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.