When I opened my eyes for the second time, a full minute later, the eyes that looked back at me were just as I'd pictured them. A deep, lustrous brown. Her face was very much as I'd pictured it too, except that I'd no way of knowing whether she was a blonde or a brunette. She looked a little like Joan. Her hair was done up in a different way, and her lips were a little fuller than Joan's and her cheekbones not quite so prominent. Her nose, too, was a fraction of an inch shorter. But otherwise she could have passed for Joan's sister. Not a twin sister, for the resemblance wasn't anything like that pronounced. But it was close to the family likeness you see quite often in portraits of two sisters when one is smiling and the other looks seriously troubled. It flashed across my mind that if they had been standing side by side, both wearing the same expression, the resemblance would have been considerably more striking. It shouldn't have surprised me too much, because of what she'd said to the doctor. Women who think and feel in much the same way are very likely to bear a family resemblance physically. It's the sort of thing which makes an anthropologist shake his head in vigorous denial. But facts are facts and who was I to dispute them? "Just lie quiet," she whispered, patting me on the shoulder. "Dr. Crawford says you mustn't try to talk. You're going to be all right. I'm Miss Cherubin, your day nurse." She smiled, her eyes crinkling a little at the corners. "You should have a night nurse too, but I've been staying on in her place." Cherubin. An angel? No--cherubim was spelt with an "M." And she wasn't _that_ young or quite as rosy-cheeked as cherubs are supposed to be. What made it really tragic was my inability to reach out and touch her or ask her a single question, because right at that moment another wave of dizziness swept over me and I blacked out again. 11 Right at this point there has to be a shift in the way I've been recording events as they happened, because what happened next took place elsewhere, while I was flat on my back in the hospital. By "what happened next" I mean ... to me and Joan personally and to Commander Littlefield and the Martian Colonization Board and everything I'd come to Mars to take cognizance of, and do my best to change for the better.