at your face, sir--to see
how clean the tubes are, I mean."

Rip turned and got out of there.

Koa was waiting in the passageway outside. Rip told him what had
happened, mimicking O'Brine's Irish accent.

The sergeant major shook his head sadly. "This is what I meant,
Lieutenant. Cruisers don't clean their tubes more'n once in ten
accelerations. The commander is just thinking up dirty work for us
to do, like I said."

"Never mind," Rip told him. "Let's find our squad room and get settled,
then draw some protective clothing and equipment. We'll clean his tubes
for him. Our turn will come later."

He remembered the last thing Joe Barris had said, only a few hours
before. _Joe was right_, he thought. _To ourselves we're supermen, but to
the spacemen we're just simps._ Evidently O'Brine was the kind of space
officer who ate Planeteers for breakfast.

Rip thought of the way the commander had turned red with rage at that
crack about his face, and he resolved, _He may eat me for breakfast, but
I'll be a very tough mouthful!_

CHAPTER THREE

Capture and Drive!

Commander O'Brine had not exaggerated. The residue of carbon and thorium
on the blast tube walls was stubborn, dirty, and penetrating. It was
caked on in a solid sheet, but when scraped, it broke up into fine
powder.

The Planeteers wore coveralls, gloves, and face masks with respirators,
but that didn't prevent the stuff from sifting through onto their bodies.
Rip, who directed the work and kept track of the radiation with a
gamma-beta ion chamber and an alpha proportional counter, knew they would
have to undergo personal decontamination.

He took a reading on the ion chamber. Only a few milliroentgens of beta
and gamma radiation. That was the dangerous kind, because both beta
particles and gamma rays could penetrate clothing and skin. But the
Planeteers wouldn't get enough of a dose to do any harm at all. The
alpha count was high, but so long as they didn't breathe any of the dust,
it was not dangerous.

The _Scorpius_ had six tubes. Rip divided the Planeteers into two squads,
one under his direction and one under Koa's. Each tube took a couple of
hours' hard work. Several times during the cleaning, the men would leave
the tube and go into the main mixing chamber while the tube was blasted
with live steam to throw the stuff they had scraped off out into space.

Each squad was on its last tube when a spaceman arrived. He saluted Rip.
"Sir, the