geant Madden to himself, _I bet they've still got armies
and navies!_

Patrolman Willis looked at him inquiringly, but the sergeant scowled at
his own thoughts. Yet the idea was very likely. When Huks first
encountered humans, they bristled with suspicion. They were definitely
on the defensive when they learned that humans had been in space
longer--much longer--than they had, and already occupied planets in
almost fifteen per cent of the galaxy.

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. Mostly it was that they were madly
ambitious to be significant, to matter in some fashion, and didn't have
the ability to matter in the only ways they could understand. They
wanted to drive themselves to eminence, and frantically snatched at
chances to make themselves nuisances because they couldn't wait to be
important any other way.

Sergeant Madden blinked slowly to himself. When humans first took to
space a lot of them were after glamour, which is the seeming of
importance. His son Timmy was on the cops because he thought it
glamorous. Patrolman Willis was probably the same way. Glamour is the
offer of importance. An offer of importance is glamour.

The sergeant grunted to himself. A possible course of action came into
his mind. He and Patrolman Willis were on the way to the solar system
Sirene 1432, where Krishnamurti's Law said there ought to be something
very close to a terran-type planet in either the third or fourth orbit
out from the sun. That planet would be inhabited by Huks, who were very
much like humans. They knew of the defeat and forced emigration of their
fellow-Huks in other solar systems. They'd hidden from humans--and it
must have outraged their pride. So they must be ready to put up a
desperate and fanatical fight if they were ever discovered.

* * * * *

A squad ship with two cops in it, and a dumpy salvage ship with fifteen
more, did not make an impressive force to try to deal with a planetary
population which bitterly hated humans. But the cops did not plan
conquest. They were neither a fighting rescue expedition nor a punitive
one. They were simply cops on assignment to get the semi-freighter
_Cerberus_ bac