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.
