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 will 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 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.