"Because we're Planeteers. They'll give us the treatment. They always do.
When the commander of this bucket gets good and ready, he'll send for
you. Until then, we might as well take it easy." He pulled a bar of
Venusian _chru_ from his pocket. "Have some. It'll make breathing
easier."
The terrific acceleration made breathing a little uncomfortable, but it
was not too bad. The chief effect was to make Rip feel as though a ton
of invisible feathers were crushing him against the vertical brace.
He accepted a bite of the bittersweet vegetable candy and munched
thoughtfully. Koa seemed to take it for granted that the spacemen would
give them a rough time.
He asked, "Aren't there any spacemen who get along with the Special Order
Squadrons?"
"Never met one." Koa chewed chru. "And I was on the _Icarus_ when the
whole thing started."
Rip looked at him in surprise. Koa didn't seem that old. The bad feeling
between spacemen and the Special Order Squadrons had started about
eighteen years ago, when the cruiser _Icarus_ had taken the first
Planeteers to Mercury.
He reviewed the history of the expedition. The spacemen's job had been to
land the newly created Special Order Squadron on the hot planet. The job
of the squadron was to explore it. Somehow confusion developed, and the
spacemen, including the officers, later reported that the squadron had
instructed them to land on the sun side of Mercury, which would have
destroyed the spaceship and its crew, or so they believed at the time.
The commanding officer of the squadron denied issuing such an order. He
said his instructions were to land as close as possible to the sun side,
but not on it. Whatever the truth--and Rip believed the SOS version, of
course--the crew of the _Icarus_ mutinied, or tried to. They made the
landing on Mercury with squadron guns pointed at their heads. Of course,
they found that a sun-side landing wouldn't have hurt the ship. The whole
affair was pretty well hushed up, but it produced bad feeling between the
Special Order Squadrons and the spacemen. "Trigger-happy space bums," the
spacemen called them, and much worse, besides.
The men of the Special Order Squadrons, searching for a handy nickname,
had called themselves Planeteers, because most of their work was on the
planets. As Maj. Joe Barris had told the officers of Rip's class, "You
might say the spacemen own space, but we Planeteers own everything solid
that's found in it."
The Planeteers were the specialists--in science, exploration,
colonization, and fighting. The spacemen carried them back and forth,
kept them supplied, and handled their message traffic. The Planeteers did
the hard work and the important work--or so they believed.
To become a Planeteer, a recruit had to pass rigid intelligence,
physical, aptitude, and psychological tests. Fewer than fifteen out of
each one hundred who applied were chosen. Then there were two years of
hard training on the space platform and the moon before a recruit was
finally accepted as a Planeteer private. Out of each fifteen who started
training, an average of five fell by the wayside.
For Planeteer officers, the requirements were even tougher. Only one out
of each five hundred applicants finally received a commission. Six years
of training made them proficient in the techniques of exploration,
fighting, rocketeering, and both navigation and astrogation. In addition,
each became a full-fledged specialist in one field of science. Rip's
specialty was astrophysics.
Sergeant Major Koa continued, "That business on the _Icarus_ started the
war, but both sides have been feeding it ever since. I have to admit that
we Planeteers lord it over the spacemen like we were old man Cosmos
himself. So they get back at us with dirty little tricks while we're on
their ships. We command on the planets, but they command in space. And
they sure get a great big nuclear charge out of commanding us to do the
dirty work!"
"We'll take whatever they hand us," Rip assured him, "and pretend we like
it fine." He gestured at the other Planeteers. "Tell me about the men,
Koa."
"They're a fine bunch, sir. I handpicked them myself. The one with the
white hair is Corporal Nels Pederson, from Sweden. I served with him at
Marsport, and he's a real tough spacewalker in a fight. The other
corporal is Paulo Santos. He's from the Philippines, and the best
snapper-boat gunner you ever saw."
He pointed out the six privates. Kemp and Dowst were Americans. Bradshaw
was an Englishman, Trudeau a Frenchman, Dominico an Italian, and Nunez a
Brazilian.
Rip liked their looks. They were as relaxed as acceleration would allow,
but you got the impression that they would leap into action in a
microsecond if the word were given. He couldn't imagine what kind of
assignment was waiting, but he was satisfied with his Planeteers. They
looked capable of anything.
