s 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