= = = = = =

   Do you wrestle with dreams?
   Do you contend with shadows?
   Do you move in a kind of sleep?
   Time has slipped away.
   Your life is stolen.
   You tarried with trifles,
   Victim of your folly.
   –Dirge for Jamis on the Funeral Plain, from “Songs of Muad'Dib” by the Princess Irulan

   Leto stood in the foyer of his house, studying a note by the light of a single suspensor lamp. Dawn was yet a few hours away, and he felt his tiredness. A Fremen messenger had brought the note to the outer guard just now as the Duke arrived from his command post.
   The note read: “A column of smoke by day, a pillar of fire by night.”
   There was no signature.
   What does it mean? he wondered.
   The messenger had gone without waiting for an answer and before he could be questioned. He had slipped into the night like some smoky shadow.
   Leto pushed the paper into a tunic pocket, thinking to show it to Hawat later. He brushed a lock of hair from his forehead, took a sighing breath. The anti-fatigue pills were beginning to wear thin. It had been a long two days since the dinner party and longer than that since he had slept.
   On top of all the military problems, there'd been the disquieting session with Hawat, the report on his meeting with Jessica.
   Should I waken Jessica? he wondered. There's no reason to play the secrecy game with her any longer. Or is there?
   Blast and damn that Duncan Idaho!
   He shook his head. No, not Duncan. I was wrong not to take Jessica into my confidence from the first. I must do it now, before more damage is done.
   The decision made him feel better, and he hurried from the foyer through the Great Hall and down the passages toward the family wing.
   At the turn where the passages split to the service area, he paused. A strange mewling came from somewhere down the service passage. Leto put his left hand to the switch on his shield belt, slipped his kindjal into his right hand. The knife conveyed a sense of reassurance. That strange sound had sent a chill through him.
   Softly, the Duke moved down the service passage, cursing the inadequate illumination. The smallest of suspensors had been spaced about eight meters apart along here and tuned to their dimmest level. The dark stone walls swallowed the light.
   A dull blob stretching across the floor appeared out of the gloom ahead.
   Leto hesitated, almost activated his shield, but refrained because that would limit his movements, his hearing . . . and because the captured shipment of lasguns had left him filled with doubts.
   Silently, he moved toward the grey blob, saw that it was a human figure, a man face down on the stone. Leto turned him over with a foot, knife poised, bent close in the dim light to see the face. It was the smuggler, Tuek, a wet stain down his chest. The dead eyes stared with empty darkness. Leto touched the stain–warm.
   How could this man be dead here? Leto asked himself. Who killed him?
   The mewling sound was louder here. It came from ahead and down the side passage to the central room where they had installed the main shield generator for the house.
   Hand on belt switch, kindjal poised, the Duke skirted the body, slipped down the passage and peered around the corner toward the shield generator room.
   Another grey blob lay stretched on the floor a few paces away, and he saw at once this was the source of the noise. The shape crawled toward him with painful slowness, gasping, mumbling.
   Leto stilled his sudden constriction of fear, darted down the passage, crouched beside the crawling figure. It was Mapes, the Fremen housekeeper, her hair tumbled around her face, clothing disarrayed. A dull shininess of dark stain spread from her back along her side. He touched her shoulder and she lifted herself on her elbows, head tipped up to peer at him, the eyes black-shadowed emptiness.
   "S'you," she gasped. "Killed . . . guard . . . sent . . . get . . . Tuek . . . escape . . . m'Lady . . . you . . . you . . . here . . . no . . . " She flopped forward, her head thumping against the stone.
   Leto felt for pulse at the temples. There was none. He looked at the stain: she'd been stabbed in the back. Who? His mind raced. Did she mean someone had killed a guard? And Tuek–had Jessica sent for him? Why?
   He started to stand up. A sixth sense warned him. He flashed a hand toward the shield switch–too late. A numbing shock slammed his arm aside. He felt pain there, saw a dart protruding from the sleeve, sensed paralysis spreading from it up his arm. It took an agonizing effort to lift his head and look down the passage.
   Yueh stood in the open door of the generator room. His face reflected yellow from the light of a single, brighter suspensor above the door. There was stillness from the room behind him–no sound of generators.
   Yueh! Leto thought. He's sabotaged the house generators! We 're wide open!
   Yueh began walking toward him, pocketing a dartgun.
   Leto found he could still speak, gasped: “Yueh! How?” Then the paralysis reached his legs and he slid to the floor with his back propped against the stone wall.
   Yueh's face carried a look of sadness as he bent over, touched Leto's forehead. The Duke found he could feel the touch, but it was remote . . . dull.
   “The drug on the dart is selective,” Yueh said “You can speak, but I'd advise against it.” He glanced down the hall, and again bent over Leto, pulled out the dart, tossed it aside. The sound of the dart clattering on the stones was faint and distant to the Duke's ears.
   It can't be Yueh, Leto thought. He's conditioned.
   “How?” Leto whispered.
   “I'm sorry, my dear Duke, but there are things which will make greater demands than this.” He touched the diamond tattoo on his forehead. “I find it very strange, myself–an override on my pyretic conscience–but I wish to kill a man. Yes, I actually wish it. I will stop at nothing to do it.”
   He looked down at the Duke. “Oh, not you, my dear Duke. The Baron Harkonnen. I wish to kill the Baron.”
   "Bar . . . on Har . . . "
   “Be quiet, please, my poor Duke. You haven't much time. That peg tooth I put in your mouth after the tumble at Narcal–that tooth must be replaced, in a moment, I'll render you unconscious and replace that tooth.” He opened his hand, stared at something in it. “An exact duplicate, its core shaped most exquisitely like a nerve. It'll escape the usual detectors, even a fast scanning. But if you bite down hard on it, the cover crushes. Then, when you expel your breath sharply, you fill the air around you with a poison gas–most deadly.”
   Leto stared up at Yueh, seeing madness in the man's eyes, the perspiration along brown and chin.
   “You were dead anyway, my poor Duke,” Yueh said. “But you will get close to the Baron before you die. He'll believe you're stupefied by drugs beyond any dying effort to attack him. And you will be drugged–and tied. But attack can take strange forms. And you will remember the tooth. The tooth, Duke Leto Atreides. You will remember the tooth.”
   The old doctor leaned closer and closer until his face and drooping mustache dominated Leto's narrowing vision.
   “The tooth,” Yueh muttered.
   “Why?” Leto whispered.
   Yueh lowered himself to one knee beside the Duke. “I made a shaitan's bargain with the Baron. And I must be certain he has fulfilled his half of it. When I see him, I'll know. When I look at the Baron, then I will know. But I'll never enter his presence without the price. You're the price, my poor Duke. And I'll know when I see him. My poor Wanna taught me many things, and one is to see certainty of truth when the stress is great. I cannot do it always, but when I see the Baron–then, I will know.”
   Leto tried to look down at the tooth in Yueh's hand. He felt this was happening in a nightmare–it could not be.
   Yueh's purple lips turned up in a grimace. “I'll not get close enough to the Baron, or I'd do this myself. No. I'll be detained at a safe distance. But you . . . ah, now! You, my lovely weapon! He'll want you close to him–to gloat over you, to boast a little.”
   Leto found himself almost hypnotized by a muscle on the left side of Yueh's jaw. The muscle twisted when the man spoke.
   Yueh leaned closer. “And you, my good Duke, my precious Duke, you must remember this tooth.” He held it up between thumb and forefinger. “It will be all that remains to you.”
   Leto's mouth moved without sound, then: “Refuse.”
   “Ah-h, no! You mustn't refuse. Because, in return for this small service. I'm doing a thing for you. I will save your son and your woman. No other can do it. They can be removed to a place where no Harkonnen can reach them.”
   “How . . . save . . . them?” Leto whispered.
   “By making it appear they're dead, by secreting them among people who draw knife at hearing the Harkonnen name, who hate the Harkonnens so much they'll burn a chair in which a Harkonnen has sat, salt the ground over which a Harkonnen has walked.” He touched Leto's jaw. “Can you feel anything in your jaw?”
   The Duke found that he could not answer. He sensed distant tugging, saw Yueh's hand come up with the ducal signet ring.
   “For Paul,” Yueh said. “You'll be unconscious presently. Good-by, my poor Duke. When next we meet we'll have no time for conversation.”
   Cool remoteness spread upward from Leto's jaw, across his cheeks. The shadowy, hall narrowed to a pinpoint with Yueh's purple lips centered in it.
   “Remember the tooth!” Yueh hissed. “The tooth!”

= = = = = =

   There should be a science of discontent. People need hard times and oppression to develop psychic muscles.
   –from “Collected Sayings of Muad'Dib” by the Princess Irulan

