There is a certain rapport, a sensitivity - I don't know how to say it - that forms a bridge between this strange machine and the cosmic spiritual force. It is not the machine, itself, you understand, that reaches out and taps the spiritual force. It is the living creature's mind, aided by the mechanism, that brings the force to us.

How strange it is, he thought, how so many senseless things shape our destiny. For the rifle range had been a senseless thing, as senseless as a billiard table…

A machine, a mechanism, no more than a tool - technological brother to the hoe, the wrench, the hammer - and yet as far a cry from these as the human brain was…

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 …