A Matter of Importance Read online

ship'sdirection, while Sergeant Madden observed without seeming to do so.Presently Patrolman Willis pushed a button. The squad ship went intooverdrive.

  It was perfectly commonplace in all its aspects.

  * * * * *

  The galaxy went about its business. Stars shone, and planets movedaround them, and double stars circled each other like waltzing couples.There were also comets and meteors and calcium-clouds and high-energyfree nuclei, all of which acted as was appropriate for them. On somemillions of planets winds blew and various organisms practicedphotosynthesis. Waves ran across seas. Clouds formed and poured downrain. On the relatively small number of worlds so far inhabited byhumans, people went about their business with no thought for such thingsor anything not immediately affecting their lives. And the cops wentabout their business.

  Sergeant Madden dozed most of the first day of overdrive travel. He hadnothing urgent to do, as yet. This was only a routine trip. The_Cerberus_ had had a breakdown in her overdrive. Commercial ships'drives being what they were, it meant that on her emergency drive shecould only limp along at maybe eight or ten lights. Which meant years toport, with neither food nor air for the journey. But it was not evenconceivable to rendezvous with a rescue ship in the emptiness betweenstars. So the _Cerberus_ had sent a message-torp and was crawling to arefuge-planet, more or less surveyed a hundred years before. There shewould land by emergency rockets, because her drive couldn't take thestrain. Once aground, the _Cerberus_ should wait for help. There wasnothing else to be done. But everything was nicely in hand. The squadship headed briskly for the planet Procyron III, and Sergeant Maddenwould take the data for a proper, official, emergency-call trafficreport on the incident, and in time the _Aldeb_ would turn up and makeemergency repairs and see the _Cerberus_ out to space again and headedfor port once more.

  This was absolutely all that there was to anticipate. Traffic handledsuch events as a matter of course. So Sergeant Madden dozed during mostof the first day of overdrive. He reflected somnolently when awake thatit was fitting for Timmy's father to be on the job when Timmy's girl wasin difficulty, since Timmy was off somewhere else.

  On the second day he conversed more or less with Patrolman Willis.Willis was a young cop, almost as young as Timmy. He took himself veryseriously. When Sergeant Madden reached for the briefing-data, he foundit disturbed. Willis had read up on the kind of ship the _Cerberus_ was,and on the characteristics of Procyron III as recorded a century before.The _Cerberus_ was a semi-freighter, Candless type. Procyron III was awater-planet with less than ten per cent of land. Which was unfortunate,because its average temperature and orbit made it highly suitable forhuman occupation. Had the ten per cent of solid ground been in onepiece, it would doubtless have been colonized. But the ground was anarchipelago.

  "Hm-m-m," said Sergeant Madden, after reading. "The survey recommendsthis 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 likeWillis and even Timmy referred so often to Huks. There weren't any, anymore. Being a cop meant carrying out purely routine tasks, nowadays.They were important tasks, of course. Without the cops, there couldn'tbe 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 thanroutine. They probably even regretted the absence of Huks. But when aman reached Sergeant Madden's age, glamour didn't matter. He had toremember 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 whoworked 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 thissector, they encountered an alien civilization. By old-time standards,it was quite a culture. The Huks had a good technology, they hadspaceships, and they were just beginning to expand, themselves, fromtheir own home planet or planets. If they'd had a few more centuries ofdevelopment, they might have been a menace to humanity. But the humansgot started first.

  There being no longer any armies or navies when the Huks werediscovered, the matter of intelligent nonhumans was a matter for thecops. So the police matter-of-factly tried to incorporate the Hukculture into the human. They explained the rules by which humancivilization worked. They painstakingly tried to arrange a sub-precinctstation on the largest Huk home planet, with Huk cops in charge. Theymade it clear that they had nothing to do with politics and were simplyconcerned with protecting civilized people from those in their midst whodidn't 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'tcare what they thought--but they insisted on acting as if they werebetter.

  They reacted, in fact, as humans would have done if just at thebeginning 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. TheHuks fought.

  "They fought pretty good," said Sergeant Madden tolerantly. "Notkiller-fashion--like delinks. The Force had to give 'em the choice ofjoining up or getting out. Took years to get 'em out. Had to use all theoff-duty men from six precincts to handle the last riot."

  The conflict he called a riot would have been termed a space battle by anavy or an army. But the cops operated within a strictly police frame ofreference, which was the reverse of military. They weren't trying tosubjugate the Huks, but to make them behave. In consequence, theirtactics were unfathomable to the Huks--who thought in military terms.Squadrons of police ships which would have seemed ridiculous to afighting-force commander threw the Huks off-balance, kept themoff-balance, did a scrupulous minimum of damage to them, and therebykept out of every trap the Huks set for them. In the end the copssupervised and assisted at the embittered, rebellious emigration of arace. The Huks took off for the far side of the galaxy. They'd neitherbeen conquered nor exterminated. But Sergeant Madden thought of thedecisive 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 ofall police forces everywhere. They practice adolescent behavior evenafter they grow up--but they never grow up. It is delinks who putstink-bombs in public places and write threatening letters and givewarnings of bombs about to go off--and sometimes set them--and stuffdirt into cold rocket-nozzles and sometimes kill people and goincontinently hysterical because they didn't mean to. Delinks do most ofthe damaging things that have no sense to them. There is no cop who hasnot wanted to kill some grinning, half-scared, half-defiant delink whohasn't yet realized that he's destroyed half a million credits' worth ofproperty or crippled somebody for life--for no reason at all.

  Sergeant Madden listened to the denunciation of all the delink tribe.Then he yawned again.

  "I know!" he said. "I don't like 'em either. But we got 'em. We alwayswill 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-twohours before the _Aldeb_."

  The little squad ship went on at an improbable multiple of the speed oflight. After all, this was a perfectly normal performance. Just anordinary bit of business for the cops.

  * * * * *

  Sergeant Madden belched when the squad ship came out of overdrive. Hewatched with seeming indifference while Patrolman Willis took a spectroon the star ahead and to the left, and painstakingly compared thereading with the ancient survey-data on the Procyr
on system. It had tomatch, of course, unless there'd been extraordinarily bad astrogation.

  Willis put the spectroscope away, estimated for himself, and thenchecked with the dial that indicated the brightness of the stillpoint-sized star. He said:

  "Four light-weeks, I make it."

  Sergeant Madden nodded. A superior officer should never do anythinguseful, so long as a subordinate isn't making a serious mistake. That isthe way subordinates are trained to become superiors, in time. PatrolmanWillis set a time-switch and pushed the overdrive button. The squad shiphopped, and abruptly the local sun had a perceptible disk. Willis madethe usual tests for direction of rotation, to get the ecliptic plane. Hebegan to search for planets. As he found them, he checked with thereference data.