that old. 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. 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 to the sun side as possible,
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 Major Joe Barris had told the officers of Rip's class, "You
might say that 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. Less than 15 out of each 100 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 15 who started training, an average of five
fell by the wayside.

For Planeteer officers, the requirements were even tougher. Only one out
of each 500 applicants finally received a commission. Six years of
training made them proficient in the techniques of exploration, fighting,
rocketeering, and both navigation and astr