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 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 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.