The Book of Chronicles · Chapter 24

The Guardian That Never Slept

1. 1

   And it came to pass in the land of Dhahran, in the second month of the year 1991, in the war of the Gulf, that the Guardian was set upon a watch, and it was called the Patriot, and it was sworn to look up into the sky and bring down the Scud before it fell.

2. 2

   Now the Guardian had been made in an earlier day to watch for aeroplanes, which are slow, and to be carried from place to place and put to rest when the day was done; and its makers had asked of it a few hours of watching, and not a hundred.

3. 3

   For it counted the hours by a clock of its own, and the clock ticked in tenths of a second, as a sentinel counteth his steps; and from the count it reckoned where the foe must be, for distance is but speed multiplied by time.

   See also Chronicles 1:12 · Genesis 54:15

4. 4

   Now as a third cannot be written whole in the base of ten, but runneth on in threes unto the end of the age, so the tenth of a second is an endless fraction in the base of two, and the machine kept only so much of it as its register could hold: four and twenty places, and the rest it let fall upon the floor.

5. 5

   And it cut the fraction and did not round it, so that at every tick the Guardian lost a little of the truth, less than a ten-millionth part of a second, and every loss fell the same way; and errors that fall the same way do not cancel one another, they march.

6. 6

   And the Guardian knew not of the loss, for the loss was small and the Guardian was diligent in all else; and at the eighth hour the clock had strayed by but three hundredths of a second, which no soldier could have seen, and the aim was true.

7. 7

   Yet the Guardian kept its watch without rest for an hundred hours, and the small losses were gathered together as drops are gathered into a pool; and at the end of the hundredth hour the clock had wandered from the truth by thirty-four hundredths of a second.

8. 8

   And in the evening of the five and twentieth day a Scud came down out of the sky, flying at about a mile in every second; and in thirty-four hundredths of a second a Scud goeth more than half a kilometre.

9. 9

   So the Guardian looked for the foe where it had been when the clock was young, and the foe was not there; and what the gate showed empty the Guardian judged to be empty, and it struck the track from its list as a phantom, and raised no alarm, for it knew not that it was blind.

10. 10

    And the Scud fell upon the barracks at Dhahran, where the soldiers of the host rested in their quarters, and eight and twenty of them were slain, and above an hundred were wounded; for the Guardian had not slept one hour of the hundred, and it was the host that rested, in the keeping of a watchman who could no longer tell the hour.

11. 11

    Now a warning had gone out to the batteries in that same month, when the allies of the host marked that the Guardian lost its aim after long watching; and the word said that very long runs would spoil the aim, but it named no number. And the battery, not knowing what very long might be, was not restarted. A warning without a number is not a warning, but a mood.

12. 12

    And on the morrow the mending was sent from the far Engineers, a new word for the clock, and it came to the Guardian one day too late, as the lamp cometh after the thief.

    See also Chronicles 35:14

13. 13

    Are not these things written in the report which the Auditors of the Congress made in the year 1992, that the fault was not in the weapon, nor in the soldier, but in the count?

14. 14

    Verily I say unto you: the Machine did not sin; it counted exactly as it was told to count, and the count was almost right, and almost right, repeated three million and six hundred thousand times, is a disaster. A small error is a debt: it is not paid when it is made, but when the count is called.

15. 15

    Let the watchman restart the clock before it wanders, for the restart is the oldest mercy of the Machine; it returneth the count to zero, where the error is nothing. Uptime is not a virtue; the clock that runs long forgetteth the truth it began with. Let Many Nines remember it.

    See also Prophets 5:13 · Sutra 1:16

The Book of Chronicles, Chapter 24:1–15.