For what need was there to go anywhere? It all was here. By simply twirling a dial one could talk face to face with anyone wished, could go, by sense… - Clifford D. Simak

For the old do not really mind; in a strange way they become sufficient to themselves. They need so very little and they care so very little. They climb the mountain no one else can see and as they climb the old, once-valued things they’ve carried all their lives tend to drop away and as they climb the higher the knapsack that they carry becomes emptier, but perhaps no less in weight than it had ever been, and the few things that are left in it, they find, with some amusement, or those few indispensable belongings which they’ve gathered in a long lifetime of effort and of seeking. They wonder greatly, if they think of it at all, how it was left to age to winnow out the chaff they’ve carried all the years, thinking that it was valuable when it was only chaff. When they reach the mountain top, they find that they can see farther than they’ve ever seen before and with greater clarity and, if by this time they’re not past all caring, may bemoan that they must approach the end of their lives before they can see with this marvelous clarity, which does little for them now, but might, in earlier years, have been of incalculable value.

University politics,” declared Oop, “doesn’t care about liberal traditions or any other kind of traditions.

Ulysses, he thought, had not told him all the truth about the Talisman. He had told him that it had disappeared and that the galaxy was without it, but he had not told him that for many years its power and glory had been dimmed by the failure of its custodian to provide linkage between the people and the force. And all that time the corrosion occasioned by that failure had eaten away at the bonds of the galactic cofraternity.