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." Abner sighed. "And so we patrol ... for a year."