 Why is the Geig Corps important?
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. We knew the pay was poor, but we had felt it a sort of obligation, something we could do as individuals to keep the industries of radioactives-starved Earth going. The geiger kept up a fairly steady click-pattern, but never broke into that sudden explosive tumult that meant we had found pay-dirt. I stopped, slipped out of the geiger harness, and lowered myself ponderously to the ground. The Geig Corps preferred married couples, working in teams. It had been spun on us only a short time ago, I realized. He was holding in his left hand the tanglegun with which he had entrapped us, and a very efficient-looking blaster was in his right. He reached for the tanglegun, flipped the little switch on its side to MELT, and shot a stream of watery fluid over our legs, keeping the blaster trained on us all the while. Earth needed radioactives, and the only way to get them was to get out and look. The great atomic wars of the late 20th Century had used up much of the supply, but the amount used to blow up half the great cities of the world hardly compared with the amount we needed to put them back together again. Everything: power drills, printing presses, typewriters, can openers, ocean liners, powered by the inexhaustible energy of the dividing atom. But though the energy is inexhaustible, the supply of nuclei isn't. After three centuries of heavy consumption, the supply failed. With every source of uranium mined dry on Earth, we had tried other possibilities. In a decade or so, our power would be just about gone. 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. 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. When we were inside he reached up, clumsily holding the blaster, and unscrewed the ancient spacesuit fishbowl.
 It is UranCo's method of acquiring manpower for the resource search
 Val and Ron worked for them before signing up with UranCo  It is UranCo's method of acquiring manpower for the resource search  It is how Ledman got involved in the uranium project in the first place  They funded the dome that Ledman lives in