thrust out his hand. "Stay out
of high vack, Foster. Too bad you didn't join us instead of the
Planeteers. I might have made a decent officer out of you."

Rip grinned. "That's a real compliment, sir. I might return it by saying
I'd be glad to have you as a Planeteer corporal any time."

O'Brine chuckled. "All right. Let's declare a truce, Planeteer. We'll meet
again. Space isn't very big."

A short time later Rip stood in front of his asteroid base and watched the
great cruiser drive into space. A short distance away a snapper-boat was
lashed to the landing boat. O'Brine had insisted on leaving it, with a
word of warning.

"These Connies are plenty smart. I don't like leaving you unprotected,
even within reach of Mercury and Terra, but orders are orders. Keep the
snapper-boat and you'll at least be able to put up a fight if you bump
into trouble."

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.

Captain Go Sian-tek, a Chinese Planeteer officer, arrived in one of the
cruiser's landing boats accompanied by three enlisted Planeteers. They
were all from the Special Order Squadron on Mercury.

Captain Go greeted Rip and his men, then handed over a plastic stylus
plate ordering Rip to deliver six cubic meters of thorium for use on
Mercury. While Koa supervised the cutting of the block, Rip and the
captain chatted.

The Mercurian Planeteer base was in the twilight zone, but the Planeteers
did all their work on the sun side, using special alloy suits to mine the
precious nuclite that only the hot planet provided.

At some time during its first years, Mercury had been so close to the sun
that its temperature was driven high enough to permit a subatomic
thermo-nuclear reaction. The reaction had shorn some elements of their
electrons and left a thin coating of material composed almost entirely of
neutrons. The nuclite was incredibly dense. It could be handled only in
low gravity because of its weight. But nothing else provided the shielding
against radiation and meteors half so well and it was in great demand for
spaceship skins.

"Things aren't so bad," Go told Rip. "The base is comfortable and we only
work a two hour shift out of each ten. We've had a plague of silly dillies
recently. They got int