Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet | Page 5

lean against the acceleration. Fighting for balance, he picked up his spack and
made his way to the nine enlisted Planeteers. They had braced against the ship's drive by
sitting with backs against bulkheads or by lying flat on the magnesium deck. Sergeant
Major Koa was seated against a vertical brace, his brown face wreathed in a grin.
Rip looked him over carefully. There was a saying among the Planeteers that an officer
was only as good as his senior sergeant. Koa's looks were reassuring. His face was
good-humored, but he had a solid jaw and a mouth that could get tough when necessary.
Rip wondered a little at his size. Big men usually didn't go to space; they were too subject
to space sickness. Koa must be a special case.
Rip slid to the floor next to the sergeant major and stuck out his hand. He sensed the
strength in Koa's big fist as it closed over his.
Koa said, "Sir, that was the 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