Abner came over and joined them, completing the party. "What're you
three up to?" he wanted to know.
MacMartree yawned. "They're trying to get me to argue with them, as an
excuse for not sleeping."
"Not a bad idea, either," Cole grinned.
"You youngsters will be the death of me," MacMartree complained. "Don't
you know an old man needs his sleep?"
"Come on, Mac," Phillips teased. "Tell us why the patrols are
necessary."
* * * * *
They all laughed then, and MacMartree grinned. "I know how it is with
you young ones," he said. "You're tired of the dull and safe life back
home and joined the Service, only to find it just as dull and safe as
anything else."
"Tell me," Phillips put in, "can't anything happen to us anymore?"
"Yes," Cole said. "We can die of old age."
It didn't take much. The three young men had known it wouldn't take
much to get MacMartree started ... it seldom did.
"Youth never fails to amaze me," he said. The younger men recognized it
as a preamble, and settled themselves comfortably in the warm darkness
to listen.
"Look at you now," he went on. "You complain that your life here on
Patrol is tedious and uninteresting. Nothing ever happens, you say.
And it means nothing to you that the dangers and misfortunes you talk
of never threaten you because you have been given the power to prevent
and cope with anything."
He sat up now, warming to his subject. "You take no pride in your
heritage. Man is completely sufficient unto himself, and beyond that.
There is an old word I have found in my reading...." He paused, trying
to remember.
"Omnipotent," he said at last. "Man is omnipotent."
"All-potent?" Abner asked. "All-powerful?"
"That's right ... it's an archaic word, but it fits," MacMartree told
them. "But you don't appreciate your power, because you don't realize
what your life would be without it.
"In my books, I've read of the things our species suffered, before our
knowledge reached fulfillment. When we were bound to Earth, there were
wars; men--killed one another."
The young men shook their heads, wondering at the folly of their kind
many thousands of years before.
"And there were other things, too. As we cut ourselves loose from
Earth, and burrowed into the farthest reaches of the Galaxies, looking
for new worlds like this one, there were terrible dangers, dreadful
enemies and elements to cope with. And at first, man was foolish ...
continually meeting his enemies on their own ground. Until at last, our
wisdom prevailed.
"We devised ways and means to detect and destroy anything that
endangered us, long before the danger could be manifested. Like here,
on this planet ... but you know about that."
"Radiation, wasn't that it?" said Cole.
"Yes," MacMartree said. "The discovery ship took its readings from out
there somewhere, out where this place was only a dust mote in the glare
of its sun. They drained off the radiation, scattered it into the void,
then seeded the place with grass and went away."
"But that's what I don't understand," Phillips objected. "Why must we
patrol? When the discoverers found this planet, they destroyed the only
thing about it that could be harmful to man ... so why must we be here?"
* * * * *
MacMartree shrugged. "Caution, boy ... call it caution. We are here
to see and observe. The discoverers do not accept their readings as
infallible, though I suspect that they are. We're here on the one
chance in a hundred million that somewhere on this little world,
there's a being or an element that might bear enmity toward mankind."