Space Station 1
you. Take it easy now. They've got the lamprene off."
He stood very still, waiting for his heart to beat normally again,
telling himself that Saddler had taken an almost suicidal risk in
leaving the ship on foot with no certain refuge in mind. By taking
along a helpless girl, he was making himself a target for the rage and
relentless enmity of men who would never rest until they had tracked
him down.
There could be no sanctuary for him anywhere. If he escaped Henley's
vengeance, the colonists would capture him in a matter of days. But
Corriston wasn't thinking in terms of days. He was thinking in terms of
minutes, hours. He stared at the empty stretch of desert ahead, trying
desperately to control the despair that was welling up inside him. How
long a head start did Saddler have? Had he left the ship only a few
minutes, or hours before?
He'd have to ask Stone one more question. Like a fool he'd put off
asking it, dreading the thought of what Stone's answer might be. But
now he had no choice. He must ask, and risk knowing that pursuit could
not be immediately undertaken by one man, that Saddler was miles away
across the desert, hiding out in some remote and inaccessible cave and
that tracking him down and putting a bullet through his heart would
have to be a joint undertaking.
It was a cruelly frustrating possibility. It increased Corriston's
rage, his bitterness. The hate within him seemed suddenly violent
enough to destroy anyone or anything. He preferred to go on alone, in
relentless pursuit of Saddler and if it took days to track him down....
It was Freddy's voice that brought him back to reality, startling
and sobering him. Freddy was coming toward him between the tractors,
shouting at the top of his lungs.
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.
He was still facing the hollow, with two bullets left in his gun. But
he knew that he would not have to fire again. Saddler was lying on his
back on the sand, his eyes wide open, his jaw hanging slack. There was
a spreading red stain on his chest and a rim of blood around his lips.
The wind which was blowing across the crest of the dune seemed suddenly
to turn malevolent, striking out at the dead man with a sudden,
downsweeping gust, ruffling his hair and making him seem to be still
enveloped in violence.
Corriston felt his throat muscles contract. He forced himself to bend
over and search for a heart beat he knew he wouldn't find, remembering
the other times when the outcome had been less fatal, when only a man's
face had changed.
As his palm rested for an instant above the dead man's heart, the
stirring of the sand immediately beneath him seemed to increase, to
become a loud and continuous rustling sound that filled him with a
vague sense of disquiet. He could not quite dismiss from his mind a
feeling that he was still in danger, that in some strange, almost
terrifying way Saddler was still a menace, and that the terrible
reality of his death had not destroyed all of the hatred and savage
violence which had forced Corriston to kill him in self-defense.
Suddenly Corriston realized that what he heard was not the wind
stirring the sand at all, but something quite different. It was closer
to him than the sloping rim of the dunes, and it was accompanied by
movements directly under his hand, a sudden tightening of the dead
man's skin, a contraction more pronounced than could have been produced
by the abrupt onset of rigor mortis, however freakishly violent or
premature.
The rustling continued for perhaps ten more seconds. Then, abruptly, it
stopped and the heads of two lamprenes came into view, moving slowly
across Saddler's unstirring flesh until their writhing mouth parts were
less than two inches from Corriston's outspread hand.
The sight of them brought an instant of terror, an awareness of peril