   Jessica awoke in the dark, feeling premonition in the stillness around her. She could not understand why her mind and body felt so sluggish. Skin raspings of fear ran along her nerves. She thought of sitting up and turning on a light, but something stayed the decision. Her mouth felt . . . strange.
   Lump-lump-lump-lump!
   It was a dull sound, directionless in the dark. Somewhere.
   The waiting moment was packed with time, with rustling needle-stick movements.
   She began to feel her body, grew aware of bindings on wrists and ankles, a gag in her mouth. She was on her side, hands tied behind her. She tested the bindings, realized they were krimskell fiber, would only claw tighter as she pulled.
   And now, she remembered.
   There had been movement in the darkness of her bedroom, something wet and pungent slapped against her face, filling her mouth, hands grasping for her. She had gasped–one indrawn breath–sensing the narcotic in the wetness. Consciousness had receded, sinking her into a black bin of terror.
   It has come, she thought. How simple it was to subdue the Bene Gesserit. All it took was treachery. Hawat was right.
   She forced herself not to pull on her bindings.
   This is not my bedroom, she thought. They've taken me someplace else.
   Slowly, she marshaled the inner calmness.
   She grew aware of the smell of her own stale sweat with its chemical infusion of fear.
   Where is Paul? she asked herself. My son–what have they done to him?
   Calmness.
   She forced herself to it, using the ancient routines.
   But terror remained so near.
   Leto? Where are you, Leto?
   She sensed a diminishing in the dark. It began with shadows. Dimensions separated, became new thorns of awareness. White. A line under a door.
   I'm on the floor.
   People walking. She sensed it through the floor.
   Jessica squeezed back the memory of terror. I must remain calm, alert, and prepared. I may get only one chance. Again, she forced the inner calmness.
   The ungainly thumping of her heartbeats evened, shaping out time. She counted back. I was unconscious about an hour. She closed her eyes, focused her awareness onto the approaching footsteps.
   Four people.
   She counted the differences in their steps.
   I must pretend I'm still unconscious. She relaxed against the cold floor, testing her body's readiness, heard a door open, sensed increased light through her eyelids.
   Feet approached: someone standing over her.
   “You are awake,” rumbled a basso voice. “Do not pretend.”
   She opened her eyes.
   The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen stood over her. Around them, she recognized the cellar room where Paul had slept, saw his cot at one side–empty. Suspensor lamps were brought in by guards, distributed near the open door. There was a glare of light in the hallway beyond that hurt her eyes.
   She looked up at the Baron. He wore a yellow cape that bulged over his portable suspensors. The fat cheeks were two cherubic mounds beneath spider-black eyes.
   “The drug was timed,” he rumbled. “We knew to the minute when you'd be coming out of it.”
   How could that be? she wondered. They 'd have to know my exact weight, my metabolism, my . . . Yueh!
   “Such a pity you must remain gagged,” the Baron said. “We could have such an interesting conversation.”
   Yueh's the only one it could be, she thought. How?
   The Baron glanced behind him at the door. “Come in, Piter.”
   She had never before seen the man who entered to stand beside the Baron, but the face was known–and the man: Piter de Vries, the Mentat-Assassin. She studied him–hawk features, blue-ink eyes that suggested he was a native of Arrakis, but subtleties of movement and stance told her he was not. And his flesh was too well firmed with water. He was tall, though slender, and something about him suggested effeminacy.
   “Such a pity we cannot have our conversation, my dear Lady Jessica.” the Baron said. “However, I'm aware of your abilities.” He glanced at the Mentat. “Isn't that true, Piter?”
   “As you say, Baron,” the man said.
   The voice was tenor. It touched her spine with a wash of coldness. She had never heard such a chill voice. To one with the Bene Gesserit training, the voice screamed: Killer!
   “I have a surprise for Piter,” the Baron said. “He thinks he has come here to collect his reward–you, Lady Jessica. But I wish to demonstrate a thing: that he does not really want you.”
   “You play with me, Baron?” Piter asked, and he smiled.
   Seeing that smile, Jessica wondered that the Baron did not leap to defend himself from this Piter. Then she corrected herself. The Baron could not read that smile. He did not have the Training.
   “In many ways, Piter is quite naive,” the Baron said. “He doesn't admit to himself what a deadly creature you are, Lady Jessica. I'd show him, but it'd be a foolish risk.” The Baron smiled at Piter, whose face had become a waiting mask. “I know what Piter really wants. Piter wants power.”
   “You promised I could have her,” Piter said. The tenor voice had lost some of its cold reserve.
   Jessica heard the clue-tones in the man's voice, allowed herself an inward shudder. How could the Baron have made such an animal out of a Mentat?
   “I give you a choice, Piter,” the Baron said.
   “What choice?”
   The Baron snapped fat fingers. “This woman and exile from the Imperium, or the Duchy of Atreides on Arrakis to rule as you see fit in my name.”
   Jessica watched the Baron's spider eyes study Piter.
   “You could be Duke here in all but name,” the Baron said.
   Is my Leto dead, then? Jessica asked herself. She felt a silent wail begin somewhere in her mind.
   The Baron kept his attention on the Mentat. “Understand yourself, Piter. You want her because she was a Duke's woman, a symbol of his power–beautiful, useful, exquisitely trained for her role. But an entire duchy, Piter! That's more than a symbol; that's the reality. With it you could have many women . . . and more.”
   “You do not joke with Piter?”
   The Baron turned with that dancing lightness the suspensors gave him. “Joke? I? Remember–I am giving up the boy. You heard what the traitor said about the lad's training. They are alike, this mother and son–deadly.” The Baron smiled. “I must go now. I will send in the guard I've reserved for this moment. He's stone deaf. His orders will be to convey you on the first leg of your journey into exile. He will subdue this woman if he sees her gain control of you. He'll not permit you to untie her gag until you're off Arrakis. If you choose not to leave . . . he has other orders.”
   “You don't have to leave,” Piter said. “I've chosen.”
   “Ah, hah!” the Baron chortled. “Such quick decision can mean only one thing.”
   “I will take the duchy,” Piter said.
   And Jessica thought: Doesn't Piter know the Baron's lying to him? But–how could he know? He's a twisted Mentat.
   The Baron glanced down at Jessica. “Is it not wonderful that I know Piter so well? I wagered with my Master at Arms that this would be Piter's choice. Hah! Well, I leave now. This is much better. Ah-h, much better. You understand, Lady Jessica? I hold no rancor toward you. It's a necessity. Much better this way. Yes. And I've not actually ordered you destroyed. When it's asked of me what happened to you, I can shrug it off in all truth.”
   “You leave it to me then?” Piter asked.
   “The guard I send you will take your orders,” the Baron said. “Whatever's done I leave to you.” He stared at Piter. “Yes. There will be no blood on my hands here. It's your decision. Yes. I know nothing of it. You will wait until I've gone before doing whatever you must do. Yes. Well . . . ah, yes. Yes. Good.”
   He fears the questioning of a Truthsayer, Jessica thought. Who? Ah-h-h, the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen, of course! If he knows he must face her questions, then the Emperor is in on this for sure. Ah-h-h-h, my poor Leto.
   With one last glance at Jessica, the Baron turned, went out the door. She followed him with her eyes, thinking: It's as the Reverend Mother warned–too potent an adversary.
   Two Harkonnen troopers entered. Another, his face a scarred mask, followed and stood in the doorway with drawn lasgun.
   The deaf one, Jessica thought, studying the scarred face. The Baron knows I could use the Voice on any other man.
   Scarface looked at Piter. “We've the boy on a litter outside. What are your orders?”
   Piter spoke to Jessica. “I'd thought of binding you by a threat held over your son, but I begin to see that would not have worked, I let emotion cloud reason. Bad policy for a Mentat.” He looked at the first pair of troopers, turning so the deaf one could read his lips: “Take them into the desert as the traitor suggested for the boy. His plan is a good one. The worms will destroy all evidence. Their bodies must never be found.”
   “You don't wish to dispatch them yourself?” Scarface asked.
   He reads lips, Jessica thought.
   “I follow my Baron's example,” Piter said. “Take them where the traitor said.”
   Jessica heard the harsh Mentat control in Piter's voice, thought: He, too, fears the Truthsayer.
   Piter shrugged, turned, and went through the doorway. He hesitated there, and Jessica thought he might turn back for a last look at her, but he went out without turning.
   “Me, I wouldn't like the thought of facing that Truthsayer after this night's work,” Scarface said.
   “You ain't likely ever to run into that old witch,” one of the other troopers said. He went around to Jessica's head, bent over her. “It ain't getting our work done standing around here chattering. Take her feet and–”
   “Why'n't we kill 'em here?” Scarface asked.
   “Too messy,” the first one said. “Unless you wants to strangle'em. Me, I likes a nice straightforward job. Drop 'em on the desert like that traitor said, cut 'em once or twice, leave 'the evidence for the worms. Nothing to clean up afterwards.”
   “Yeah . . . well, I guess you're right,” Scarface said.
   Jessica listened to them, watching, registering. But the gag blocked her Voice, and there was the deaf one to consider.
   Scarface holstered his lasgun, took her feet. They lifted her like a sack of grain, maneuvered her through the door and dumped her onto a suspensor-buoyed litter with another bound figure. As they turned her, fitting her to the litter, she saw her companion's face–Paul! He was bound, but not gagged. His face was no more than ten centimeters from hers, eyes closed, his breathing even.
   Is he drugged? she wondered.
   The troopers lifted the litter, and Paul's eyes opened the smallest fraction–dark slits staring at her.
   He mustn't try the Voice! she prayed. The deaf guard!
   Paul's eyes closed.
   He had been practicing the awareness-breathing, calming his mind, listening to their captors. The deaf one posed a problem, but Paul contained his despair. The mind-calming Bene Gesserit regimen his mother had taught him kept him poised, ready to expand any opportunity.
   Paul allowed himself another slit-eyed inspection of his mother's face. She appeared unharmed. Gagged, though.
   He wondered who could've captured her. His own captivity was plain enough–to bed with a capsule prescribed by Yueh, awaking to find himself bound to this litter. Perhaps a similar thing had befallen her. Logic said the traitor was Yueh, but he held final decision in abeyance. There was no understanding it–a Suk doctor a traitor.
   The litter tipped slightly as the Harkonnen troopers maneuvered it through a doorway into starlit night. A suspensor-buoy rasped against the doorway. Then they were on sand, feet grating in it. A 'thopter wing loomed overhead, blotting the stars. The litter settled to the ground.
   Paul's eyes adjusted to the faint light. He recognized the deaf trooper as the man who opened the 'thopter door, peered inside at the green gloom illuminated by the instrument panel.
   “This the 'thopter we're supposed to use?” he asked, and turned to watch his companion's lips.
   “It's the one the traitor said was fixed for desert work,” the other said.
   Scarface nodded. “But it's one of them little liaison jobs. Ain't room in there for more'n them an' two of us.”
   “Two's enough,” said the litter-bearer, moving up close and presenting his lips for reading. “We can take care of it from here on, Kinet.”
   “The Baron he told me to make sure what happened to them two,” Scarface said.
   “What you so worried about?” asked another trooper from behind the litter-bearer.
   “She is a Bene Gesserit witch,” the deaf one said. “They have powers.”
   "Ah-h-h . . . "The litter-bearer made the sign of the fist at his ear. "One of them, eh? Know whatcha mean."
   The trooper behind him grunted. “She'll be worm meat soon enough. Don't suppose even a Bene Gesserit witch has powers over one of them big worms. Eh, Czigo?” He nudged the litter-bearer.
   “Yee-up,” the litter-bearer said. He returned to the litter, took Jessica's shoulders. “C'mon, Kinet. You can go along if you wants to make sure what happens.”
   “It is nice of you to invite me, Czigo,” Scarface said.
   Jessica felt herself lifted, the wing shadow spinning–stars. She was pushed into the rear of the 'thopter, her krimskell fiber bindings examined, and she was strapped down. Paul was jammed in beside her, strapped securely, and she noted his bonds were simple rope.
   Scarface, the deaf one they called Kinet, took his place in front. The litter-bearer, the one they called Czigo, came around and took the other front seat.
   Kinet closed his door, bent to the controls. The 'thopter took off in a wing-tucked surge, headed south over the Shield Wall. Czigo tapped his companion's shoulder, said: “Whyn't you turn around and keep an eye on them two?”
   “Sure you know the way to go?” Kinet watched Czigo's lips.
   “I listened to the traitor same's you.”
   Kinet swiveled his seat. Jessica saw the glint of starlight on a lasgun in his hand. The 'thopter's light-walled interior seemed to collect illumination as her eyes adjusted, but the guard's scarred face remained dim. Jessica tested her seat belt, found it loose. She felt roughness in the strap against her left arm, realized the strap had been almost severed, would snap at a sudden jerk.
   Has someone been at this 'thopter, preparing it for us? she wondered. Who? Slowly, she twisted her bound feet clear of Paul's.
   “Sure do seem a shame to waste a good-looking woman like this,” Scarface said. “You ever have any highborn types?” He turned to look at the pilot.
   “Bene Gesserit ain't all highborn,” the pilot said.
   “But they all looks heighty.”
   He can see me plain enough, Jessica thought. She brought her bound legs up onto the seat, curled into a sinuous ball, staring at Scarface.
   “Real pretty, she is,” Kinet said. He wet his lips with his tongue. “Sure do seem a shame.” He looked at Czigo.
   “You thinking what I think you're thinking?” the pilot asked.
   "Who'd be to know?" the guard asked. "Afterwards . . . " He shrugged. "I just never had me no highborns. Might never get a chance like this one again."
   "You lay a hand on my mother . . . " Paul grated. He glared at Scarface.
   “Hey!” the pilot laughed. “Cub's got a bark. Ain't got no bite, though.”
   And Jessica thought; Paul's pitching his voice too high. It may work, though.
   They flew on in silence.
   These poor fools, Jessica thought, studying her guards and reviewing the Baron's words. They'll be killed as soon as they report success on their mission. The Baron wants no witnesses.
   The 'thopter banked over the southern rim of the Shield Wall, and Jessica saw a moonshadowed expanse of sand beneath them.
   “This oughta be far enough,” the pilot said. “The traitor said to put'em on the sand anywhere near the Shield Wall.” He dipped the craft toward the dunes in a long, falling stoop, brought it up stiffly over the desert surface.
   Jessica saw Paul begin taking the rhythmic breaths of the calming exercise. He closed his eyes, opened them. Jessica stared, helpless to aid him. He hasn't mastered the Voice yet, she thought, if he fails . . .
   The 'thopter touched sand with a soft lurch, and Jessica, looking north back across the Shield Wall, saw a shadow of wings settle out of sight up there.
   Someone's following us! she thought. Who? Then: The ones the Baron set to watch this pair. And there'll be watchers for the watchers, too.
   Czigo shut off his wing rotors. Silence flooded in upon them.
   Jessica turned her head. She could see out the window beyond Scarface a dim glow of light from a rising moon, a frosted rim of rock rising from the desert. Sandblast ridges streaked its sides.
   Paul cleared his throat.
   The pilot said: “Now, Kinet?”
   “I dunno, Czigo.”
   Czigo turned, said: “Ah-h-h, look.” He reached out for Jessica's skirt.
   “Remove her gag,” Paul commanded.
   Jessica felt the words rolling in the air. The tone, the timbre excellent–imperative, very sharp. A slightly lower pitch would have been better, but it could still fall within this man's spectrum.
   Czigo shifted his hand up to the band around Jessica's mouth, slipped the knot on the gag.
   “Stop that!” Kinet ordered.
   “Ah, shut your trap,” Czigo said. “Her hands're tied.” He freed the knot and the binding dropped. His eyes glittered as he studied Jessica.
   Kinet put a hand on the pilot's arm. "Look, Czigo, no need to . . . "
   Jessica twisted her neck, spat out the gag. She pitched her voice in low, intimate tones. “Gentlemen! No need to fight over me.” At the same time, she writhed sinuously for Kinet's benefit.
   She saw them grow tense, knowing that in this instant they were convinced of the need to fight over her. Their disagreement required no other reason. In their minds, they were fighting over her.
   She held her face high in the instrument glow to be sure Kinet would read her lips, said: “You mustn't disagree.” They drew farther apart, glanced warily at each other. “Is any woman worth fighting over?” she asked.
   By uttering the words, by being there, she made herself infinitely worth their fighting.
   Paul clamped his lips tightly closed, forced himself to be silent. There had been the one chance for him to succeed with the Voice. Now–everything depended on his mother whose experience went so far beyond his own.
   "Yeah," Scarface said. "No need to fight over . . . "
   His hand flashed toward the pilot's neck. The blow was met by a splash of metal that caught the arm and in the same motion slammed into Kinet's chest.
   Scarface groaned, sagged backward against his door.
   “Thought I was some dummy didn't know that trick,” Czigo said. He brought back his hand, revealing the knife. It glittered in reflected moonlight.
   “Now for the cub,” he said and leaned toward Paul.
   “No need for that,” Jessica murmured.
   Czigo hesitated.
   "Wouldn't you rather have me cooperative?" Jessica asked. "Give the boy a chance." Her lip curled in a sneer. "Little enough chance he'd have out there in that sand. Give him that and . . . " She smiled. "You could find yourself well rewarded."
   Czigo glanced left, right, returned his attention to Jessica. “I've heard me what can happen to a man in this desert,” he said. “Boy might find the knife a kindness.”
   “Is it so much I ask?” Jessica pleaded.
   “You're trying to trick me,” Czigo muttered.
   “I don't want to see my son die,” Jessica said. “Is that a trick?”
   Czigo moved back, elbowed the door latch. He grabbed Paul, dragged him across the seat, pushed him half out the door and held the knife posed. “What'll y' do, cub, if I cut y'r bonds?”
   “He'll leave here immediately and head for those rocks,” Jessica said.
   “Is that what y'll do, cub?” Czigo asked.
   Paul's voice was properly surly. “Yes.”
   The knife moved down, slashed the bindings of his legs. Paul felt the hand on his back to hurl him down onto the sand, feigned a lurch against the doorframe for purchase, turned as though to catch himself, lashed out with his right foot.
   The toe was aimed with a precision that did credit to his long years of training, as though all of that training focused on this instant. Almost every muscle of his body cooperated in the placement of it. The tip struck the soft part of Czigo's abdomen just below the sternum, slammed upward with terrible force over the liver and through the diaphragm to crush the right ventricle of the man's heart.
   With one gurgling scream, the guard jerked backward across the seats. Paul, unable to use his hands, continued his tumble onto the sand, landing with a roll that took up the force and brought him back to his feet in one motion. He dove back into the cabin, found the knife and held it in his teeth while his mother sawed her bonds. She took the blade and freed his hands.
   “I could've handled him,” she said. “He'd have had to cut my bindings. That was a foolish risk.”
   “I saw the opening and used it,” he said.
   She heard the harsh control in his voice, said: “Yueh's house sign is scrawled on the ceiling of this cabin.”
   He looked up, saw the curling symbol.
   “Get out and let us study this craft,” she said. “There's a bundle under the pilot's seat. I felt it when we got in.”
   “Bomb?”
   “Doubt it. There's something peculiar here.”
   Paul leaped out to the sand and Jessica followed. She turned, reached under the seat for the strange bundle, seeing Czigo's feet close to her face, feeling dampness on the bundle as she removed it, realizing the dampness was the pilot's blood.
   Waste of moisture, she thought, knowing that this was Arrakeen thinking.
   Paul stared around them, saw the rock scarp lifting out of the desert like a beach rising from the sea, wind-carved palisades beyond. He turned back as his mother lifted the bundle from the 'thopter, saw her stare across the dunes toward the Shield Wall. He looked to see what drew her attention, saw another 'thopter swooping toward them, realized they'd not have time to clear the bodies out of this 'thopter and escape.
   “Run, Paul!” Jessica shouted. “It's Harkonnens!”

