Candless type. Procyron III was a
water-planet with less than ten per cent of land. Which was unfortunate,
because its average temperature and orbit made it highly suitable for
human occupation. Had the ten per cent of solid ground been in one
piece, it would doubtless have been colonized. But the ground was an
archipelago.

"Hm-m-m," said Sergeant Madden, after reading. "The survey recommends
this northern island for emergency landing. Eh?"

Willis nodded. "Huks used to use it. Not the island. The planet."

Sergeant Madden yawned. It seemed pathetic to him that young cops like
Willis and even Timmy referred so often to Huks. There weren't any, any
more. Being a cop meant carrying out purely routine tasks, nowadays.
They were important tasks, of course. Without the cops, there couldn't
be any civilization. But Willis and Timmy didn't think of it that way.
Not yet. To them being a cop was still a matter of glamour rather than
routine. They probably even regretted the absence of Huks. But when a
man reached Sergeant Madden's age, glamour didn't matter. He had to
remember that his job was worth doing, in itself.

"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