Space Station 1

"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.