Civilization.… Like everything else, it has a price. The down payment is freedom. For the privilege of living together, men surrender the right to do… - Jack Williamson

“The only real scientific support of extrasensory and psychokinetic phenomena has come from such studies as those at Duke University,” he added. “Some of the published results purporting to show the reality of ESP and the mental manipulation of probability are pretty convincing—but I’m afraid the wish to demonstrate the survival of the soul has blinded the researchers to some grave flaw in their experimental or statistical methods.”
He shook his head, with a sober emphasis.
“This universe, to me, is strictly mechanistic. Every phenomena that takes place in it—from the birth of suns to the tendency of men to live in fear of gods and devils—was implicit in the primal superatom from whose explosive cosmic energy it was formed. The efforts that some distinguished scientists make to find room for operation of a free human will and the creative function of supernatural divinity in such apparent defects of mechanistic determination as Heisenberg’s principle of uncertainty—those futile efforts are as pathetic to me as the crudest attempt of a witch doctor to make it rain by sprinkling water on the ground. All the so-called supernatural, Mr. Barbee, is pure delusion, based on misdirected emotion and inaccurate observation and illogical thinking.”
His calm brown face smiled hopefully.
“Does that make you feel any better?”
“It does, doctor.”

Yet there was a pattern, and the fact that Horn could find it was a commentary upon empire. Mass government is government by rule and regulation. Obedience and conformity are overriding virtues; initiative is punished more often than rewarded. There are prescribed procedures for conducting a search, and no man can be punished for choosing rules over reality.

“I wonder—?” whispered April Bell, her long eyes narrowed and dark. “I wonder what they really found?”
“Whatever it is,” breathed Barbee, “the find doesn’t seem to have made them very happy. A fundamentalist might think they had stumbled into hell.”
“No,” the girl said, “men aren’t that much afraid of hell.”