If you take every wild-eyed scientist with a lab full of explosively inventive progress and then shove them into the same small neighborhood, it was argued, they would tend only to hurt themselves, each other, and their assistants.

There would always be civilian casualties, of course: but it was so much easier to keep those to a minimum if the threats were all crowded together.

The apparent danger of one immense, coordinated incident was considered small because the occupants of the District tended toward self regulation of the kind that starts with 'Fenwick's project may be more remarkable than mine!' and ends with 'Good old Fenwick. When shall we see his like again?'