= = = = = =

   Arrakis teaches the attitude of the knife–chopping off what's incomplete and saying: “Now, it's complete because it's ended here.”
   –from “Collected Sayings of, Muad'Dib” by the Princess Irulan

   A man in Harkonnen uniform skidded to a stop at the end of the hall, stared in at Yueh, taking in at a single glance Mapes' body, the sprawled form of the Duke, Yueh standing there. The man held a lasgun in his right hand. There was a casual air of brutality about him, a sense of toughness and poise that sent a shiver through Yueh.
   Sardaukar, Yueh thought. A Bashar by the look of him. Probably one of the Emperor's own sent here to keep an eye on things. No matter what the uniform, there's no disguising them.
   “You're Yueh,” the man said. He looked speculatively at the Suk School ring on the Doctor's hair, stared once at the diamond tattoo and then met Yueh's eyes.
   “I am Yueh,” the Doctor said.
   “You can relax, Yueh,” the man said. “When you dropped the house shields we came right in. Everything's under control here. Is this the Duke?”
   “This is the Duke.”
   “Dead?”
   “Merely unconscious. I suggest you tie him.”
   “Did you do for these others?” He glanced back down the hall where Mapes' body lay.
   “More's the pity,” Yueh muttered.
   “Pity!” the Sardaukar sneered. He advanced, looked down at Leto. “So that's the great Red Duke.”
   If I had doubts about what this man is, that would end them, Yueh thought. Only the Emperor calls the Atreides the Red Duke.
   The Sardaukar reached down, cut the red hawk insignia from Leto's uniform. “Little souvenir,” he said. “Where's the ducal signet ring?”
   “He doesn't have it on him,” Yueh said.
   “I can see that!” the Sardaukar snapped.
   Yueh stiffened, swallowed, if they press me, bring in a Truthsayer, they'll find out about the ring, about the 'thopter I prepared–all will fail.
   “Sometimes the Duke sent the ring with a messenger as surety that an order came directly from him,” Yueh said.
   “Must be damned trusted messengers,” the Sardaukar muttered.
   “Aren't you going to tie him?” Yueh ventured.
   “How long'll he be unconscious?”
   “Two hours or so. I wasn't as precise with his dosage as I was for the woman and boy.”
   The Sardaukar spurned the Duke with his toe. “This was nothing to fear even when awake. When will the woman and boy awaken?”
   “About ten minutes.”
   “So soon?”
   “I was told the Baron would arrive immediately behind his men.”
   “So he will. You'll wait outside, Yueh.” He shot a hard glance at Yueh. “Now!”
   Yueh glanced at Leto. "What about . . . "
   “He'll be delivered to the Baron all properly trussed like a roast for the oven.” Again, the Sardaukar looked at the diamond tattoo on Yueh's forehead. “You're known; you'll be safe enough in the halls. We've no more time for chit-chat, traitor. I hear the others coming.”
   Traitor, Yueh thought. He lowered his gaze, pressed past the Sardaukar, knowing this as a foretaste of how history would remember him: Yueh the traitor.
   He passed more bodies on his way to the front entrance and glanced at them, fearful that one might be Paul or Jessica. All were house troopers or wore Harkonnen uniform.
   Harkonnen guards came alert, staring at him as he emerged from the front entrance into flame-lighted night. The palms along the road had been fired to illuminate the house. Black smoke from the flammables used to ignite the trees poured upward through orange flames.
   “It's the traitor,” someone said.
   “The Baron will want to see you soon,” another said.
   I must get to the 'thopter, Yueh thought. I must put the ducal signet where Paul will find it. And fear struck him: If Idaho suspects me or grows impatient–if he doesn't wait and go exactly where I told him–Jessica and Paul will not be saved from the carnage. I'll be denied even the smallest relief from my act.
   The Harkonnen guard released his arm, said “Wait over there out of the way.”
   Abruptly, Yueh saw himself as cast away in this place of destruction, spared nothing, given not the smallest pity. Idaho must not fail!
   Another guard bumped into him, barked: “Stay out of the way, you!”
   Even when they've profited by me they despise me. Yueh thought. He straightened himself as he was pushed aside, regained some of his dignity.
   “Wait for the Baron!” a guard officer snarled.
   Yueh nodded, walked with controlled casualness along the front of the house, turned the corner into shadows out of sight of the burning palms. Quickly, every step betraying his anxiety, Yueh made for the rear yard beneath the conservatory where the 'thopter waited–the craft they had placed there to carry away Paul and his mother.
   A guard stood at the open rear door of the house, his attention focused on the lighted hall and men banging through there, searching from room to room.
   How confident they were!
   Yueh hugged the shadows, worked his way around the 'thopter, eased open the door on the side away from the guard. He felt under the front seats for the Fremkit he had hidden there, lifted a flap and slipped in the ducal signet. He felt the crinkling of the spice paper there, the note he had written, pressed the ring into the paper. He removed his hand, resealed the pack.
   Softly, Yueh closed the 'thopter door, worked his way back to the corner of the house and around toward the flaming trees.
   Now, it is done, he thought.
   Once more, he emerged into the light of the blazing palms. He pulled his cloak around him, stared at the flames. Soon I will know. Soon I will see the Baron and I will know. And the Baron–he will encounter a small tooth.

= = = = = =

   There is a legend that the instant the Duke Leto Atreides died a meteor streaked across the skies above his ancestral palace on Caladan.
   –the Princess Irulan: “Introduction to A Child's History of Muad'Dib”

