 What made the narrator's mission so difficult?
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. For example, he could have chosen a Second Looie for the job on Venus. We were somewhere in Area Two on Earth, takeoff point for any operations in Space II. 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. 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. He'd goofed off on a pile of uranium that could've, and almost did, blow the barracks sky-high that night. And now, through the fouled-up machinery that exists in any military organization, he outranked me. The trip to Venus came off without a hitch. His features, his muscles, everything seemed to have been stretched like a rubber band. "You've got the wrong number," he said, and I was a little surprised at his use of Terran idiom. My orders said I was to report to Captain Bransten immediately upon arrival. The Officer's Club was a plasteel hut with window shields that protected it from the heat of the sun.
 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.