lis.

Sergeant Madden settled himself comfortably.

"We'll go over," he grumbled, "and see what makes these Huks tick. They
raised a lot of hell, eighty years ago. It took all the off-duty men
from six precincts to handle the last riot. The Huks had got together
and built themselves a fightin' fleet then, though. It's not likely
there's more than one planetful of them where we're going. I thought
they'd all been moved out."

He shook his head vexedly.

"No need for 'em to have to go, except they wouldn't play along with
humans. Acted like delinks, they did. Only proud. Y'don't get mad
fighting 'em. So I heard, anyway. If they only had sense you could get
along with them."

He dogged the door shut. Patrolman Willis pushed a button. The squad
ship fell toward the sky.

Very matter-of-factly.

* * * * *

On the way over, in overdrive, Sergeant Madden again dozed a great deal
of the time. Sergeants do not fraternize extensively with mere
patrolmen, even on assignments. Especially not very senior sergeants
only two years from retirement. Patrolman Willis met with the sergeant's
approval, to be sure. Timmy was undoubtedly more competent as a cop, but
Timmy would have been in a highly emotional state with his girl on the
_Cerberus_ and that ship in the hands of the Huks.

Between naps, the sergeant somnolently went over what he knew about the
alien race. He'd heard that their thumbs were on the outside of their
hands. Intelligent nonhumans would have to have hands, and with some
equivalent of opposable thumbs, if their intelligence was to be of any
use to them. They pretty well had to be bipeds, too, and if they weren't
warm-blooded they couldn't have the oxygen-supply that highgrade brain
cells require.

There were even certain necessary psychological facts. They had to be
capable of learning and of passing on what they'd learned, or they'd
never have gotten past an instinctual social system. To pass on acquired
knowledge, they had to have family units in which teaching was done to
the young--at least at the beginning. Schools might have been invented
later. Most of all, their minds had to work logically to cope with a
logically constructed universe. In fact, they had to be very much like
humans, in almost all significant respects, in order to build up a
civilization and develop sciences and splendidly to invade space just a
few centuries before humans found them.

_But_, said Ser