   The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen stood at a viewport of the grounded lighter he was using as a command post. Out the port he saw the flame-lighted night of Arrakeen. His attention focused on the distant Shield Wall where his secret weapon was doing its work.
   Explosive artillery.
   The guns nibbled at the caves where the Duke's fighting men had retreated for a last-ditch stand. Slowly measured bites of orange glare, showers of rock and dust in the brief illumination–and the Duke's men were being sealed off to die by starvation, caught like animals in their burrows.
   The Baron could feel the distant chomping–a drumbeat carried to him through the ship's metal: broomp . . . broomp. Then: BROOMP-broomp!
   Who would think of reviving artillery in this day of shields? The thought was a chuckle in his mind. But it was predictable the Duke's men would run for those caves. And the Emperor will appreciate my cleverness in preserving the lives of our mutual force.
   He adjusted one of the little suspensors that guarded his fat body against the pull of gravity. A smile creased his mouth, pulled at the lines of his jowls.
   A pity to waste such fighting men as the Duke's, he thought. He smiled more broadly, laughing at himself. Pity should be cruel! He nodded. Failure was, by definition, expendable. The whole universe sat there, open to the man who could make the right decisions. The uncertain rabbits had to be exposed, made to run for their burrows. Else how could you control them and breed them? He pictured his fighting men as bees routing the rabbits. And he thought: The day hums sweetly when you have enough bees working for you.
   A door opened behind him. The Baron studied the reflection in the night-blackened viewport before turning.
   Piter de Vries advanced into the chamber followed by Umman Kudu, the captain of the Baron's personal guard. There was a motion of men just outside the door, the mutton faces of his guard, their expressions carefully sheep-like in his presence.
   The Baron turned.
   Piter touched finger to forelock in his mocking salute. “Good news, m'Lord. The Sardaukar have brought in the Duke.”
   “Of course they have,” the Baron rumbled.
   He studied the somber mask of villainy on Piter's effeminate face. And the eyes: those shaded slits of bluest blue-in-blue.
   Soon I mast remove him, the Baron thought. He has almost outlasted his usefulness, almost reached the point of positive danger to my person. First, though, he must make the people of Arrakis hate him. Then–they will welcome my darling Feyd-Rautha as a savior.
   The Baron shifted his attention to the guard captain–Umman Kudu: scissors-line of jaw muscles, chin like a boot toe–a man to be trusted because the captain's vices were known.
   “First, where is the traitor who gave me the Duke?” the Baron asked. “I must give the traitor his reward.”
   Piter turned on one toe, motioned to the guard outside.
   A bit of black movement there and Yueh walked through. His motions were stiff and stringy. The mustache drooped beside his purple lips. Only the old eyes seemed alive. Yueh came to a stop three paces into the room, obeying a motion from Piter, and stood there staring across the open space at the Baron.
   “Ah-h-h, Dr. Yueh.”
   “M'Lord Harkonnen.”
   “You've given us the Duke, I hear.”
   “My half of the bargain, m'Lord.”
   The Baron looked at Piter.
   Piter nodded.
   The Baron looked back at Yueh. “The letter of the bargain, eh? And I . . .” He spat the words out: “What was I to do in return?”
   “You remember quite well, m'Lord Harkonnen.”
   And Yueh allowed himself to think now, hearing the loud silence of clocks in his mind. He had seen the subtle betrayals in the Baron's manner. Wanna was indeed dead–gone far beyond their reach. Otherwise, there'd still be a hold on the weak doctor. The Baron's manner showed there was no hold; it was ended.
   “Do I?” the Baron asked.
   “You promised to deliver my Wanna from her agony.”
   The Baron nodded. “Oh, yes. Now, I remember. So I did. That was my promise. That was how we bent the Imperial Conditioning. You couldn't endure seeing your Bene Gesserit witch grovel in Piter's pain amplifiers. Well, the Baron Vladimir Harkonnen always keeps his promises. I told you I'd free her from the agony and permit you to join her. So be it.” He waved a hand at Piter.
   Piter's blue eyes took a glazed look. His movement was catlike in its sudden fluidity. The knife in his hand glistened like a claw as it flashed into Yueh's back.
   The old man stiffened, never taking his attention from the Baron.
   “So join her!” the Baron spat.
   Yueh stood, swaying, His lips moved with careful precision, and his voice came in oddly measured cadence: “You . . . think . . . you . . . de . . . feated . . . me. You . . . think . . . I . . . did . . . not . . . know . . . what . . . I . . . bought . . . for . . . my . . . Wanna.”
   He toppled. No bending or softening. It was like a tree falling.
   “So join her,” the Baron repeated. But his words were like a weak echo.
   Yueh had filled him with a sense of foreboding. He whipped his attention to Piter, watched the man wipe the blade on a scrap of cloth, watched the creamy look of satisfaction in the blue eyes.
   So that's how he kills by his own hand, the Baron thought. It's well to know.
   “He did give us the Duke?” the Baron asked.
   “Of a certainty, my Lord,” Piter said.
   “Then get him in here!”
   Piter glanced at the guard captain, who whirled to obey.
   The Baron looked down at Yueh. From the way the man had fallen, you could suspect oak in him instead of bones.
   “I never could bring myself to trust a traitor,” the Baron said. “Not even a traitor I created.”
   He glanced at the night-shrouded viewport. That black bag of stillness out there was his, the Baron knew. There was no more crump of artillery against the Shield Wall caves; the burrow traps were sealed off. Quite suddenly, the Baron's mind could conceive of nothing more beautiful than that utter emptiness of black. Unless it were white on the black. Plated white on the black. Porcelain white.
   But there was still the feeling of doubt.
   What had the old fool of a doctor meant? Of course, he'd probably known what would happen to him in the end. But that bit about thinking he'd been defeated: “You think you defeated me.”
   What had he meant?
   The Duke Leto Atreides came through the door. His arms were bound in chains, the eagle face streaked with dirt. His uniform was torn where someone had ripped off his insignia. There were tatters at his waist where the shield belt had been removed without first freeing the uniform ties. The Duke's eyes held a glazed, insane look.
   “Wel-l-l-l,” the Baron said. He hesitated, drawing in a deep breath. He knew he had spoken too loudly. This moment, long envisioned, had lost some of its savor.
   Damn that cursed doctor through all eternity!
   “I believe the good Duke is drugged,” Piter said. “That's how Yueh caught him for us.” Piter turned to the Duke. “Aren't you drugged, my dear Duke?”
   The voice was far away. Leto could feel the chains, the ache of muscles, his cracked lips, his burning cheeks, the dry taste of thirst whispering its grit in his mouth. But sounds were dull, hidden by a cottony blanket. And he saw only dim shapes through the blanket.
   “What of the woman and the boy, Piter?” the Baron asked. “Any word yet?”
   Piter's tongue darted over his lips.
   “You've heard something!” the Baron snapped. “What?”
   Piter glanced at the guard captain, back to the Baron. “The men who were sent to do the job, m'Lord–they've . . . ah . . . been . . . ah . . . found.”
   “Well, they report everything satisfactory?”
   “They're dead, m'Lord.”
   “Of course they are! What I want to know is–”
   “They were dead when found, m'Lord.”
   The Baron's face went livid. “And the woman and boy?”
   “No sign, m'Lord, but there was a worm. It came while the scene was being investigated. Perhaps it's as we wished–an accident. Possibly–”
   “We do not deal in possibilities, Piter. What of the missing 'thopter? Does that suggest anything to my Mentat?”
   “One of the Duke's men obviously escaped in it, m'Lord. Killed our pilot and escaped.”
   “Which of the Duke's men?”
   “It was a clean, silent killing, m'Lord. Hawat, perhaps, or that Halleck one. Possibly Idaho. Or any top lieutenant.”
   “Possibilities,” the Baron muttered. He glanced at the swaying, drugged figure of the Duke.
   “The situation is in hand, m'Lord,” Piter said.
   “No, it isn't! Where is that stupid planetologist? Where is this man Kynes?”
   “We've word where to find him and he's been sent for, m'Lord.”
   “I don't like the way the Emperor's servant is helping us,” the Baron muttered.
   They were words through a cottony blanket, but some of them burned in Leto's mind. Woman and boy–no sign. Paul and Jessica had escaped. And the fate of Hawat, Halleck, and Idaho remained an unknown. There was still hope.
   “Where is the ducal signet ring?” the Baron demanded. “His finger is bare.”
   “The Sardaukar say it was not on him when he was taken, my Lord,” the guard captain said.
   “You killed the doctor too soon,” the Baron said. “That was a mistake. You should've warned me, Piter. You moved too precipitately for the good of our enterprise.” He scowled. “Possibilities!”
   The thought hung like a sine wave in Leto's mind: Paul and Jessica have escaped! And there was something else in his memory: a bargain. He could almost remember it.
   The tooth!
   He remembered part of it now: a pill of poison gas shaped into a false tooth.
   Someone had told him to remember the tooth. The tooth was in his mouth. He could feel its shape with his tongue. All he had to do was bite sharply on it.
   Not yet!
   The someone had told him to wait until he was near the Baron. Who had told him? He couldn't remember.
   “How long will he remain drugged like this?” the Baron asked.
   “Perhaps another hour, m'Lord.”
   “Perhaps,” the Baron muttered. Again, he turned to the night-blackened window. “I am hungry.”
   That's the Baron, that fuzzy gray shape there, Leto thought. The shape danced back and forth, swaying with the movement of the room. And the room expanded and contracted. It grew brighter and darker. It folded into blackness and faded.
   Time became a sequence of layers for the Duke. He drifted up through them. I must wait.
   There was a table. Leto saw the table quite clearly. And a gross, fat man on the other side of the table, the remains of a meal in front of him. Leto felt himself sitting in a chair across from the fat man, felt the chains, the straps that held his tingling body in the chair. He was aware there had been a passage of time, but its length escaped him.
   “I believe he's coming around. Baron.”
   A silky voice, that one. That was Piter.
   “So I see, Piter.”
   A rumbling basso: the Baron.
   Leto sensed increasing definition in his surroundings. The chair beneath him took on firmness, the bindings were sharper.
   And he saw the Baron clearly now. Leto watched the movements of the man's hands: compulsive touchings–the edge of a plate, the handle of a spoon, a finger tracing the fold of a jowl.
   Leto watched the moving hand, fascinated by it.
   “You can hear me, Duke Leto,” the Baron said. “I know you can hear me. We want to know from you where to find your concubine and the child you sired on her.”
   No sign escaped Leto, but the words were a wash of calmness through him. It's true, then: they don't have Paul and Jessica.
   “This is not a child's game we play,” the Baron rumbled. “You must know that.” He leaned toward Leto, studying the face. It pained the Baron that this could not be handled privately, just between the two of them. To have others see royalty in such straits–it set a bad precedent.
   Leto could feel strength returning. And now, the memory of the false tooth stood out in his mind like a steeple in a flat landscape. The nerve-shaped capsule within that tooth–the poison gas–he remembered who had put the deadly weapon in his mouth.
   Yueh.
   Drug-fogged memory of seeing a limp corpse dragged past him in this room hung like a vapor in Leto's mind. He knew it had been Yueh.
   “Do you hear that noise, Duke Leto?” the Baron asked.
   Leto grew conscious of a frog sound, the burred mewling of someone's agony.
   "We caught one of your men disguised as a Fremen, " the Baron said. "We penetrated the disguise quite easily: the eyes, you know. He insists he was sent among the Fremen to spy on them. I've lived for a time on this planet, cher cousin. One does not spy on those ragged scum of the desert. Tell me, did you buy their help? Did you send your woman and son to them?"
   Leto felt fear tighten his chest. If Yueh sent them to the desert fold . . . the search won't stop until they 're found.
   “Come, come,” the Baron said. “We don't have much time and pain is quick. Please don't bring it to this, my dear Duke.” The Baron looked up at Piter who stood at Leto's shoulder. “Piter doesn't have all his tools here, but I'm sure he could improvise.”
   “Improvisation is sometimes the best, Baron.”
   That silky, insinuating voice! Leto heard it at his ear.
   “You had an emergency plan,” the Baron said. “Where have your woman and the boy been sent?” He looked at Leto's hand. “Your ring is missing. Does the boy have it?”
   The Baron looked up, stared into Leto's eyes.
   “You don't answer,” he said. “Will you force me to do a thing I do not want to do? Piter will use simple, direct methods. I agree they're sometimes the best, but it's not good that you should be subjected to such things.”
   “Hot tallow on the back, perhaps, or on the eyelids,” Piter said. “Perhaps on other portions of the body. It's especially effective when the subject doesn't know where the tallow will fall next. It's a good method and there's a sort of beauty in the pattern of pus-white blisters on naked skin, eh, Baron?”
   “Exquisite,” the Baron said, and his voice sounded sour.
   Those touching fingers! Leto watched the fat hands, the glittering jewels on baby-fat hands–their compulsive wandering.
   The sounds of agony coming through the door behind him gnawed at the Duke's nerves. Who is it they caught? he wondered. Could it have been Idaho?
   “Believe me, cher cousin,” the Baron said. “I do not want it to come to this.”
   “You think of nerve couriers racing to summon help that cannot come,” Piter said. “There's an artistry in this, you know.”
   “You're a superb artist,” the Baron growled. “Now, have the decency to be silent.”
   Leto suddenly recalled a thing Gurney Halleck had said once, seeing a picture of the Baron: " 'And I stood upon the sand of the sea and saw a beast rise up out of the sea . . . and upon his heads the name of blasphemy.' "
   “We waste time, Baron,” Piter said.
   “Perhaps.”
   The Baron nodded. “You know, my dear Leto, you'll tell us in the end where they are. There's a level of pain that'll buy you.”
   He's most likely correct, Leto thought. Were if not for the tooth . . . and the fact that I truly don't know where they are.
   The Baron picked up a sliver of meat, pressed the morsel into his mouth, chewed slowly, swallowed. We must try a new tack, he thought.
   “Observe this prize person who denies he's for hire,” the Baron said. “Observe him, Piter.”
   And the Baron thought: Yes! See him there, this man who believes he cannot be bought. See him detained there by a million shares of himself sold in dribbles every second of his life! If you took him up now and shook him, he'd rattle inside. Emptied! Sold out! What difference how he dies now?
   The frog sounds in the background stopped.
   The Baron saw Umman Kudu, the guard captain, appear in the doorway across the room, shake his head. The captive hadn't produced the needed information. Another failure. Time to quit stalling with this fool Duke, this stupid soft fool who didn't realize how much hell there was so near him–only a nerve's thickness away.
   This thought calmed the Baron, overcoming his reluctance to have a royal person subject to pain. He saw himself suddenly as a surgeon exercising endless supple scissor dissections–cutting away the masks from fools, exposing the hell beneath.
   Rabbits, all of them!
   And how they cowered when they saw the carnivore!
   Leto stared across the table, wondering why he waited. The tooth would end it all quickly. Still–it had been good, much of this life. He found himself remembering an antenna kite updangling in the shell-blue sky of Caladan, and Paul laughing with joy at the sight of it. And he remembered sunrise here on Arrakis–colored strata of the Shield Wall mellowed by dust haze.
   “Too bad,” the Baron muttered. He pushed himself back from the table, stood up lightly in his suspensors and hesitated, seeing a change come over the Duke. He saw the man draw in a deep breath, the jawline stiffen, the ripple of a muscle there as the Duke clamped his mouth shut.
   How he fears me! the Baron thought.
   Shocked by fear that the Baron might escape him, Leto bit sharply on the capsule tooth, felt it break. He opened his mouth, expelled the biting vapor he could taste as it formed on his tongue. The Baron grew smaller, a figure seen in a tightening tunnel. Leto heard a gasp beside his ear–the silky-voiced one: Piter.
   It got him, too!
   “Piter! What's wrong?”
   The rumbling voice was far away.
   Leto sensed memories rolling in his mind–the old toothless mutterings of hags. The room, the table, the Baron, a pair of terrified eyes–blue within blue, the eyes–all compressed around him in ruined symmetry.
   There was a man with a boot-toe chin, a toy man falling. The toy man had a broken nose slanted to the left: an offbeat metronome caught forever at the start of an upward stroke. Leto heard the crash of crockery–so distant–a roaring in his ears. His mind was a bin without end, catching everything. Everything that had ever been: every shout, every whisper, every . . . silence.
   One thought remained to him. Leto saw it in formless light on rays of black: The day the flesh shapes and the flesh the day shapes. The thought struck him with a sense of fullness he knew he could never explain.
   Silence.
   The Baron stood with his back against his private door, his own bolt hole behind the table. He had slammed it on a room full of dead men. His senses took in guards swarming around him. Did I breathe it? he asked himself. Whatever it was in there, did it get me, too?
   Sounds returned to him . . . and reason. He heard someone shouting orders–gas masks . . . keep a door closed . . . get blowers going.
   The others fell quickly, he thought. I'm still standing. I'm still breathing. Merciless hell! That was close!
   He could analyze it now. His shield had been activated, set low but still enough to slow molecular interchange across the field barrier. And he had been pushing himself away from the table . . . that and Piter's shocked gasp which had brought the guard captain darting forward into his own doom.
   Chance and the warning in a dying man's gasp–these had saved him.
   The Baron felt no gratitude to Piter. The fool had got himself killed. And that stupid guard captain! He'd said he scoped everyone before bringing them into the Baron's presence! How had it been possible for the Duke . . . ? No warning. Not even from the poison snooper over the table–until it was too late. How?
   Well, no matter now, the Baron thought, his mind firming. The next guard captain will begin by finding answers to these questions.
   He grew aware of more activity down the hall–around the corner at the other door to that room of death. The Baron pushed himself away from his own door, studied the lackeys around him. They stood there staring, silent, waiting for the Baron's reaction.
   Would the Baron be angry?
   And the Baron realized only a few seconds had passed since his flight from that terrible room.
   Some of the guards had weapons leveled at the door. Some were directing their ferocity toward the empty hall that stretched away toward the noises around the corner to their right.
   A man came striding around that corner, gas mask dangling by its straps at his neck, his eyes intent on the overhead poison snoopers that lined this corridor. He was yellow-haired, flat of face with green eyes. Crisp lines radiated from his thick-lipped mouth. He looked like some water creature misplaced among those who walked the land.
   The Baron stared at the approaching man, recalling the name: Nefud. Iakin Nefud. Guard corporal. Nefud was addicted to semuta, the drug-music combination that played itself in the deepest consciousness. A useful item of information, that.
   The man stopped in front of the Baron, saluted. “Corridor's clear, m'Lord. I was outside watching and saw that it must be poison gas. Ventilators in your room were pulling air in from these corridors.” He glanced up at the snooper over the Baron's head. “None of the stuff escaped. We have the room cleaned out now. What are your orders?”
   The Baron recognized the man's voice–the one who'd been shouting orders. Efficient, this corporal, he thought.
   “They're all dead in there?” the Baron asked.
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   Well, we must adjust, the Baron thought.
   “First,” he said, “let me congratulate you, Nefud. You're the new captain of my guard. And I hope you'll take to heart the lesson to be learned from the fate of your predecessor.”
   The Baron watched the awareness grow in his newly promoted guardsman. Nefud knew he'd never again be without his semuta.
   Nefud nodded. “My Lord knows I'll devote myself entirely to his safety.”
   “Yes. Well, to business. I suspect the Duke had something in his mouth. You will find out what that something was, how it was used, who helped him put it there. You'll take every precaution–”
   He broke off, his chain of thought shattered by a disturbance in the corridor behind him–guards at the door to the lift from the lower levels of the frigate trying to hold back a tall colonel bashar who had just emerged from the lift.
   The Baron couldn't place the colonel bashar's face: thin with mouth like a slash in leather, twin ink spots for eyes.
   “Get your hands off me, you pack of carrion-eaters!” the man roared, and he dashed the guards aside.
   Ah-h-h, one of the Sardaukar, the Baron thought.
   The colonel bashar came striding toward the Baron, whose eyes went to slits of apprehension. The Sardaukar officers filled him with unease. They all seemed to look like relatives of the Duke . . . the late Duke. And their manners with the Baron!
   The colonel bashar planted himself half a pace in front of the Baron, hands on hips. The guard hovered behind him in twitching uncertainty.
   The Baron noted the absence of salute, the disdain in the Sardaukar's manner, and his unease grew. There was only the one legion of them locally–ten brigades–reinforcing the Harkonnen legions, but the Baron did not fool himself. That one legion was perfectly capable of turning on the Harkonnens and overcoming them.
   “Tell your men they are not to prevent me from seeing you, Baron,” the Sardaukar growled. “My men brought you the Atreides Duke before I could discuss his fate with you. We will discuss it now.”
   I must not lose face before my men, the Baron thought.
   “So?” It was a coldly controlled word, and the Baron felt proud of it.
   “My Emperor has charged me to make certain his royal cousin dies cleanly without agony,” the colonel bashar said.
   “Such were the Imperial orders to me,” the Baron lied. “Did you think I'd disobey?”
   “I'm to report to my Emperor what I see with my own eyes,” the Sardaukar said.
   “The Duke's already dead,” the Baron snapped, and he waved a hand to dismiss the fellow.
   The colonel bashar remained planted facing the Baron. Not by flicker of eye or muscle did he acknowledge he had been dismissed. “How?” he growled.
   Really! the Baron thought. This is too much.
   “By his own hand, if you must know,” the Baron said. “He took poison.”
   “I will see the body now,” the colonel Bashar said.
   The Baron raised his gaze to the ceiling in feigned exasperation while his thoughts raced. Damnation! This sharp-eyed Sardaukar will see the room before a thing's been changed!
   “Now,” the Sardaukar growled. “I'll see it with my own eyes.”
   There was no preventing it, the Baron realized. The Sardaukar would see all. He'd know the Duke had killed Harkonnen men . . . that the Baron most likely had escaped by a narrow margin. There was the evidence of the dinner remnants on the table, and the dead Duke across from it with destruction around him.
   No preventing it at all.
   “I'll not be put off,” the colonel bashar snarled.
   “You're not being put off,” the Baron said, and he stared into the Sardaukar's obsidian eyes. “I hide nothing from my Emperor.” He nodded to Nefud. “The colonel bashar is to see everything, at once. Take him in by the door where you stood, Nefud.”
   “This way, sir,” Nefud said.
   Slowly, insolently, the Sardaukar moved around the Baron, shouldered a way through the guardsmen.
   Insufferable, the Baron thought. Now, the Emperor will know how I slipped up. He'll recognize it as a sign of weakness.
   And it was agonizing to realize that the Emperor and his Sardaukar were alike in their disdain for weakness. The Baron chewed at his lower lip, consoling himself that the Emperor, at least, had not learned of the Atreides raid on Giedi Prime, the destruction of the Harkonnen spice stores there.
   Damn that slippery Duke!
   The Baron watched the retreating backs–the arrogant Sardaukar and the stocky, efficient Nefud.
   We must adjust, the Baron thought. I'll have to put Rabban over this damnable planet once more. Without restraint. I must spend my own Harkonnen blood to put Arrakis into a proper condition for accepting Feyd-Rautha. Damn that Piter! He would get himself killed before I was through with him.
   The Baron sighed.
   And I must send at once to Tleielax for a new Mentat. They undoubtedly have the new one ready for me by now.
   One of the guardsmen beside him coughed.
   The Baron turned toward the man. “I am hungry.”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   “And I wish to be diverted while you're clearing out that room and studying its secrets for me,” the Baron rumbled.
   The guardsman lowered his eyes. “What diversion does m'Lord wish?”
   “I'll be in my sleeping chambers,” the Baron said. “Bring me that young fellow we bought on Gamont, the one with the lovely eyes. Drug him well. I don't feel like wrestling.”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   The Baron turned away, began moving with his bouncing, suspensor-buoyed pace toward his chambers. Yes, he thought. The one with the lovely eyes, the one who looks so much like the young Paul Atreides.

