 What would have happened if Ledman had stayed on Earth?
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. 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 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. We had no ties on Earth that couldn't be broken without much difficulty. It had been spun on us only a short time ago, I realized. 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. 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. 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. In a decade or so, our power would be just about gone. So, Mars. It's a stopgap effort, just to keep things moving until Project Sea-Dredge starts functioning. 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. A one-man Dome, of all things! No chairs, no tape-player, no decoration of any sort.
 He might not have needed a wheelchair long-term
 He would've managed to maintain leadership of his company  He might not have needed a wheelchair long-term  He would have joined the Project Sea-Dredge mission  He would've become more depressed and never found revenge