 How did Ledman get to Mars?
The planet itself was tough enough—barren, desolate, forbidding; enough to stop the most adventurous and dedicated. Nothing but what had stopped us could stop a sandcat: sand in the delicate mechanism of the atomic engine. But no; she blamed it all on me somehow: So we were out walking on the spongy sand of the Martian desert. She had been just as much inflamed by the idea of coming to Mars to help in the search for uranium as I was. No, we had decided together to come to Mars—the way we decided together on everything. I longed to lie down on the soft, spongy Martian sand and bury myself. I stopped, slipped out of the geiger harness, and lowered myself ponderously to the ground. Maybe we shouldn't have come to Mars after all. I watched her, sleeping peacefully, a wayward lock of her soft blonde hair trailing down over one eyebrow, and it seemed hard to believe that we'd exchanged Earth and all it held for us for the raw, untamed struggle that was Mars. It had been spun on us only a short time ago, I realized. He wore an outmoded, bulky spacesuit and a fishbowl helmet, all but the face area opaque. I thought I knew everyone on sparsely-settled Mars. Earth needed radioactives, and the only way to get them was to get out and look. And that started the chain of events that led Val and me to end up as a madman's prisoners, on Mars. With every source of uranium mined dry on Earth, we had tried other possibilities. Project Sea-Dredge was trying to get uranium from the oceans. So, Mars. There's not much uranium on Mars, and it's not easy to find or any cinch to mine. It's a stopgap effort, just to keep things moving until Project Sea-Dredge starts functioning. Enter the Geig Corps: volunteers out on the face of Mars, combing for its uranium deposits. After we walked on a while, a Dome became visible up ahead. It slid up over the crest of a hill, set back between two hummocks on the desert. For a puzzled moment I thought it was our Dome, the settlement where all of UranCo's Geig Corps were located, but another look told me that this was actually quite near us and fairly small. He herded us off to one side of the airlock, uttered a few words keyed to his voice, and motioned us inside when the door slid up.
 He saved his money to send himself
 He saved his money to send himself  He joined the Corps just as Val and Ron did  He was part of a uranium company who funded his trip  He posed as a tourist and stayed behind on a vacation