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rocking sideways.
     
Laird’s shout: “Fire! Fire! Stop them!”
    Tracers tore at the chopper and bounced from its skin and whined away from its rushing rotors. With her uncanny eyesight Linda saw her mother fall back through the open door and saw the armored door slam closed behind her, as the Snark took steps to protect its human cargo. In seconds the helicopter had vanished into the hazy night sky.
She lay on her back, alert and helpless, smelling the wet warm grass and the burned fuel and the H.E. and the blood, as figures came running out of the darkness to stand over her.
     
“Kill her, sir?”
     
“Don’t be stupid. Not until we’re sure her parents are dead.”
     
“We’d better face facts, Bill,” said another. “We can’t just pretend that nothing’s . . .”
     
“Don’t tell me my business. Patch her up and do a good job of it. There may be inquiries.”
     
“Bill . . .”
     
“It’s not over. This can be contained.” “William . . .”
    The gray man flinched, and Linda looked up ruefully at the face that pushed into the tightening circle of her consciousness, the face of the gray woman; she stood beside Laird, her long gray hair spilling in tangles, a silenced pistol in her hand. That’s who had shot her, Linda realized–after Laird had told the others to hold their fire. Shot her because Linda had not taken the time, had not had the will, to kill her first.
“Why her?” Laird barked at the gray woman. “It’s Nagy you should have killed, him and his wife.”
     
“I didn’t intend to kill her, William. I intended to keep her here.”
     
The bedraggled helicopter pilot staggered into the circle of faces, his face contorted in rage. “You left her an opening! She . . .”
     
“Shut up,” the gray man said, ignoring him, glaring at the woman. “Nagy came near to succeeding, and he’s not through yet. How could you be so careless?”
     
“We can’t simply discard her, William. She could be the greatest of us.”
     
“No more! She resists our authority. She has always resisted it. Look at this . . . this debacle.”
     
“She’s a child. When she realizes the truth, when she really understands everything . . .”
     
“To resist us is to resist the Knowledge.”
     
“William . . .”
    “No more talk from any of you.” He looked down at Linda with the hardest eyes she had ever seen, even in his hard face. “This one is so much unenlightened meat. We’ll put her away somewhere she can’t be found. Then we’ll start over.”
Seeing herself lying paralyzed on the grass, her new persona knew that if she could free herself from this horrible dream of reality, she would be safe. Linda opened her mouth– “Blake,” she whispered. “Blake.”
     
Laird looked down at her and his face twisted into a bitter sneer.
     
This time when she came awake, there was no one with her. And as she lay alone in the dark cabin, her heart pumping, she struggled mightily to remember what she had just been dreaming.
II
    The gleaming white ship fell swiftly toward Mars, a sleek cutter emblazoned with the blue band and gold star of the Board of Space Control. It was falling tail-first toward Mars Station; its fusion torch had been extinguished at the radiation perimeter, and the ship was braking itself into parking orbit on chemical rockets alone, maintaining a steady one-gee acceleration.
    Shielded against heavy radiation in every wavelength, its hull had no windows opening upon the universe. The young woman stood before the wallsized videoplate in the wardroom, watching the view from the stern, where black Phobos slid across the pale orange disk of Mars–a moon only twenty-seven kilometers long seen against a planet only 6,000 kilometers away. “Potato-shaped” was the cliché people had used to describe Phobos for over a century, but no other phrase captured the essence of its form so succinctly: pitted, lumpy, black, Phobos could have been a fine russet spud freshly dug from