He made himself as comfortable as possible and encouraged Koa to talk
about his service in the Special Order Squadrons. Koa had plenty to tell,
and he talked interestingly. Rip learned that the tall Hawaiian had been
to every planet in the system, had fought the Venusians on the central
desert, and had mined nuclite with SOS One on Mercury. He also found that
Koa was one of the seventeen pure-blooded Hawaiians left. During the
three hours that acceleration kept them from moving around the ship, Rip
got a new view of space and of service with the SOS--it was the view of a
Planeteer who had spent years around the Solar System.
"I'm glad they assigned you to me," Rip told Koa frankly. "This is my
first job, and I'll be pretty green, no matter what it is. I'll depend
on you for a lot of things."
To his surprise, Koa thrust out his hand. "Shake, Lieutenant." His grin
showed strong white teeth. "You're the first junior officer I ever met
who admitted he didn't know everything about everything. You can depend
on me, sir. I won't steer you into any meteor swarms."
Koa had half turned to shake hands. Suddenly he spun on around, banging
his head against the deck. Rip felt a surge of relaxing muscles that had
been braced against acceleration. At the same time, silence flooded in on
them. Rip murmured "_Brennschluss_," and the murmur was like a trumpet
blast.
The _Scorpius_ had reached velocity, and the nuclear drive had cut out.
From terrific acceleration, they had dropped to zero. The ship was making
high speed, but velocity cannot be felt. For the moment the men were
weightless.
A nearby spaceman had heard Rip's comment. He spoke in an undertone to
the man nearest. His voice was pitched low enough that Rip couldn't
object officially, but loud and clear enough to be heard by everyone.
"Get this, gang. The Planeteer officer knows what _Brennschluss_ is. He
doesn't look old enough to know which end his bubble goes on."
Rip started to his feet, but Koa's hand on his arm restrained him. With a
violent kick, the big sergeant major shot through the air. His line of
flight took him past the spaceman, and somehow their arms got linked. The
spaceman was jerked from his post, and the two came to a stop against the
ceiling.
Koa's voice echoed through the ship. "Sorry. I'm not used to no-weight.
Didn't mean to grab you. Here, I'll help you back to your post."
He whirled the helpless spaceman like a bag of feathers and slung him
through the air. The force of the action only flattened Koa against the
ceiling, but the hapless spaceman shot forward head first and landed with
a clang against the bulkhead. He didn't hit hard enough to break any
bones, but he would carry a bump on his head for a day or two.
Koa's voice floated after him. "Great Cosmos! I sure am sorry, spaceman.
I guess I don't know my own strength." He kicked away from the ceiling,
landing accurately at Rip's side. He added in a hard voice all could
hear, "They sure are a nice gang, these spacemen. They never say anything
about Planeteers."
No spaceman answered, but Koa's meaning was clear. No spaceman had better
say anything about the Planeteers! Rip saw that the deputy commander and
the safety officer had appeared not to notice the incident. Technically,
there was no reason for an officer to take action. It had all been an
"accident." He smiled. There was a lot he had to learn about dealing with
spacemen, a lot Koa evidently knew very well indeed.
Suddenly he began to feel weight. The ship was going into rotation. The
feeling increased until he felt normally heavy again. There was no other
sensation, even though the space cruiser was now spinning on its axis
through space at unaltered speed. The centrifugal force produced by the
spinning gave them an artificial gravity.
Now that he thought about it, _Brennschluss_ had come pretty early. The
trip apparently was going to be a short one. _Brennschluss_--funny, he
thought, how words stay on in a language, even after their original
meaning is changed. _Brennschluss_ was German for "burn out." It was
rocket talk, and it meant the moment when all the fuel in a rocket burned
out. It had come into common use because the English "burn out" could
also mean that the engine itself had burned out. The German word meant
only the one thing. Now, in nuclear drive ships, the same word was used
for the moment when power was cut off.
Words interested him. He started to mention it to Koa just as the
telescreen lit up. An officer's face appeared. "Send that Planeteer
officer to the commander," the face said. "Tell him to show an exhaust."