 What is a Mud-eater?
The ancient rule was sink or swim—swim in the miasma of a planet without spaceflight, or sink to utter destruction! [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Worlds of If Science Fiction, July 1963. I The horses and packs were loaded before we went aboard the scoutship. An intelligent runt like me. I'm short, dark and scrawny, though I don't expect that scrawniness to last much longer. Thinking it over, I was almost sorry I'd been stinking to Jimmy D. The trouble is, you don't go partners with the competition, do you? The last contact the Ship had had with it—and we were the ones who dropped them—was almost 150 years ago. The thought that made me unhappy was that I would have to be on a planet for a whole month. Planets make me feel wretched. Either your arches and calves ache or every time you step you think you're going to trip on a piece of fluff and break your neck. There are vegetables everywhere and little grubby things just looking for you to crawl on. Worst of all, planets stink. A planet is all right for a Mud-eater, but not for me. We have a place in the Ship like that—the Third Level—but it's only a thousand square miles and any time it gets on your nerves you can go up a level or down a level and be back in civilization. They don't care what order you go in, so Jimmy D. jumped up, grabbed his gear and then led his horse down the ramp. They don't let us grow for fourteen years and then kick us out to die. They do figure, though, that if you can't keep yourself alive by the time you're fourteen, you're too stupid, foolish or unlucky to be any use to the Ship. It means that everybody on the Ship is a person who can take care of himself if he has to. Daddy says that something has to be done in a closed society to keep the population from decaying mentally and physically, and this is it. I began to check my gear out—sonic pistol, pickup signal so I could be found at the end of the month, saddle and cinches, food and clothes. At our next landing, I grabbed Ninc's reins and cut Venie out smoothly. The ship lifted impersonally away from Ninc and me like a rising bird, and in just a moment it was gone.
 A derogatory term for a person who lives on a planet, instead of in space
 A derogatory term for a farmer  A derogatory term for a person who lives on a planet, instead of in space  A derogatory term for a person whose job it is to herd Losels  A derogatory term for a person who breeds without restraint