Chapter 21

Corriston couldn’t quite catch what the lad was shouting at first. Something about the dunes and the ship and footprints. Then he caught the name of Helen Ramsey and his mouth went dry and for an instant he couldn’t seem to breathe. Freddy was shouting that he had found Helen Ramsey.

Dr. Drever started and leapt quickly to his feet, his eyes darting with an understandable solicitude toward the small figure coming toward them across the sand. He moved quickly to place himself directly in front of Stone, as if fearing it would be bad for Freddy to see a man so close to death. Then the full significance of Freddy’s words seemed to dawn on him, and his solicitude for his son was replaced by a larger concern, a wider sympathy.

“You talk to him, Corriston,” he said. “You’ve been living through a short stretch of hell. If he’s really found her--”

Corriston needed no urging. He swayed a little forward, steadied himself and broke into a run, meeting Freddy almost midway between the nearest tractor and the hollow where Drever was crouching.

Freddy’s eyes seemed almost too large for so young a face, large and immensely serious. But along with the seriousness Corriston could sense something else, a taper glow of excitement burning bright.

Freddy had gone exploring. As he told Corriston about it, the words seemed to flow from him as if they had a mysterious life of their own, and were somehow reshaping Freddy, making him over into a grown man with a heavy stubble of beard and eyes that had looked on far places and a thousand brilliant suns.

Freddy had found Helen Ramsey by following her footprints in the sand. Corriston let Freddy tell it in his own words, shaken by doubts for a moment, but finally convinced that the lad couldn’t possibly be making any of it up.

“There wasn’t a footprint anywhere near the ship, Lieutenant Corriston. The sandstorm covered them over. I looked everywhere just to be sure. I mean there wasn’t any prints that could have been made by a woman leaving the ship with a man. The sand was trampled in a few places, because about ten minutes ago Mr. Macklin and two other men started looking too. But that was all.

“I remembered then that the sand sometimes stays nearly smooth close to very high dunes, even in a storm. There’s a--a windbreaking buffer zone where the dunes keep the sand from piling up. I asked Mr. Macklin about that once and he told me. I got to thinking that if I just wandered off I could be back again before anyone missed me.”

Freddy turned and gestured toward the ship. “You can see the dunes from here. Not the ones right behind the ship. Those two bigger ones over there ... that sort of look like the humps on a camel. I guess nobody would have been crazy enough to go looking for prints that far away from the ship. But if I hadn’t done it I wouldn’t have found her. That’s for sure.”

Corriston said: “You’re so much the opposite of crazy, Freddy, that I’m afraid you’re trying to spare me. It’s hard to hurt someone you like, but I’ve got to have the truth.”

His hand tightened on Freddy’s shoulder. “Do you understand, Freddy? I must know. Don’t lie to spare me. Is she all right?”

Freddy looked up at him, troubled, uncertain. “I think she is. She’s lying down near the bottom of the dune, right where it slopes up again toward another dune. It’s like one, big, hollow dune. I didn’t see her move. I guess she must have fainted. He’s there, too, lying face down in the sand halfway up the dune, like he was hurt...”

“All right,” Corriston said. “Now you’d better stay here with your father.”

“Can’t I go back with you? I was afraid to climb down to her alone. I was afraid he’d catch me and kill me, and then no one would ever know I’d found her. He’d be warned and try to get away--”

“It was the right thing to do, the level-headed thing,” Corriston said. “You couldn’t have used better judgment.”

“Then it’s all right if I go back with you?”

Corriston shook his head. “No, Freddy. I’d rather you didn’t. Don’t you understand? You’ve done more than your share. Now it’s my turn.”

Freddy tightened his lips and stared for a moment at the glitter of sunlight on the caterpillar tread of the nearest tractor. Finally he said, “All right, Lieutenant Corriston. If it’s an order.”

“It’s an order, Freddy.”

Corriston gave Freddy’s shoulder a pat. Then, after the briefest pause, he said: “There’s no substitute for the kind of fast-thinking resourcefulness you’ve just displayed, Freddy. In a dozen years you’ll be heading an expedition and it won’t be the kind that gets bogged down after the first thousand miles. You can take my word for that.”

He turned then and walked toward the ship. In a moment he had passed the ship and was moving out into the desert beyond, and Freddy wondered how a man could remain so calm in an affair of life and death such as this. It was just as well, perhaps, that he could not see Corriston’s face as he moved still further away from the ship into a loneliness of desert and sky.

She was lying in a wind-scoured hollow beneath a seventy-foot dune, her head resting on one sharply-bent elbow, a look of utter exhaustion on her face. Her eyes were closed, and even from where he stood Corriston could see that she was breathing heavily. He could see the slight rise and fall of her bosom, the trembling vibration of her oxygen mask. She was completely alone.

He stood for an instant absolutely motionless on the summit of the dune, staring down at her, noticing in alarm the hollow contour of her cheeks on both sides of the oxygen mask, and the slight tinge of gray that had crept into her countenance. Then he started downward. Almost instantly the sand rose like an unsteady sea on all sides of him, and a warning signal sounded in his brain.

He could connect it with no cause. Beneath him stretched only the wind-scoured inner surface of the dune, dazzling his eyes with its brightness, mirroring the sunlight like a burning glass. For a moment the brightness deceived him, and he did not realize that there were shadowed hollows directly beneath him, dark fissures in the tumbled sand wide enough to conceal a crouching man. He did not even see the shadow creeping toward him over the sand. Only the dazzle for an instant and the gleam of sunlight on Helen Ramsey’s tousled hair.

Then, suddenly, he was aware of the danger, fully awake and aware. But realization came too late. Abruptly, without warning, a knife blade flashed in the sunlight and he felt an agonizing stab of pain just below his left kneecap.

A dark shape rose before him, and then dissolved into the shadows again, darting downward and sideways as it disappeared. Corriston threw himself backwards and froze into immobility, thrusting his elbows deep into the sand behind him, using that moment of surprise forced upon him by his assailant to lower his eyes and seek him out.

He saw Saddler’s face clearly for an instant, saw the gleaming knife and the hand holding it, and the wavering outline of the man’s crouching body three-fourths in shadow. He heard Saddler mutter: “I’m done for, Corriston. But I’ll get you first.”

It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Corriston’s hand went to his hip, but with a nightmare feeling of retardation and his fingers seemed to move without any assistance from the motor centers of his brain. Then even more slowly he was facing the hollow with the gun in his clasp, and the weapon was exploding into the shadows, filling the hollows and windy places with reverberating echoes of sound.

There was complete silence after that. No groans, no outcry--nothing but silence. It went on for so long that Corriston could not shake off a numbing sense of unreality. Surely only a dream could have had so violently unreal a beginning, so terrible an outcome. Then he looked down, and saw the blood on his leg where the knife had grazed it, and knew that it could not have been a dream.