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“Yeah,” said Sergeant Madden. “There was quite a time with those Huks.”

“Did you … did you ever see a Huk, sir?” asked Willis.

“Before my time,” said Sergeant Madden. “But I’ve talked to men who worked on the case.”

* * * * *

It did not occur to him that the Huks would hardly have been called a “case” by anybody but a cop. When human colonies spread through this sector, they encountered an alien civilization. By old-time standards, it was quite a culture. The Huks had a good technology, they had spaceships, and they were just beginning to expand, themselves, from their own home planet or planets. If they’d had a few more centuries of development, they might have been a menace to humanity. But the humans got started first.

There being no longer any armies or navies when the Huks were discovered, the matter of intelligent nonhumans was a matter for the cops. So the police matter-of-factly tried to incorporate the Huk culture into the human. They explained the rules by which human civilization worked. They painstakingly tried to arrange a sub-precinct station on the largest Huk home planet, with Huk cops in charge. They made it clear that they had nothing to do with politics and were simply concerned with protecting civilized people from those in their midst who didn’t want to be civilized.

The Huks wouldn’t have it. They bristled, proudly. They were defiant. They considered themselves not only as good as humans–the cops didn’t care what they thought–but they insisted on acting as if they were better.

They reacted, in fact, as humans would have done if just at the beginning of their conquest of the stars, they’d run into an expanding, farther-advanced race which tried to tell them what they had to do. The Huks fought.

“They fought pretty good,” said Sergeant Madden tolerantly. “Not killer-fashion–like delinks. The Force had to give ’em the choice of joining up or getting out. Took years to get ’em out. Had to use all the off-duty men from six precincts to handle the last riot.”

The conflict he called a riot would have been termed a space battle by a navy or an army. But the cops operated within a strictly police frame of reference, which was the reverse of military. They weren’t trying to subjugate the Huks, but to make them behave. In consequence, their tactics were unfathomable to the Huks–who thought in military terms. Squadrons of police ships which would have seemed ridiculous to a fighting-force commander threw the Huks off-balance, kept them off-balance, did a scrupulous minimum of damage to them, and thereby kept out of every trap the Huks set for them. In the end the cops supervised and assisted at the embittered, rebellious emigration of a race. The Huks took off for the far side of the galaxy. They’d neither been conquered nor exterminated. But Sergeant Madden thought of the decisive fracas as a riot rather than a battle.

“Yeah,” he repeated. “They acted a lot like delinks.”

Patrolman Willis spoke with some heat about delinks, who are the bane of all police forces everywhere. They practice adolescent behavior even after they grow up–but they never grow up. It is delinks who put stink-bombs in public places and write threatening letters and give warnings of bombs about to go off–and sometimes set them–and stuff dirt into cold rocket-nozzles and sometimes kill people and go incontinently hysterical because they didn’t mean to. Delinks do most of the damaging things that have no sense to them. There is no cop who has not wanted to kill some grinning, half-scared, half-defiant delink who hasn’t yet realized that he’s destroyed half a million credits’ worth of property or crippled somebody for life–for no reason at all.

Sergeant Madden listened to the denunciation of all the delink tribe. Then he yawned again.