weinbaum said thoughtfully, “I don’t find this very hard to accept, so far. Pruned of the philosophy, it even makes some sense of the ‘J. Shelby Stevens’ affair. I assume that by letting the old gentleman become known as somebody who knew more about the Dirac transmitter than I did, and who wasn’t averse to negotiating with anybody who had money, you kept the leak working through yourather than transmitting data directly to unfriendly governments.”
“It did work out that way,” Dana said. “But that wasn’t the genesis or the purpose of the Stevens masquerade. I’ve already given you the whole explanation of how that came about.”
“Well, you’d better name me that leak, before the man gets away.”
“When the price is paid, not before. It’s too late to prevent a getaway, anyhow. In the meantime, Robin, I want to go on and tell you the other answer to your question about how I was able to find this particular Dirac secret, and you didn’t.
What answers I’ve given you up to now have been cause-and-effect answers, with which we’re all more comfortable. But I want to impress on you that all apparent cause-and-effect relationships are accidents. There is no such thing as a cause, and no such thing as an effect. I found the secret because I found it; that event was fixed; that certain circumstances seem to explain why I found it, in the old cause-and-effect terms, is irrelevant. Similarly, with all your superior equipment and brains, you didn’t find it for one reason, and one reason alone: because you didn’t find it. The history of the future says you didn’t.”