"It's not that," said Cushing. "Not itching to go free."

"It's this Place of Going to the Stars," said Monty. "I would suppose that's it. If I were a younger man, I think that I'd be going, too. Although, I'm not sure that I could force myself to go. I think that through the centuries we people in this university have become agoraphobes. All of us have stayed so long, huddled on this campus, that none of us ever thinks of going anywhere."

"Can I take this to mean," asked Cushing, "that you are trying to say you think there maybe something to this business Wilson wrote down in his notes—that there could be a Place of Going to the Stars?"

"I do not know," said Monty. "I would not even try to guess. Ever since you showed me the notes and told me of your finding them I have been thinking on it. Not just wool-gathering, romantic thoughts about how exciting it might be if there were such a place, but trying to weigh the factors that would make such a situation true or false, and I am forced to tell you that I think it might be possible. We do know that men went out into the solar system. We know they went to the Moon and Mars. And in light of this, we must ask ourselves if they would have been satisfied with only Moon and Mars. I don't think they would have been. Given the capability, they'd have left the solar system. Given time, they would have gained that capability. We have no hint of whether they did gain the capability because those last few hundred years before the Collapse are hidden from us. It is those few hundred years that were excised from the books. The people who brought about the Collapse wanted to erase all memory of those few centuries and we have no way to know what might have happened during that long span of time. But judging from the progress that men had made during those years that we do know about, that were left to us to read, it seems to me almost certain that they would have gained deep-space capability."