If mankind were to continue in other than the present barbarism, a new path must be found, a new civilization based on some other method than technol… - Clifford D. Simak

Whatever doubt might rise, he knew that he was right. But the rightness was an intellectual rightness and the doubt emotional.

As he looked, Sutton felt the cold hand of loneliness reach down with icy fingers to take him in its grip. For here was sheer, mad loneliness such as he had never dreamed. Here was the very negation of life and motion, here was the stark, bald beginning when there was no life, nor even thought of life. Here anything that knew or thought or moved was an alien thing, a disease, a cancer on the face of nothingness.

yeah’! Page stopped in front of a smaller room, enclosed by heavy quartz. Inside that room was the great bank of mercury-vapor rectifiers. From them lashed a blue-green glare that splashed against his face and shoulders, painting him in angry, garish color. The glass guarded him from the terrific blast of ultra-violet light that flared from the pool of shimmering molten metal, a terrible emanation that would have flayed a man’s skin from his body within the space of seconds. * * * * The scientist squinted his eyes against the glare. There was something in it that caught him with a deadly fascination. The personification of power — the incredibly intense spot of incandescent vapor, the tiny sphere of blue-green fire, the spinning surge of that shining pool, the intense glare of ionization. Power…the breath of modern mankind, the pulse of progress.