 Why did Val and Ron really decide to go 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. Even though the Martian gravity was only a fraction of Earth's, I was starting to tire, and I knew it must have been really rough on Val with her lovely but unrugged legs. She had been just as much inflamed by the idea of coming to Mars to help in the search for uranium as I was. 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. 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 felt almost guilty for having dragged her out to Mars, until I recalled that I hadn't. 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. 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. 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.
 They were curious and wanted to help their planet
 They were curious and wanted to help their planet  They did not want to spend anymore time on earth  They wanted a more creative way to make money  Out of obligation to find a job to sustain themselves