 What made the narrator's mission so difficult?
S. A. LOMBINO There were more Joes on Venus than you could shake a ray-gun at. Perhaps there was method in Colonel Walsh's madness—murder-madness—when he ordered Major Polk to scan the planet for a guy named Joe. [Transcriber's Note: This etext was produced from Planet Stories November 1952. Extensive research did not uncover any evidence that the U.S. copyright on this publication was renewed.] For example, he could have chosen a Second Looie for the job on Venus. But he liked me about as much as I liked him, and so he decided the job was just right for a Major. We were somewhere in Area Two on Earth, takeoff point for any operations in Space II. Come to think of it, the most I ever did was inspect a few defective tubes every now and then. The rest was gravy, and Colonel Walsh wasn't going to let me get by with gravy. "It will be a simple assignment, Major," he said to me, peering over his fingers. "It will involve finding one man, a Venusian native." "I always figured Venus was under the jurisdiction of Space III, sir. I thought our activities were confined to Mars." He folded his fingers like a deck of cards and dropped them on his desk as if he were waiting for me to cut. If Walsh really wanted to know the reasons for the revolt, I could give them to him in one word: Walsh. It had been going on for six months now and we'd lost at least a thousand men from Space II. Revolt. "And this man is on Venus now?" It was just like Walsh to ship me off to a strange place. "This man is on Venus." That was before I'd reported him for sleeping on Boiler Watch. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night.
 The inhabitants of Venus were all very much the same.
 No one cooperated with the narrator to help him find the right Joe.  He became incapacitated by the hot weather on Venus.  He became physically lost on Venus.  The inhabitants of Venus were all very much the same.