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The bad feeling between spacemen and the Special Order Squadrons had started about 18 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.
Rip and Kemp ran forward until they were right at the sun line. Then they slowed down, holding position and waiting for the crystal they had chosen to reach them. As it came across the sun line into darkness they stopped running and rode the crystal through the shadow until it reached the sun again. Then the two Planeteers ran back across the dark zone to meet the crystal as it came around again.
We use that heat to turn a chemical called methane into its component parts. Methane is known as marsh gas, Foster. I wouldn’t expect a Planeteer to know that. It is composed of carbon and hydrogen. When we pump it into the heat coils of the reactor, it breaks down and creates a gas that burns and drives us through space. But that isn’t all it does." "You’re a Planeteer. I Don’t Like Planeteers."
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.
Santos followed a second later, and the crippled rocket twisted wildly under the two Planeteers. "Don't use the propulsion tubes," Rip called. "Slow down with your air bottles." He thrust the tubes into his belt, found his air bottles, and pointed two of them in the direction they had been traveling. He wanted to come to a stop, to let the wild snapper-boat get away from them.
The asteroid sped on its lonely way for two days and then a cruiser came out of space, its nuclear drive glowing. The Planeteers manned the rocket launcher and Rip and Santos stood by the snapper-boat just in case, but the cruiser was the Sagittarius, out of Mercury.
"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."
The Planeteers on the asteroid blinked with the speed of the cruiser’s getaway. Fire flamed from the stern tubes for an instant and then there was nothing but a fading glow where the Scorpius had been. Rip had a mental image of everything movable in the ship crashing against bulkheads with the terrific acceleration. And in the same moment, the Consops cruiser reacted.
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.
"We're finished. The safety officer passed the word to secure the tubes, which means we're going to decelerate." He smiled grimly. "You all know they gave us this job just out of pure love for the Planeteers. So remember it when you go through the control room to the decontamination chamber." The Planeteers nodded enthusiastically.
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