Space Station 1

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 so acute that Corriston’s breath caught in his throat. His hand whipped back and he leapt to his feet with a convulsive shudder.

It was suddenly very still on the dune again. Corriston stood for a moment with his body rigid, fearing to look downward, his mind filled with a growing sense of panic.

Had Helen Ramsey been attacked by lamprenes too? No, no, she was all right; she had to be. Everything confirmed it, her quietness, her steady breathing, the simple fact J:hat her eyes had been closed and not opened wide in torment.

He descended the dune like a man ploughing in frantic haste through a snowdrift, sinking to his knees and floundering free again, lurching backward and sideways, sliding a third of the way.

She was all right when he got to her. He dropped down beside her and lifted her into his arms, and for an instant there was complete silence between them. She just looked at him, looked up into his face steadily and calmly, as if she could read his mind and had the good sense to realize there could be no more certain way of reassuring him. Then her arms tightened about him. “Darling”, she whispered. “Darling, darling...”.

Corriston started fumbling with his oxygen mask and suddenly he had it off. He held his breath and more slowly helped her free her lips so that he could kiss her. Their lips met and the kiss was longer and more intense than any they had ever before shared.

A half hour later the tractors were in rumbling motion again, their destination Ramsey’s Citadel. And Corriston had a plan. He knew that it was riddled with risks and that he was perhaps quite mad to think that it might succeed. But the fact that Helen Ramsey was now completely safe and had dropped off into a brief, outwardly untroubled sleep at his side made him feel reckless to the point where a cautious, level-headed man like Drever could only stare at him and shake his head.

There was a swaying and a creaking all about them, the slow, steady rumble of caterpillar treads, and Drever had almost to shout to make himself heard. He stood directly opposite Corriston, supporting himself by a guard rail, and watching the desert through the weather-shield change color in the wake of the heavy vehicles heaving, churning, torpedo-shaped rear-end.

“Stone’s been unconscious now for an hour”, Drever said, dividing his gaze between Corriston, and the loosely strapped-in, sleeping girl at his side, both swaying with the swaying tractor. “We can’t count on getting any more information out of him. I can’t wake him up. Drugs would be dangerous. I don’t think he’ll live, but we can’t deliberately kill him to get him to talk”.

“I know that”, Corriston said.

“But he’s the only one who knows why Henley is staying so long at the Citadel. He should have been back hours ago. He left before you escaped from the ship. For all we know, he may be dead. Ramsey may have lost his head and had him shot, although that seems unlikely. Ramsey would go to any length to save his daughter. But we’ve no way of knowing whether he believed Henley’s story or not. Anything could have happened. Henley may have attacked Ramsey”.

“I’ve a feeling that he’s still at the Citadel”, Corriston said. “I’ll have to gamble on that — the one-in-five chance that for some reason the negotiations have been prolonged. He may be lying dead in the desert somewhere. He may have been attacked by lamprenes. As you say, anything could have happened. But when I make up my mind to do something I usually go through with it. It’s just a matter of plain common sense. You don’t toss aside a decision you’ve given a great deal of thought to just because the arguments against it are weighty, too”.

“I see. So you’re still determined to walk right up to the gate and tell them you’re Stone”.

“Why not? They’ve never laid eyes on Stone and they don’t know me from Adam. I won’t be wearing this uniform. I’ll tell them that Henley’s expecting me, that he left orders for me to join him if he failed to come back at a specified time. I’ll watch the guard’s face and change my story a little — if I have to — as I go along”.

“It’s a very long gamble. I hope you realize that”.

“It’s either that or no gamble at all. And we’ve got to gamble. We’re holding at least two high cards and a joker. Henley has had the ground shot right out from under him. He’s completely alone, and the only thing he has left to gamble with is his nearness to Ramsey, his ability to terrify Ramsey by making him believe that his daughter’s life is still in danger. Ramsey has to be told that Helen has been freed, has to be warned in time, before he does anything foolish”.

“Don’t you see? With that threat hanging over him, Ramsey would never let us get within fifty yards of the Citadel, let alone walk through the gates. And if Henley finds out that we’ve got Helen, he’ll know that he has nothing left to gamble with except that desperate bluff. And he may doubt his ability to win with a bluff. That would be the worst tragedy of all. He may turn on Ramsey in blind rage, and kill him. He gets a horrible, pathological pleasure out of killing. I’ve told you how he went berserk on the Station”.

Drever nodded, and, quite suddenly and unexpectedly, the look of stubborn opposition was gone from his eyes.

“I guess you’re right, Lieutenant. You can’t always tell how the cards will fall”.

“You can never tell”, Corriston said. “And there are some games where the important moves can only be made by just one player, and he usually has to be something of a reckless fool”.