21 - Empire by Clifford D. Simak

“I wish you could see it my way, Manning, he said. There's no place for me on earth. No place for me in the solar system. You see, I tried and failed. I'm just a has-been back there. He laughed quietly. Somehow, I can't imagine myself coming back in the role of the defeated tribal leader, chained to your chariots, so to speak.”

“Man doesn't want to live under scientific government. He doesn't want to be protected against blunders. He wants what he calls freedom. The right to do things he wants to do, even if it means making a damn fool of himself. The right to rise to great heights and tumble to equally low depths. That's human nature. I rule it out. Bet you can't rule out human nature.”

“With the new material-energy engines, life on every planet would be possible now, even easy. The cost of manufacture, mining, shipping, across the vast distances between the planets, would be only a fraction of what it had been when man had been forced to rely upon the unwieldy, expensive accumulator system of supplying life-giving power. Now Mars would have power of her own, even Pluto could generate her own.”

“There would be trips back to the earth for sentimental reasons, to see the place where one's ancestors were born and had lived, to goggle at the monument which marked the point from which the first spaceship had taken off for the moon, to visit old museums and see old cities and breathe the air that men and women had breathed for thousands of years before they found the power to take them anywhere. In the end, earth would be just a worn-out planet.”

“Think of what criminal uses could be made of the tele-transport. No vault, no net of charged wires, nothing could stop a thief from taking anything he wanted. Prisons would cease to be prisons. Criminals could reach in and pick up their friends, no matter how many guards there were. Prisons and bank vaults and national treasuries could be cleaned out in a single day.”

“Simple, said Craven. They were just fields that had more energy packed into a certain portion of space than space could take. Space-fields that had far more than their share of energy, more than they could hold. A super-saturated solution will crystallize almost immediately after the tiniest crystal put into it. Those fields acted the same way. They crystallized instantly into hyperspace the moment they came into contact with other energy.”