"Partly. But don't get carried away by mere size. A hundred million miles of empty space isn't significant-if it's empty. No, Matt, the split goes deeper. We've given the human race a hundred years of peace, and now there is no one left who remembers war. They've come to accept peace and comfort as the normal way of life. But it isn't. The human animal has millions of years of danger and starving and death behind him; the past century is just a flicker of an eyelash in his history. But only the Patrol seems aware of it."
"Would you abolish the Patrol?"
"Oh, my, no, Matt! But I wish there were some way to make people realize by how thin a barrier the jungle has been shut out. And another thing, too-" Thurlow grinned sheepishly. "-I wish they had some understanding of what we are. The taxpayer's hired man, that's what they think of us."
Matt nodded. "They think we're some sort of traffic cop. There is a man back home who sells used copters-asked me why Patrolmen should be pensioned when they retire. He said that he hadn't been able to sit back and take it easy at thirty-five and he didn't see why he should have to support somebody else who did." Matt looked puzzled. "At the same time he sort of glamorized the Patrol-wants his son to be a cadet. I don't understand it."
"That's it. To them we are a kind of expensive, useless prize pet-their property. They don't understand that we ;ire not for hire. The sort of guardian you can hire is worth about as much as the sort of wife you can buy."
The following week Matt found time to look up what the ship's library afforded on the subject of the exploded planet. There was not much-dry statistics on sizes of asteroids, fragments, and particles, distributional and orbital data, Goodman's calculations summarized. Nothing at all about what he wanted to know-how it happened!-nothing but some fine-spun theories.
He took it up with Thurlow the next time they were out on Patrol. The lieutenant shrugged. "What do you expect, Matt?"
"I don't know, but more than I found."
"Our time scale is all wrong for us to learn much. Suppose you pick out one of the spools you've been studying- here, this one." The officer held out one-marked "Social structures of the Martian aborigines." "Now suppose you examine a couple of frames in the middle. Can you reconstruct the thousands and thousands of frames that come before it, just by logic?"
"Naturally not."