There can be no doubt, however, that a full page was no more than his due. Circumstances alone can create a legend, a hero-image, and when a man risks his life in a hazardous undertaking it is not too important that he is merely carrying out orders and performing a duty which he might, with complete freedom of choice, prefer to avoid. Corporal Thomas Walton was the first United States soldier to see a Martian face to face. The Martian ship was a smoking, half-telescoped mass of wreckage and how a living Martian could have survived deep in the hull, in the midst of what must have been a raging inferno, was not an easy enigma for the scientists to unravel or the newspaper-reading public to grasp. The TV-viewing public would have liked very much to see that particular Martian but he died soon afterwards and was never televised. There were eight hundred Martian captives to question, and TV coverage remained so over-burdened for days that viewers did not feel any pronounced sense of outrage until it was too late to rectify an official blunder that was tragic from a documentary point of view. Fortunately Corporal Walton did see that first remarkable survivor--saw him close and saw him plain. He had been advancing cautiously toward the wreckage with a Geiger counter which was not clicking and a protective helmet which he had just started to take off. Neither the Geiger counter nor the helmet were of any particular value to him, for the wreckage was not radio-active and never had been. The Martian ships had been attacked by both guided missiles and swooping jets. Three successive bombing attacks had been launched against them. But the small, intermediate-range ballistic missiles had not carried atomic warheads and neither had the jets. The towering, silver-finned I B M's had remained on their launching pads, their destructive potential quiescent and unchallenged. It had been a World War II-type bombing attack, but so sudden, fierce and unrelenting that two of the Martian ships had gone down in flames and another had been forced to land and disgorge its entire crew. The two remaining ships had flown lopsidedly westward, trailing clouds of smoke, too crippled to retaliate with more than a single blast of searing fire. The blast had struck far west of the missile base, blackening two acres of woodland, but missing the base completely. A slender jet had gone in pursuit of the fleeing disks, and that one jet had been armed in a more formidable way--with a small, gray-nosed atomic projectile. The fleeing disks had not returned. Corporal Walton was remembering all this as he drew near to the wreckage of the only ship which was still smouldering after five hours of exposure to fire-extinguishing vapor showers from two circling planes.