"Peaceful ones. Scholarly. No brass and no balloons."
"Golly."
"Why 'golly'?"
"We need that tome."
"Not really. Too soon. Jung wrote me, once, that he thought it would
take about five hundred years before people began to understand
generally the ideas he elicited."
"More books might help shorten the interval."
I nodded my head affirmatively. "Might. Time doesn't matter, though.
Not so much. When I first began to see what caused the immense and
self-evident discrepancy between what some men would like to be and
what most men actually are I burned up with the idea of noising the
news around. I learned the hard way that the idea was one for just a
few people--too few to be more than leaven in the coming centuries.
I finally realized that my burn was, mostly, the desire to be the
missionary myself. To get a by-line. Ego in a low form. And I also
slowly realized that the truth would be there, always--and since it
was there, steps could be taken by anybody, anytime, toward finding it
again."
"You just write off your whole civilization--like that."
"It's what we're here for. To write ourselves off."
"Usefully."
"Well--our civilization has learned enough useful technical tricks to
last for millenniums. We served a purpose."