= = = = = =

   O Seas of Caladan,
   O people of Duke Leto–
   Citadel of Leto fallen,
   Fallen forever . . .
   –from “Songs of Muad'Dib” by the Princess Irulan

   Paul felt that all his past, every experience before this night, had become sand curling in an hourglass. He sat near his mother hugging his knees within a small fabric and plastic hutment–a stilltent–that had come, like the Fremen clothing they now wore, from the pack left in the 'thopter.
   There was no doubt in Paul's mind who had put the Fremkit there, who had directed the course of the 'thopter carrying them captive.
   Yueh.
   The traitor doctor had sent them directly into the hands of Duncan Idaho.
   Paul stared out the transparent end of the stilltent at the moonshadowed rocks that ringed this place where Idaho had hidden them.
   Hiding like a child when I'm now the Duke, Paul thought. He felt the thought gall him, but could not deny the wisdom in what they did.
   Something had happened to his awareness this night–he saw with sharpened clarity every circumstance and occurrence around him. He felt unable to stop the inflow of data or the cold precision with which each new item was added to his knowledge and the computation was centered in his awareness. It was Mentat power and more.
   Paul thought back to the moment of impotent rage as the strange 'thopter dived out of the night onto them, stooping like a giant hawk above the desert with wind screaming through its wings. The thing in Paul's mind had happened then. The 'thopter had skidded and slewed across a sand ridge toward the running figures–his mother and himself. Paul remembered how the smell of burned sulfur from abrasion of 'thopter skids against sand had drifted across them.
   His mother, he knew, had turned, expected to meet a lasgun in the hands of Harkonnen mercenaries, and had recognized Duncan Idaho leaning out the 'thopter's open door shouting: “Hurry! There's wormsign south of you!”
   But Paul had known as he turned who piloted the 'thopter. An accumulation of minutiae in the way it was flown, the dash of the landing–clues so small even his mother hadn't detected them–had told Paul precisely who sat at those controls.
   Across the stilltent from Paul, Jessica stirred, said: “There can be only one explanation. The Harkonnens held Yueh's wife. He hated the Harkonnens! I cannot be wrong about that. You read his note. But why has he saved us from the carnage?”
   She is only now seeing it and that poorly, Paul thought. The thought was a shock. He had known this fact as a by-the-way thing while reading the note that had accompanied the ducal signet in the pack.
   “Do not try to forgive me,” Yueh had written. “I do not want your forgiveness. I already have enough burdens. What I have done was done without malice or hope of another's understanding. It is my own tahaddi al-burhan, my ultimate test. I give you the Atreides ducal signet as token that I write truly. By the time you read this, Duke Leto will be dead. Take consolation from my assurance that he did not die alone, that one we hate above all others died with him.”
   It had not been addressed or signed, but there 'd been no mistaking the familiar scrawl–Yueh's.
   Remembering the letter, Paul re-experienced the distress of that moment–a thing sharp and strange that seemed to happen outside his new mentat alertness. He had read that his father was dead, known the truth of the words, but had felt them as no more than another datum to be entered in his mind and used.
   I loved my father, Paul thought, and knew this for truth. I should mourn him. I should feel something.
   But he felt nothing except: Here's an important fact.
   It was one with all the other facts.
   All the while his mind was adding sense impressions, extrapolating, computing.
   Halleck's words came back to Paul: "Mood's a thing for cattle or for making love. You fight when the necessity arises, no matter your mood. "
   Perhaps that's it, Paul thought. I'll mourn my father later . . . when there's time.
   But he felt no letup in the cold precision of his being. He sensed that his new awareness was only a beginning, that it was growing. The sense of terrible purpose he'd first experienced in his ordeal with the Reverend Mother Gaius Helen Mohiam pervaded him. His right hand–the hand of remembered pain–tingled and throbbed.
   Is this what it is to be their Kwisatz Haderach? he wondered.
   "For a while, I thought Hawat had failed us again, "Jessica said. "I thought perhaps Yueh wasn't a Suk doctor."
   “He was everything we thought him . . . and more,” Paul said. And he thought: Why is she so slow seeing these things? He said, “If Idaho doesn't get through to Kynes, we'll be–”
   “He's not our only hope,” she said.
   “Such was not my suggestion,” he said.
   She heard the steel in his voice, the sense of command, and stared across the grey darkness of the stilltent at him. Paul was a silhouette against moon-frosted rocks seen through the tent's transparent end.
   “Others among your father's men will have escaped,” she said. “We must regather them, find–”
   “We will depend upon ourselves,” he said. “Our immediate concern is our family atomics. We must get them before the Harkonnens can search them out.”
   “Not likely they'll be found,” she said, “the way they were hidden.”
   “It must not be left to chance.”
   And she thought: Blackmail with the family atomics as a threat to the planet and its spice–that's what he has in mind. But all he can hope for then is escape into renegade anonymity.
   His mother's words had provoked another train of thought in Paul–a duke's concern for all the people they'd lost this night. People are the true strength of a Great House, Paul thought. And he remembered Hawat's words: “Parting with people is a sadness; a place is only a place.”
   “They're using Sardaukar,” Jessica said. “We must wait until the Sardaukar have been withdrawn.”
   “They think us caught between the desert and the Sardaukar,” Paul said. “They intend that there be no Atreides survivors–total extermination. Do not count on any of our people escaping.”
   “They cannot go on indefinitely risking exposure of the Emperor's part in this.”
   “Can't they?”
   “Some of our people are bound to escape.”
   “Are they?”
   Jessica turned away, frightened of the bitter strength in her son's voice, hearing the precise assessment of chances. She sensed that his mind had leaped ahead of her, that it now saw more in some respects than she did. She had helped train the intelligence which did this, but now she found herself fearful of it. Her thoughts turned, seeking toward the lost sanctuary of her Duke, and tears burned her eyes.
   This is the way it had to be, Leto, she thought. “A time of love and a time of grief.” She rested her hand on her abdomen, awareness focused on the embryo there. I have the Atreides daughter I was ordered to produce, but the Reverend Mother was wrong: a daughter wouldn't have saved my Leto. This child is only life reaching for the future in the midst of death. I conceived out of instinct and not out of obedience.
   “Try the communinet receiver again,” Paul said.
   The mind goes on working no matter how we try to hold it back, she thought.
   Jessica found the tiny receiver Idaho had left for them, flipped its switch. A green light glowed on the instrument's face. Tinny screeching came from its speaker. She reduced the volume, hunted across the bands. A voice speaking Atreides battle language came into the tent.
   " . . . back and regroup at the ridge. Fedor reports no survivors in Carthag and the Guild Bank has been sacked."
   Carthag! Jessica thought. That was a Harkonnen hotbed.
   "They're Sardaukar," the voice said. "Watch out for Sardaukar in Atreides uniforms. They're . . . "
   A roaring filled the speaker, then silence.
   “Try the other bands,” Paul said.
   “Do you realize what that means?” Jessica asked.
   “I expected it. They want the Guild to blame us for destruction of their bank. With the Guild against us, we're trapped on Arrakis. Try the other bands.”
   She weighed his words: I expected it. What had happened to him? Slowly, Jessica returned to the instrument. As she moved the bandslide, they caught glimpses of violence in the few voices calling out in Atreides battle language: " . . . fallback . . . " " . . . try to regroup at . . . " " . . . trapped in a cave at . . . ."
   And there was no mistaking the victorious exultation in the Harkonnen gibberish that poured from the other bands. Sharp commands, battle reports. There wasn't enough of it for Jessica to register and break the language, but the tone was obvious.
   Harkonnen victory.
   Paul shook the pack beside him, hearing the two literjons of water gurgle there. He took a deep breath, looked up through the transparent end of the tent at the rock escarpment outlined against the stars. His left hand felt the sphincter-seal of the tent's entrance. “It'll be dawn soon,” he said. “We can wait through the day for Idaho, but not through another night. In the desert, you must travel by night and rest in shade through the day.”
   Remembered lore insinuated itself into Jessica's mind: Without a stillsuit, a man sitting in shade on the desert needs five liters of water a day to maintain body weight. She felt the slick-soft skin of the stillsuit against her body, thinking how their lives depended on these garments.
   “If we leave here, Idaho can't find us,” she said.
   “There are ways to make any man talk,” he said. “If Idaho hasn't returned by dawn, we must consider the possibility he has been captured. How long do you think he could hold out?”
   The question required no answer, and she sat in silence.
   Paul lifted the seal on the pack, pulled out a tiny micromanual with glowtab and magnifier. Green and orange letters leaped up at him from the pages: "literjons, stilltent, energy caps, recaths, sandsnork, binoculars, stillsuit repkit, baradye pistol, sinkchart, filt-plugs, paracompass, maker hooks, thumpers, Fremkit, fire pillar . . . "
   So many things for survival on the desert.
   Presently, he put the manual aside on the tent floor.
   “Where can we possibly go?” Jessica asked.
   “My father spoke of desert power,” Paul said. “The Harkonnens cannot rule this planet without it. They've never ruled this planet, nor shall they. Not even with ten thousand legions of Sardaukar.”
   “Paul, you can't think that–”
   “We've all the evidence in our hands,” he said. “Right here in this tent–the tent itself, this pack and its contents, these stillsuits. We know the Guild wants a prohibitive price for weather satellites. We know that–”
   "What've weather satellites to do with it?" she asked. "They couldn't possibly . . . " She broke off.
   Paul sensed the hyperalertness of his mind reading her reactions, computing on minutiae. “You see it now,” he said. “Satellites watch the terrain below. There are things in the deep desert that will not bear frequent inspection.”
   “You're suggesting the Guild itself controls this planet?”
   She was so slow.
   “No!” he said. “The Fremen! They're paying the Guild for privacy, paying in a coin that's freely available to anyone with desert power–spice. This is more than a second-approximation answer; it's the straight-line computation. Depend on it.”
   “Paul.” Jessica said, “you're not a Mentat yet; you can't know for sure how–”
   “I'll never be a Mentat,” he said. “I'm something else . . . a freak.”
   “Paul! How can you say such–”
   “Leave me alone!”
   He turned away from her, looking out into the night. Why can't I mourn? he wondered. He felt that every fiber of his being craved this release, but it would be denied him forever.
   Jessica had never heard such distress in her son's voice. She wanted to reach out to him, hold him, comfort him, help him–but she sensed there was nothing she could do. He had to solve this problem by himself.
   The glowing tab of the Fremkit manual between them on the tent floor caught her eye. She lifted it, glanced at the flyleaf, reading: “Manual of 'The Friendly Desert,' the place full of life. Here are the ayat and burhan of Life. Believe, and al-Lat shall never burn you.”
   It reads like the Azhar Book, she thought, recalling her studies of the Great Secrets. Has a Manipulator of Religions been on Arrakis?
   Paul lifted the paracompass from the pack, returned it, said: “Think of all these special-application Fremen machines. They show unrivaled sophistication. Admit it. The culture that made these things betrays depths no one suspected.”
   Hesitating, still worried by the harshness in his voice, Jessica returned to the book, studied an illustrated constellation from the Arrakeen sky: “Muad'Dib: The Mouse,” and noted that the tail pointed north.
   Paul stared into the tent's darkness at the dimly discerned movements of his mother revealed by the manual's glowtab. Now is the time to carry out my father's wish, he thought. I must give her his message now while she has time for grief. Grief would inconvenience us later. And he found himself shocked by precise logic.
   “Mother,” he said.
   “Yes?”
   She heard the change in his voice, felt coldness in her entrails at the sound. Never had she heard such harsh control.
   “My father is dead,” he said.
   She searched within herself for the coupling of fact and fact and fact–the Bene Gesserit way of assessing data–and it came to her: the sensation of terrifying loss.
   Jessica nodded, unable to speak.
   “My father charged me once,” Paul said, “to give you a message if anything happened to him. He feared you might believe he distrusted you.”
   That useless suspicion, she thought.
   “He wanted you to know he never suspected you,” Paul said, and explained the deception, adding: “He wanted you to know he always trusted you completely, always loved you and cherished you. He said he would sooner have mistrusted himself and he had but one regret–that he never made you his Duchess.”
   She brushed the tears coursing down her cheeks, thought: What a stupid waste of the body's water! But she knew this thought for what it was–the attempt to retreat from grief into anger. Leto, my Leto, she thought. What terrible things we do to those we love! With a violent motion, she extinguished the little manual's glowtab.
   Sobs shook her.
   Paul heard his mother's grief and felt the emptiness within himself. I have no grief, he thought. Why? Why? He felt the inability to grieve as a terrible flaw.
   "A time to get and time to lose," Jessica thought, quoting to herself from the O.C. Bible. "A time to keep and a time to cast away; a time for love and a time to hate; a time of war and a time of peace. "
   Paul's mind had gone on in its chilling precision. He saw the avenues ahead of them on this hostile planet. Without even the safety valve of dreaming, he focused his prescient awareness, seeing it as a computation of most probable futures, but with something more, an edge of mystery–as though his mind dipped into some timeless stratum and sampled the winds of the future.
