“...What normal person would join the Outer Patrol of his own free will? There are no such people. Abnormal is another matter. But not everyone is abnormal, but only those for whom this work is occupational therapy. He will be convinced, and he himself is unlikely to resist much. This is temporary. And there are few people who want to lose their main job. Our task: patrolling the far outskirts of the solar system. Each of us has our own sector, and in the sector, in addition to emptiness, there are a dozen automatic monitoring stations and even an automatic tanker for refueling. In the Kuiper belt there are tons of ice blocks, sometimes entire planetoids, and in the Oort cloud there are even more of them . But the distance! But the amount of space! Scatter a million ping-pong balls across the world's oceans, and then arm yourself with a large net and start hunting for them - will you catch many?..."