Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet | Page 5

best fleedle I've ever seen an earthling make. You been on Venus?"
Rip eyed him suspiciously, wondering if the big Planeteer was laughing at him. Koa was grinning, but it was a friendly grin. "What is a fleedle?" Rip demanded. "I've never been on Venus."
"It's the way the water hole people fight," Koa explained. "They're like a bunch of rubber balls when they get to fighting. They ram each other with their heads."
Rip searched his memory for data on Venus. He couldn't recall any mention of fleedling. Venusians, if his memory was right, had a sort of blowgun as a main weapon. He told Koa so.
The sergeant major nodded. "That's when they mean business, Lieutenant. Fleedling is more like us fighting with our fists. Sort of a sport. Great Cosmos! The way they dive at each other is something to see."
Rip grinned. "I didn't know I was going to fleedle those officers. It isn't the way I usually enter a cruiser." He hadn't entered many. He added, "I suppose I ought to report to someone."
Koa shook his head. "No use, sir. You can't walk around very well until the ship reaches Brennschluss. Besides, you won't find any space officers who'll talk to you."
Rip stared. "Why not?"
"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