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 den