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Read Ebook: Patrol by Hamling William L
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Ebook has 142 lines and 6476 words, and 3 pages
PATROL
MacMartree knew that Man was omnipotent--Master of the Universe. But could he expect his patrol to fight and conquer an invisible enemy?
They made their camp high on the breast of the gently swelling hill. As the small planet turned toward the sunset, MacMartree stood a moment on the hillside, watching. Far out on the grass-covered plain their ship stood gleaming, a slender candle, touched by the flame of the sinking sun. Then, quickly, the far horizon caught the sun and pulled it under, and the gloom of night rushed in to drown the pale twilight.
"Night comes so fast here," Abner said, at MacMartree's side.
"Yes," MacMartree agreed, turning to him. "And day comes even faster. Time for sleep now, with morning only four hours away."
"I can't get used to it," Abner said as they moved back into the camp area. "Sleeping and waking in four hour bits!"
MacMartree laughed at that. "Abner, you're getting old. You can't adapt anymore."
Abner laughed, too, and unrolled his sleep-kit for the night.
MacMartree walked to the place where Phillips and Cole lay on the ground, talking casually and watching the stars.
"Time to switch on the screen, Phillips," MacMartree reminded the younger man.
Phillips nodded, sat up and reached for the control box that lay on the earth beside him. He closed the circuit, and the force-screen bloomed around them, glimmering softly like a thin veil of glowing fireflies.
"Kind of useless, that, don't you think?" Cole asked.
MacMartree sat down beside them.
"It's one of the rules, and no patrol ever came to grief by following the rules."
Phillips lay back on the turf. "No patrol ever came to grief at all, you mean. I'm bored to death."
MacMartree smiled tolerantly. "I know. It's a quiet life."
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."
Abner sighed. "And so we patrol ... for a year."
"Yes," MacMartree agreed. "For a year. And after the year, another patrol, and another year, and so on through a hundred patrols and years, until the place is classified safe for colonization."
"I think my species is cowardly," Cole said, a trifle hotly.
"Cautious," MacMartree corrected gently. "Only cautious. It's as it should be ... they have set up rules of caution, and we've never suffered for it."
"Except from boredom," Phillips cut in, and they all laughed again.
"Really though," said MacMartree, "you should be proud, not bored. Think of it, if the sun that just rolled down the horizon should suddenly begin to expand into a super-nova, it's within our ability to restore it to its normal status. Should a comet sweep this planet tonight and drag a tail of poisonous gases over us as we sleep, our force screen would protect us, and our mechanisms and devices would make the air sweet and clean for us in minutes. If--oh, but you know. Appreciate your power, your ability. Be glad you are what you are!"
MacMartree slept the sleep of the aged, curled in the clinging, billowy warmth of his sleep-kit. It took him a minute to rouse, when Cole came and shook him by the shoulder.
"It's Phillips," Cole was saying. "Come and see him, Mac, come and see."
"Eh?" MacMartree questioned. "What about Phillips?"
"There's something--something wrong with him. I don't know ... come and see, Mac!"
Abner lighted the lamp, and MacMartree blinked against the glare that flooded the area within the screen. Then, as his eyes grew accustomed to the brilliance, he saw what was happening to Phillips.
"You see?" Cole said, in great agitation. "Something is wrong with him."
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