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“I know!” he said. “I don’t like ’em either. But we got ’em. We always will have ’em. Like old age.”

Then he made computations with a stubby pencil and asked reflectively:

“When’re you coming out of overdrive?”

Patrolman Willis told him. Sergeant Madden nodded.

“I’ll take another nap,” he observed. “We’ll be there a good twenty-two hours before the Aldeb.”

The little squad ship went on at an improbable multiple of the speed of light. After all, this was a perfectly normal performance. Just an ordinary bit of business for the cops.

* * * * *

Sergeant Madden belched when the squad ship came out of overdrive. He watched with seeming indifference while Patrolman Willis took a spectro on the star ahead and to the left, and painstakingly compared the reading with the ancient survey-data on the Procyron system. It had to match, of course, unless there’d been extraordinarily bad astrogation.

Willis put the spectroscope away, estimated for himself, and then checked with the dial that indicated the brightness of the still point-sized star. He said:

“Four light-weeks, I make it.”

Sergeant Madden nodded. A superior officer should never do anything useful, so long as a subordinate isn’t making a serious mistake. That is the way subordinates are trained to become superiors, in time. Patrolman Willis set a time-switch and pushed the overdrive button. The squad ship hopped, and abruptly the local sun had a perceptible disk. Willis made the usual tests for direction of rotation, to get the ecliptic plane. He began to search for planets. As he found them, he checked with the reference data. All this was tedious. Sergeant Madden grunted:

“That’ll be it,” he said, and pointed. “Water world. It’s the color of ocean. Try it.”

Patrolman Willis threw on the telescope screen. The image of the distant planet leaped into view. It was Procyron III. The spiral cloud-arms of a considerable storm showed in the southern hemisphere, but in the north there was a group or specks which would be the planet’s only solid ground–the archipelago reported by the century-old survey. The Cerberus should have been the first ship to land there in a hundred years, and the squad ship should be the second.

Patrolman Willis got the squad ship competently over to the planet, a diameter out. He juggled to position over the archipelago. Sergeant Madden turned on the space phone. Nothing. He frowned. A grounded ship awaiting help should transmit a beam signal to guide its rescuer. But nothing came up from the ground.

Patrolman Willis looked at him uncertainly. Sergeant Madden rumbled and swung the telescope below. The surface of the planet appeared–deep water, practically black beneath a surface reflection of daytime sky. The image shifted–a patch of barren rocks. The sergeant glanced at the survey picture, shifted the telescope, and found the northern-most island. He swelled the picture. He could see the white of monstrous surf breaking on the windward shore–waves that had gathered height going all around the planet. He traced the shoreline. There was a bay up at the top.

He centered the shoreline of the bay and put on maximum magnification. Then he pointed a stubby forefinger. A singular, perfectly straight streak of black appeared, beginning a little distance inland from the bay and running up into what appeared to be higher ground. The streak ended not far from a serpentine arm of the sea which almost cut the island in half.

“That’ll be it,” said Sergeant Madden, rumbling. “The Cerberus had to land on her rockets. She had some ground speed. She burned a ten-mile streak on the ground, coming down.” He growled. “Commercial skippers! Should’ve matched velocity aloft! Take her down.”

The squad ship drove for ground.

Patrolman Willis steadied the ship no more than a few thousand feet high, above the streak of scorched ground and ashes.