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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.

Sergeant Madden found his mind obscurely switching to the matter of delinks those characters who act like adolescents, not only while they are kids, but after. They were the permanent major annoyance of the cops, because what they did didn't make sense. Learned books explained why people went delink, of course.

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."

'Sounds like delinks." Then he growled. "Only it's not. There'd have to be too many men. Delinks don't work together more'n two or three. Too jealous of showin' off. But where was that other ship, and what was it doin' here?" Patrolman Willis hesitated, and then said: "There used to be pirates, sergeant." "Uh-huh," said the sergeant. "You had it right the first time, most likely. Not delinks.

The cops handled traffic, naturally, as they handled sanitary-code enforcement and delinks and mercantile offenses and murderers and swindlers and missing persons. Everything was dumped on the cops. They'd even handled the Huks in time gone by which in still earlier times would have been called a space war and put down in all the history books.

A delink tries to matter in the world he lives in. It's a small world, with only him and his close pals in it. So he struts before his pals. He don't realize that anybody but him and his pals are human. See?" "I know!" said Patrolman Willis with an edge to his voice. "Last month a couple of delinks set a ground-truck running downhill, and jumped off it, and " "True," said Sergeant Madden.

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.

Opening communication with someone who shoots on detector-contact may be difficult. "I figure," rumbled the sergeant, "they're a lot like delinks. A cop can figure how they think, but they can't figure how a cop thinks." "Such as?" asked the skipper. "They can't understand anybody not tryin' to be important," said Sergeant Madden. "It baffles 'em."

He had a proximity detector out, which would pick up any radiation caused by the cutting of magnetic lines of force by any object. It made very tiny whining noises from time to time. If anything from a Huk missile rocket to the salvage ship Aldeb approached, however, the sound would be distinctive. "Now that," said Sergeant Madden, "is the same thing that makes delinks.

Being a cop means you matter against all the delinks and crooks an' fools and murderers who'd pull down civilization in a minute if they could, just so they could be important because they did it. But there's no glamour! We're not admired! We just do our job. And if I sound sentimental, I mean it." "Yes, sir," said Willis.