Rip Foster in Ride the Gray Planet | Page 8

a squad room. Settle in, then draw equipment from the supply room and get going. When I want to talk to you again, I'll call for you. Now blast off, Lieutenant, and rake that radiation. Rake it clean."
Rip forced a bright and friendly smile. "Yes, sir," he said sweetly. "We'll rake it so clean you can see your face in it, sir." He paused, then added politely. "If you don't mind looking 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 safety officer says to secure the tubes."
That could mean only one thing: deceleration. Rip rounded up his men. "We're finished. The safety officer passed the word to secure the tubes, which means we're going to decelerate." He smiled grimly. "You all know they gave us this job just out of pure love for the Planeteers. So remember it when you go through the control room to the decontamination chamber."
The Planeteers nodded enthusiastically.
Rip led the way from the mixing chamber, through the heavy safety door, and into the engine control room. His entrance was met with poorly concealed grins by the spacemen.
Halfway across the room, Rip turned suddenly and bumped into Sergeant Major Koa. Koa fell to the deck, arms flailing for balance--but flailing against his protective clothing. The other Planeteers rushed to pick him up, and somehow all their hands beat against each other.
The protective clothing was saturated with fine dust. It rose from them in a choking cloud and was picked up and dispersed by the ventilating system. It was contaminated dust. The automatic radiation safety equipment filled the ship with an earsplitting buzz of warning. Spacemen clapped emergency respirators to their faces and spoke unkindly of Rip's Planeteers in the saltiest space language possible.
Rip and his men picked up Koa and continued the march to the decontamination room, grinning under their respirators at the consternation around them. There was no danger to the spacemen, since they had clapped on respirators the moment the warning sounded. But even a little contamination meant the whole ship had to be gone over with instruments, and the ventilating system would have to be cleaned.
The deputy commander met Rip at the door of the radiation room. Above the respirator, his face looked furious.
"Lieutenant," he bellowed, "haven't you any more sense than to bring contaminated clothing into the engine control room?"
Rip was sorry the deputy commander couldn't see