   Abruptly, as though he had found a necessary key, Paul's mind climbed another notch in awareness. He felt himself clinging to this new level, clutching at a precarious hold and peering about. It was as though he existed within a globe with avenues radiating away in all directions . . . yet this only approximated the sensation.
   He remembered once seeing a gauze kerchief blowing in the wind and now he sensed the future as though it twisted across some surface as undulant and impermanent as that of the windblown kerchief.
   He saw people.
   He felt the heat and cold of uncounted probabilities.
   He knew names and places, experienced emotions without number, reviewed data of innumerable unexplored crannies. There was time to probe and test and taste, but no time to shape.
   The thing was a spectrum of possibilities from the most remote past to the most remote future–from the most probable to the most improbable. He saw his own death in countless ways. He saw new planets, new cultures.
   People.
   People.
   He saw them in such swarms they could not be listed, yet his mind catalogued them.
   Even the Guildsmen.
   And he thought: The Guild–there' d be a way for us, my strangeness accepted as a familiar thing of high value, always with an assured supply of the now-necessary spice.
   But the idea of living out his life in the mind-groping-ahead-through-possible-futures that guided hurtling spaceships appalled him. It was a way, though. And in meeting the possible future that contained Guildsmen he recognized his own strangeness.
   I have another kind of sight. I see another kind of terrain: the available paths.
   The awareness conveyed both reassurance and alarm–so many places on that other kind of terrain dipped or turned out of his sight.
   As swiftly as it had come, the sensation slipped away from him, and he realized the entire experience had taken the space of a heartbeat.
   Yet, his own personal awareness had been turned over, illuminated in a terrifying way. He stared around him.
   Night still covered the stilltent within its rock-enclosed hideaway. His mother's grief could still be heard.
   His own lack of grief could still be felt . . . that hollow place somewhere separated from his mind, which went on in its steady pace–dealing with data, evaluating, computing, submitting answers in something like the Mentat way.
   And now he saw that he had a wealth of data few such minds ever before had encompassed. But this made the empty place within him no easier to bear. He felt that something must shatter. It was as though a clockwork control for a bomb had been set to ticking within him. It went on about its business no matter what he wanted. It recorded minuscule shadings of difference around him–a slight change in moisture, a fractional fall in temperature, the progress of an insect across their stilltent roof, the solemn approach of dawn in the starlighted patch of sky he could see out the tent's transparent end.
   The emptiness was unbearable. Knowing how the clockwork had been set in motion made no difference. He could look to his own past and see the start of it–the training, the sharpening of talents, the refined pressures of sophisticated disciplines, even exposure to the O.C. Bible at a critical moment . . . and, lastly, the heavy intake of spice. And he could look ahead–the most terrifying direction–to see where it all pointed.
   I'm a monster! he thought. A freak!
   “No,” he said. Then: “No. No! NO!”
   He found that he was pounding the tent floor with his fists. (The implacable part of him recorded this as an interesting emotional datum and fed it into computation.)
   “Paul!”
   His mother was beside him, holding his hands, her face a gray blob peering at him. “Paul, what's wrong?”
   “You!” he said.
   “I'm here, Paul,” she said. “It's all right.”
   “What have you done to me?” he demanded.
   In a burst of clarity, she sensed some of the roots in the question, said: “I gave birth to you.”
   It was, from instinct as much as her own subtle knowledge, the precisely correct answer to calm him. He felt her hands holding him, focused on the dim outline of her face. (Certain gene traces in her facial structure were noted in the new way by his onflowing mind, the clues added to other data, and a final-summation answer put forward.)
   “Let go of me,” he said.
   She heard the iron in his voice, obeyed. “Do you want to tell me what's wrong, Paul?”
   “Did you know what you were doing when you trained me?” he asked.
   There's no more childhood in his voice, she thought. And she said: “I hoped the thing any parent hopes–that you'd be . . . superior, different.”
   “Different?”
   She heard the bitterness in his tone, said: “Paul, I–”
   “You didn't want a son!” he said. “You wanted a Kwisatz Haderach! You wanted a male Bene Gesserit!”
   She recoiled from his bitterness. “But Paul . . .”
   “Did you ever consult my father in this?”
   She spoke gently out of the freshness of her grief: “Whatever you are, Paul, the heredity is as much your father as me.”
   “But not the training,” he said. “Not the things that . . . awakened . . . the sleeper.”
   “Sleeper?”
   “It's here.” He put a hand to his head and then to his breast. “In me. It goes on and on and on and on and–”
   “Paul!”
   She had heard the hysteria edging his voice.
   “Listen to me,” he said. “You wanted the Reverend Mother to hear about my dreams: You listen in her place now. I've just had a waking dream. Do you know why?”
   “You must calm yourself,” she said. “If there's–”
   “The spice,” he said, “It's in everything here–the air, the soil, the food. The geriatric spice. It's like the Truthsayer drug. It's a poison!”
   She stiffened.
   His voice lowered and he repeated: “A poison–so subtle, so insidious . . . so irreversible. It won't even kill you unless you stop taking it. We can't leave Arrakis unless we take part of Arrakis with us.”
   The terrifying presence of his voice brooked no dispute.
   “You and the spice,” Paul said. “The spice changes anyone who gets this much of it, but thanks to you, I could bring the change to consciousness. I don't get to leave it in the unconscious where its disturbance can be blanked out. I can see it.”
   “Paul, you–”
   “I see it!” he repeated.
   She heard madness in his voice, didn't know what to do.
   But he spoke again, and she heard the iron control return to him: “We're trapped here.”
   We're trapped here, she agreed.
   And she accepted the truth of his words. No pressure of the Bene Gesserit, no trickery or artifice could pry them completely free from Arrakis: the spice was addictive. Her body had known the fact long before her mind awakened to it.
   So here we live out our lives, she thought, on this hell-planet. The place is prepared for us, if we can evade the Harkonnens. And there's no doubt of my course: a broodmare preserving an important bloodline for the Bene Gesserit Plan.
   “I must tell you about my waking dream,” Paul said. (Now there was fury in his voice.) “To be sure you accept what I say, I'll tell you first I know you'll bear a daughter, my sister, here on Arrakis.”
   Jessica placed her hands against the tent floor, pressed back against the curving fabric wall to still a pang of fear. She knew her pregnancy could not show yet. Only her own Bene Gesserit training had allowed her to read the first faint signals of her body, to know of the embryo only a few weeks old.
   “Only to serve,” Jessica whispered, clinging to the Bene Gesserit motto. “We exist only to serve.”
   “We'll find a home among the Fremen,” Paul said, “where your Missionaria Protectiva has bought us a bolt hole.”
   They've prepared a way for us in the desert, Jessica told herself. But how can he know of the Missionaria Protectiva? She found it increasingly difficult to subdue her terror at the overpowering strangeness in Paul.
   He studied the dark shadow of her, seeing her fear and every reaction with his new awareness as though she were outlined in blinding light. A beginning of compassion for her crept over him.
   “The things that can happen here, I cannot begin to tell you,” he said. “I cannot even begin to tell myself, although I've seen them. This sense of the future–I seem to have no control over it. The thing just happens. The immediate future–say, a year–I can see some of that . . . a road as broad as our Central Avenue on Caladan. Some places I don't see . . . shadowed places . . . as though it went behind a hill” (and again he thought of the surface of a blowing kerchief) " . . . and there are branchings . . . "
   He fell silent as memory of that seeing filled him. No prescient dream, no experience of his life had quite prepared him for the totality with which the veils had been ripped away to reveal naked time.
   Recalling the experience, he recognized his own terrible purpose–the pressure of his life spreading outward like an expanding bubble . . . time retreating before it . . .
   Jessica found the tent's glowtab control, activated it.
   Dim green light drove back the shadows, easing her fear. She looked at Paul's face, his eyes–the inward stare. And she knew where she had seen such a look before: pictured in records of disasters–on the faces of children who experienced starvation or terrible injury. The eyes were like pits, mouth a straight line, cheeks indrawn.
   It's the look of terrible awareness, she thought, of someone forced to the knowledge of his own mortality.
   He was, indeed, no longer a child.
   The underlying import of his words began to take over in her mind, pushing all else aside. Paul could see ahead, a way of escape for them.
   “There's a way to evade the Harkonnens,” she said.
   “The Harkonnens!” he sneered. “Put those twisted humans out of your mind.” He stared at his mother, studying the lines of her face in the light of the glowtab. The lines betrayed her.
   She said: “You shouldn't refer to people as humans without–”
   “Don't be so sure you know where to draw the line,” he said. “We carry our past with us. And, mother mine, there's a thing you don't know and should–we are Harkonnens.”
   Her mind did a terrifying thing: it blanked out as though it needed to shut off all sensation. But Paul's voice went on at that implacable pace, dragging her with it.
   “When next you find a mirror, study your face–study mine now. The traces are there if you don't blind yourself. Look at my hands, the set of my bones. And if none of this convinces you, then take my word for it. I've walked the future, I've looked at a record, I've seen a place, I have all the data. We're Harkonnens.”
   “A . . . renegade branch of the family,” she said. “That's it, isn't it? Some Harkonnen cousin who–”
   “You're the Baron's own daughter,” he said, and watched the way she pressed her hands to her mouth. “The Baron sampled many pleasures in his youth, and once permitted himself to be seduced. But it was for the genetic purposes of the Bene Gesserit, by one of you.”
   The way he said 'you' struck her like a slap. But it set her mind to working and she could not deny his words. So many blank ends of meaning in her past reached out now and linked. The daughter the Bene Gesserit wanted–it wasn't to end the old Atreides-Harkonnen feud, but to fix some genetic factor in their lines. What? She groped for an answer.
   As though he saw inside her mind, Paul said: “They thought they were reaching for me. But I'm not what they expected, and I've arrived before my time. And they don't know it.”
   Jessica pressed her hands to her mouth.
   Great Mother! He's the Kwisatz Haderach!
   She felt exposed and naked before him, realizing then that he saw her with eyes from which little could be hidden. And that, she knew, was the basis of her fear.
   “You're thinking I'm the Kwisatz Haderach,” he said. “Put that out of your mind. I'm something unexpected.”
   I must get word out to one of the schools, she thought. The mating index may show what has happened.
   “They won't learn about me until it's too late,” he said.
   She sought to divert him, lowered her hands and said: “We'll find a place among the Fremen?”
   "The Fremen have a saying they credit to Shai-hulud, Old Father Eternity," he said. "They say: 'Be prepared to appreciate what you meet.' "
   And he thought: Yes, mother mine–among the Fremen. You'll acquire the blue eyes and a callus beside your lovely nose from the filter tube to your stillsuit . . . and you'll bear my sister: St. Alia of the Knife.
   “If you're not the Kwisatz Haderach,” Jessica said, “what–”
   “You couldn't possibly know,” he said. “You won't believe it until you see it.”
   And he thought: I'm a seed.
   He suddenly saw how fertile was the ground into which he had fallen, and with this realization, the terrible purpose filled him, creeping through the empty place within, threatening to choke him with grief.
   He had seen two main branchings along the way ahead–in one he confronted an evil old Baron and said: “Hello, Grandfather.” The thought of that path and what lay along it sickened him.
   The other path held long patches of grey obscurity except for peaks of violence. He had seen a warrior religion there, a fire spreading across the universe with the Atreides green and black banner waving at the head of fanatic legions drunk on spice liquor. Gurney Halleck and a few others of his father's men–a pitiful few–were among them, all marked by the hawk symbol from the shrine of his father's skull.
   “I can't go that way,” he muttered. “That's what the old witches of your schools really want.”
   “I don't understand you, Paul,” his mother said.
   He remained silent, thinking like the seed he was, thinking with the race consciousness he had first experienced as terrible purpose. He found that he no longer could hate the Bene Gesserit or the Emperor or even the Harkonnens. They were all caught up in the need of their race to renew its scattered inheritance, to cross and mingle and infuse their bloodlines in a great new pooling of genes. And the race knew only one sure way for this–the ancient way, the tried and certain way that rolled over everything in its path: jihad.
   Surely, I cannot choose that way, he thought.
   But he saw again in his mind's eye the shrine of his father's skull and the violence with the green and black banner waving in its midst.
   Jessica cleared her throat, worried by his silence. “Then . . . the Fremen will give us sanctuary?”
   He looked up, staring across the green-lighted tent at the inbred, patrician lines of her face. “Yes,” he said. “That's one of the ways.” He nodded. “Yes. They'll call me . . . Muad'Dib, 'The One Who Points the Way.' Yes . . . that's what they'll call me.”
   And he closed his eyes, thinking: Now, my father, I can mourn you. And he felt the tears coursing down his cheeks.

