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He should have thought of it. He knew that. And he knew that the words from Earth weren’t as callous as they sounded. Down there, men would be sweating with him, going crazy trying to do something. But they were right. Earth had to be protected first; Bill Adams was only one out of two and a half billions, even if he had reached a planet before any other man.

Yeah, it was fine to be a hero. But heroes shouldn’t menace the rest of the world.

Logically, he knew they were right. That helped him get his emotions under control. “Where do you want me to put down?”

“Tycho. It isn’t hard to spot for radar-controlled delivery of supplies to you, but it’s a good seven hundred miles from Lunar Base. And look—we’ll try to get a doctor to you. But keep us informed if anything slips. We need those maps, if we can find a way to sterilize ‘em.”

“Okay,” he acknowledged. “And tell the cartographers there are no craters, no intelligence, and only plants about half an inch high. Mars stinks.”

They’d already been busy, he saw, as he teetered down on his jets for a landing on Tycho. Holding control was the hardest job he’d ever done. A series of itchings cropped out just as the work got tricky, when he could no longer see the surface, and had to go by feel. But somehow he made it. Then he relaxed and began an orgy of scratching.