unciation of all the delink tribe.
Then he yawned again.

"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
Mad