Book Two. MUAD'DIB

= = = = = =

   When my father, the Padishah Emperor, heard of Duke Leto's death and the manner of it, he went into such a rage as we had never before seen. He blamed my mother and the compact forced on him to place a Bene Gesserit on the throne. He blamed the Guild and the evil old Baron. He blamed everyone in sight, not excepting even me, for he said I was a witch like all the others. And when I sought to comfort him, saying it was done according to an older law of self-preservation to which even the most ancient rulers gave allegiance, he sneered at me and asked if I thought him a weakling. I saw then that he had been aroused to this passion not by concern over the dead Duke but by what that death implied for all royalty. As I look back on it, I think there may have been some prescience in my father, too, for it is certain that his line and Muad'Dib's shared common ancestry.
   –"In My Father's House," by the Princess Irulan

   “Now Harkonnen shall kill Harkonnen,” Paul whispered.
   He had awakened shortly before nightfall, sitting up in the sealed and darkened stilltent. As he spoke, he heard the vague stirrings of his mother where she slept against the tent's opposite wall.
   Paul glanced at the proximity detector on the floor, studying the dials illuminated in the blackness by phosphor tubes.
   “It should be night soon,” his mother said. “Why don't you lift the tent shades?”
   Paul realized then that her breathing had been different for some time, that she had lain silent in the darkness until certain he was awake.
   “Lifting the shades wouldn't help,” he said. “There's been a storm. The tent's covered by sand. I'll dig us out soon.”
   “No sign of Duncan yet?”
   “None.”
   Paul rubbed absently at the ducal signet on his thumb, and a sudden rage against the very substance of this planet which had helped kill his father set him trembling.
   “I heard the storm begin,” Jessica said.
   The undemanding emptiness of her words helped restore some of his calm. His mind focused on the storm as he had seen it begin through the transparent end of their stilltent–cold dribbles of sand crossing the basin, then runnels and tails furrowing the sky. He had looked up to a rock spire, seen it change shape under the blast, becoming a low, Cheddar-colored wedge. Sand funneled into their basin had shadowed the sky with dull curry, then blotted out all light as the tent was covered.
   Tent bows had creaked once as they accepted the pressure, then–silence broken only by the dim bellows wheezing of their sand snorkel pumping air from the surface.
   “Try the receiver again,” Jessica said.
   “No use,” he said.
   He found his stillsuit's watertube in its clip at his neck, drew a warm swallow into his mouth, and he thought that here he truly began an Arrakeen existence–living on reclaimed moisture from his own breath and body. It was flat and tasteless water, but it soothed his throat.
   Jessica heard Paul drinking, felt the slickness of her own stillsuit clinging to her body, but she refused to accept her thirst. To accept it would require awakening fully into the terrible necessities of Arrakis where they must guard even fractional traces of moisture, hoarding the few drops in the tent's catchpockets, begrudging a breath wasted on the open air.
   So much easier to drift back down into sleep.
   But there had been a dream in this day's sleep, and she shivered at memory of it. She had held dreaming hands beneath sandflow where a name had been written: Duke Leto Atreides. The name had blurred with the sand and she had moved to restore it, but the first letter filled before the last was begun.
   The sand would not stop.
   Her dream became wailing: louder and louder. That ridiculous wailing–part of her mind had realized the sound was her own voice as a tiny child, little more than a baby. A woman not quite visible to memory was going away.
   My unknown mother, Jessica thought. The Bene Gesserit who bore me and gave me to the Sisters because that's what she was commanded to do. Was she glad to rid herself of a Harkonnen child?
   “The place to hit them is in the spice,” Paul said.
   How can he think of attack at a time like this? she asked herself.
   “An entire planet full of spice,” she said. “How can you hit them there?”
   She heard him stirring, the sound of their pack being dragged across the tent floor.
   “It was sea power and air power on Caladan,” he said. “Here, it's desert power. The Fremen are the key.”
   His voice came from the vicinity of the tent's sphincter. Her Bene Gesserit training sensed in his tone an unresolved bitterness toward her.
   All his life he has been trained to hate Harkonnens, she thought. Now, he finds he is Harkonnen . . . because of me. How little he knows me! I was my Duke's only woman. I accepted his life and his values even to defying my Bene Gesserit orders.
   The tent's glowtab came alight under Paul's hand, filled the domed area with green radiance. Paul crouched at the sphincter, his stillsuit hood adjusted for the open desert–forehead capped, mouth filter in place, nose plugs adjusted. Only his dark eyes were visible: a narrow band of face that turned once toward her and away.
   “Secure yourself for the open,” he said, and his voice was blurred behind the filter.
   Jessica pulled the filter across her mouth, began adjusting her hood as she watched Paul break the tent seal.
   Sand rasped as he opened the sphincter and a burred fizzle of grains ran into the tent before he could immobilize it with a static compaction tool. A hole grew in the sandwall as the tool realigned the grains. He slipped out and her ears followed his progress to the surface.
   What will we find out there? she wondered. Harkonnen troops and the Sardaukar, those are dangers we can expect. But what of the dangers we don't know?
   She thought of the compaction tool and the other strange instruments in the pack. Each of these tools suddenly stood in her mind as a sign of mysterious dangers.
   She felt then a hot breeze from surface sand touch her cheeks where they were exposed above the filter.
   “Pass up the pack.” It was Paul's voice, low and guarded.
   She moved to obey, heard the water literjons gurgle as she shoved the pack across the floor. She peered upward, saw Paul framed against stars.
   “Here,” he said and reached down, pulled the pack to the surface.
   Now she saw only the circle of stars. They were like the luminous tips of weapons aimed down at her. A shower of meteors crossed her patch of night. The meteors seemed to her like a warning, like tiger stripes, like luminous grave slats clabbering her blood. And she felt the chill of the price on their heads.
   “Hurry up,” Paul said. “I want to collapse the tent.”
   A shower of sand from the surface brushed her left hand. How much sand will the hand hold? She asked herself.
   “Shall I help you?” Paul asked.
   “No.”
   She swallowed in a dry throat, slipped into the hole, felt static-packed sand rasp under her hands. Paul reached down, took her arm. She stood beside him on a smooth patch of starlit desert, stared around. Sand almost brimmed their basin, leaving only a dim lip of surrounding rock. She probed the farther darkness with her trained senses.
   Noise of small animals.
   Birds.
   A fall of dislodged sand and faint creature sounds within it.
   Paul collapsing their tent, recovering it up the hole.
   Starlight displaced just enough of the night to charge each shadow with menace. She looked at patches of blackness.
   Black is a blind remembering, she thought. You listen for pack sounds, for the cries of those who hunted your ancestors in a past so ancient only your most primitive cells remember. The ears see. The nostrils see.
   Presently, Paul stood beside her, said: “Duncan told me that if he was captured, he could hold out . . . this long. We must leave here now.” He shouldered the pack, crossed to the shallow lip of the basin, climbed to a ledge that looked down on open desert.
   Jessica followed automatically, noting how she now lived in her son's orbit.
   For now is my grief heavier than the sands of the seas, she thought. This world has emptied me of all but the oldest purpose: tomorrow's life. I live now for my young Duke and the daughter yet to be.
   She felt the sand drag her feet as she climbed to Paul's side.
   He looked north across a line of rocks, studying a distant escarpment.
   The faraway rock profile was like an ancient battleship of the seas outlined by stars. The long swish of it lifted on an invisible wave with syllables of boomerang antennae, funnels arcing back, a pi-shaped upthrusting at the stern.
   An orange glare burst above the silhouette and a line of brilliant purple cut downward toward the glare.
   Another line of purple!
   And another upthrusting orange glare!
   It was like an ancient naval battle, remembered shellfire, and the sight held them staring.
   “Pillars of fire,” Paul whispered.
   A ring of red eyes lifted over the distant rock. Lines of purple laced the sky.
   “Jetflares and lasguns,” Jessica said.
   The dust-reddened first moon of Arrakis lifted above the horizon to their left and they saw a storm trail there–a ribbon of movement over the desert.
   “It must be Harkonnen 'thopters hunting us,” Paul said. “The way they're cutting up the desert . . . it's as though they were making certain they stamped out whatever's there . . . the way you'd stamp out a nest of insects.”
   “Or a nest of Atreides,” Jessica said.
   “We must seek cover,” Paul said. “We'll head south and keep to the rocks. If they caught us in the open . . .” He turned, adjusting the pack to his shoulders. “They're killing anything that moves.”
   He took one step along the ledge and, in that instant, heard the low hiss of gliding aircraft, saw the dark shapes of ornithopters above them.

