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.
I know, I know. Ten million separate events are taking place all the time on Earth and on Mars and by no stretch of the imagination could they be thought of as an immediate part of this record. But when the threads all start to draw together and tighten about you in a destiny-altering way you have to keep the time-sequence in order and record developments as they take place. Otherwise when they become of immediate concern later on the entire picture will seem out of focus. The frame will start lengthening out and the people in the picture will be out-of-kelter also, and scattered all over the landscape. The only way you can keep them sharply in focus is to record what happens to them when it happens.
It shouldn't be too difficult, because there's a seeing eye that hovers over the Mars' Colony day and night. The big Time-Space eye that records everything that takes place in the universe, so that nothing is ever really lost beyond re-capture. The past, the present and the future keep flickering, in a backward-forward way, across that immense retina, and some day a technique may be developed for running history off in reverse and you'll see events that took place thousands of years ago as if they were happening today on a lighted screen.
So ... let's look through that Big Eye straight down at the Mars Colony, you and I together. And remember. In this particular instance we won't need a history-reversing gimmick at all, because what we'll see and hear is NOW. It starts as a two-person conversation:
"John, I'm frightened. What if the insulation isn't absolutely foolproof? What if one of those Endicott Fuel containers isn't shielded in just the right way? Suppose the radio-active stuff inside builds up to what the nuclear physicists call critical mass and there's an atomic explosion? Blowups have happened ... even in the Endicott Laboratories under the strictest kind of supervision."