= = = = = =

   My father once told me that respect for the truth comes close to being the basis for all morality. “Something cannot emerge from nothing,” he said. This is profound thinking if you understand how unstable “the truth” can be.
   –from “Conversations with Muad'Dib” by the Princess Irulan

   “I've always prided myself on seeing things the way they truly are,” Thufir Hawat said. “That's the curse of being a Mentat. You can't stop analyzing your data.”
   The leathered old face appeared composed in the predawn dimness as he spoke. His sapho-stained lips were drawn into a straight line with radial creases spreading upward.
   A robed man squatted silently on sand across from Hawat, apparently unmoved by the words.
   The two crouched beneath a rock overhang that looked down on a wide, shallow sink. Dawn was spreading over the shattered outline of cliffs across the basin, touching everything with pink. It was cold under the overhang, a dry and penetrating chill left over from the night. There had been a warm wind just before dawn, but now it was cold. Hawat could hear teeth chattering behind him among the few troopers remaining in his force.
   The man squatting across from Hawat was a Fremen who had come across the sink in the first light of false dawn, skittering over the sand, blending into the dunes, his movements barely discernible.
   The Fremen extended a finger to the sand between them, drew a figure there. It looked like a bowl with an arrow spilling out of it. “There are many Harkonnen patrols,” he said. He lifted his finger, pointed upward across the cliffs that Hawat and his men had descended.
   Hawat nodded.
   Many patrols. Yes.
   But still he did not know what this Fremen wanted and this rankled. Mentat training was supposed to give a man the power to see motives.
   This had been the worst night of Hawat's life. He had been at Tsimpo, a garrison village, buffer outpost for the former capital city, Carthag, when the reports of attack began arriving. At first, he'd thought: It's a raid. The Harkonnens are testing.
   But report followed report–faster and faster.
   Two legions landed at Carthag.
   Five legions–fifty brigades! –attacking the Duke's main base at Arrakeen.
   A legion at Arsunt.
   Two battle groups at Splintered Rock.
   Then the reports became more detailed–there were Imperial Sardaukar among the attackers–possibly two legions of them. And it became clear that the invaders knew precisely which weight of arms to send where. Precisely! Superb Intelligence.
   Hawat's shocked fury had mounted until it threatened the smooth functioning of his Mentat capabilities. The size of the attack struck his mind like a physical blow.
   Now, hiding beneath a bit of desert rock, he nodded to himself, pulled his torn and slashed tunic around him as though warding off the cold shadows.
   The size of the attack.
   He had always expected their enemy to hire an occasional lighter from the Guild for probing raids. That was an ordinary enough gambit in this kind of House-to-House warfare. Lighters landed and took off on Arrakis regularly to transport the spice for House Atreides. Hawat had taken precautions against random raids by false spice lighters. For a full attack they'd expected no more than ten brigades.
   But there were more than two thousand ships down on Arrakis at the last count–not just lighters, but frigates, scouts, monitors, crushers, troop-carriers, dump-boxes . . .
   More than a hundred brigades–ten legions!
   The entire spice income of Arrakis for fifty years might just cover the cost of such a venture.
   It might.
   I underestimated what the Baron was willing to spend in attacking us, Hawat thought. I failed my Duke.
   Then there was the matter of the traitor.
   I will live long enough to see her strangled! he thought. I should've killed that Bene Gesserit witch when I had the chance. There was no doubt in his mind who had betrayed them–the Lady Jessica. She fitted all the facts available.
   “Your man Gurney Halleck and part of his force are safe with our smuggler friends,” the Fremen said.
   “Good.”
   So Gurney will get off this hell planet. We 're not all gone.
   Hawat glanced back at the huddle of his men. He had started the night just past with three hundred of his finest. Of those, an even twenty remained and half of them were wounded. Some of them slept now, standing up, leaning against the rock, sprawled on the sand beneath the rock. Their last 'thopter, the one they'd been using as a ground-effect machine to carry their wounded, had given out just before dawn. They had cut it up with lasguns and hidden the pieces, then worked their way down into this hiding place at the edge of the basin.
   Hawat had only a rough idea of their location–some two hundred kilometers southeast of Arrakeen. The main traveled ways between the Shield Wall sietch communities were somewhere south of them.
   The Fremen across from Hawat threw back his hood and stillsuit cap to reveal sandy hair and beard. The hair was combed straight back from a high, thin forehead. He had the unreadable total blue eyes of the spice diet. Beard and mustache were stained at one side of the mouth, his hair matted there by pressure of the looping catchtube from his nose plugs.
   The man removed his plugs, readjusted them. He rubbed at a scar beside his nose.
   “If you cross the sink here this night,” the Fremen said, “you must not use shields. There is a break in the wall . . . " He turned on his heels, pointed south. " . . . there, and it is open sand down to the erg. Shields will attract a . . . " He hesitated. ". . . worm. They don't often come in here, but a shield will bring one every time.”
   He said worm, Hawat thought. He was going to say something else. What? And what does he want of us?
   Hawat sighed.
   He could not recall ever before being this tired. It was a muscle weariness that energy pills were unable to ease.
   Those damnable Sardaukar!
   With a self-accusing bitterness, he faced the thought of the soldier-fanatics and the Imperial treachery they represented. His own Mentat assessment of the data told him how little chance he had ever to present evidence of this treachery before the High Council of the Landsraad where justice might be done.
   “Do you wish to go to the smugglers?” the Fremen asked.
   “Is it possible?”
   “The way is long.”
   “Fremen don't like to say no,” Idaho had told him once.
   Hawat said: “You haven't yet told me whether your people can help my wounded.”
   “They are wounded.”
   The same damned answer every time!
   “We know they're wounded!” Hawat snapped. “That's not the–”
   “Peace, friend,” the Fremen cautioned. “What do your wounded say? Are there those among them who can see the water need of your tribe?”
   “We haven't talked about water,” Hawat said. “We–”
   “I can understand your reluctance,” the Fremen said. “They are your friends, your tribesmen. Do you have water?”
   “Not enough.”
   The Fremen gestured to Hawat's tunic, the skin exposed beneath it. “You were caught in-sietch, without your suits. You must make a water decision, friend.”
   “Can we hire your help?”
   The Fremen shrugged. “You have no water.” He glanced at the group behind Hawat. “How many of your wounded would you spend?”
   Hawat fell silent, staring at the man. He could see as a Mentat that their communication was out of phase. Word-sounds were not being linked up here in the normal manner.
   “I am Thufir Hawat,” he said. “I can speak for my Duke. I will make promissory commitment now for your help. I wish a limited form of help, preserving my force long enough only to kill a traitor who thinks herself beyond vengeance.”
   “You wish our siding in a vendetta?”
   “The vendetta I'll handle myself. I wish to be freed of responsibility for my wounded that I may get about it.”
   The Fremen scowled. “How can you be responsible for your wounded? They are their own responsibility. The water's at issue, Thufir Hawat. Would you have me take that decision away from you?”
   The man put a hand to a weapon concealed beneath his robe.
   Hawat tensed, wondering: Is there betrayal here?
   “What do you fear?” the Fremen demanded.
   These people and their disconcerting directness! Hawat spoke cautiously. “There's a price on my head.”
   “Ah-h-h-h.” The Fremen removed his hand from his weapon. “You think we have the Byzantine corruption. You don't know us. The Harkonnens have not water enough to buy the smallest child among us.”
   But they had the price of Guild passage for more than two thousand fighting ships, Hawat thought. And the size of that price still staggered him.
   “We both fight Harkonnens,” Hawat said. “Should we not share the problems and ways of meeting the battle issue?”
   “We are sharing,” the Fremen said. “I have seen you fight Harkonnens. You are good. There've been times I'd have appreciated your arm beside me.”
   “Say where my arm may help you,” Hawat said.
   “Who knows?” the Fremen asked. “There are Harkonnen forces everywhere. But you still have not made the water decision or put it to your wounded.”
   I must be cautious, Hawat told himself. There's a thing here that's not understood.
   He said: “Will you show me your way, the Arrakeen way?”
   “Stranger-thinking,” the Fremen said, and there was a sneer in his tone. He pointed to the northwest across the clifftop. “We watched you come across the sand last night.” He lowered his arm. “You keep your force on the slip-face of the dunes. Bad. You have no stillsuits, no water. You will not last long.”
   “The ways of Arrakis don't come easily,” Hawat said.
   “Truth. But we've killed Harkonnens.”
   "What do you do with your own wounded? "Hawat demanded.
   “Does a man not know when he is worth saving?” the Fremen asked. “Your wounded know you have no water.” He tilted his head, looking sideways up at Hawat. “This is clearly a time for water decision. Both wounded and unwounded must look to the tribe's future.”
   The tribe's future, Hawat thought. The tribe of Atreides. There's sense in that. He forced himself to the question he had been avoiding.
   “Have you word of my Duke or his son?”
   Unreadable blue eyes stared upward into Hawat's. “Word?”
   “Their fate!” Hawat snapped.
   “Fate is the same for everyone,” the Fremen said. “Your Duke, it is said, has met his fate. As to the Lisan al-Gaib, his son, that is in Liet's hands. Liet has not said.”
   I knew the answer without asking, Hawat thought.
   He glanced back at his men. They were all awake now. They had heard. They were staring out across the sand, the realization in their expressions: there was no returning to Caladan for them, and now Arrakis was lost.
   Hawat turned back to the Fremen. “Have you heard of Duncan Idaho?”
   “He was in the great house when the shield went down,” the Fremen said. “This I've heard . . . no more.”
   She dropped the shield and let in the Harkonnens, he thought. I was the one who sat with my back to a door. How could she do this when it meant turning also against her own son? But . . . who knows how a Bene Gesserit witch thinks . . . if you can call it thinking?
   Hawat tried to swallow in a dry throat. “When will you hear about the boy?”
   “We know little of what happens in Arrakeen,” the Fremen said. He shrugged. “Who knows?”
   “You have ways of finding out?”
   “Perhaps.” The Fremen rubbed at the scar beside his nose. “Tell me, Thufir Hawat, do you have knowledge of the big weapons the Harkonnens used?”
   The artillery, Hawat thought bitterly. Who could have guessed they'd use artillery in this day of shields?
   “You refer to the artillery they used to trap our people in the caves,” he said. “I've . . . theoretical knowledge of such explosive weapons.”
   “Any man who retreats into a cave which has only one opening deserves to die,” the Fremen said.
   “Why do you ask about these weapons?”
   “Liet wishes it.”
   Is that what he wants from us? Hawat wondered. He said: “Did you come here seeking information about the big guns?”
   “Liet wished to see one of the weapons for himself.”
   “Then you should just go take one,” Hawat sneered.
   “Yes,” the Fremen said. “We took one. We have it hidden where Stilgar can study it for Liet and where Liet can see it for himself if he wishes. But I doubt he'll want to: the weapon is not a very good one. Poor design for Arrakis.”
   “You . . . took one?” Hawat asked.
   “It was a good fight,” the Fremen said. “We lost only two men and spilled the water from more than a hundred of theirs.”
   There were Sardaukar at every gun, Hawat thought. This desert madman speaks casually of losing only two men against Sardaukar!
   “We would not have lost the two except for those others fighting beside the Harkonnens,” the Fremen said. “Some of those are good fighters.”
   One of Hawat's men limped forward, looked down at the squatting Fremen. “Are you talking about Sardaukar?”
   “He's talking about Sardaukar,” Hawat said.
   “Sardaukar!” the Fremen said, and there appeared to be glee in his voice. “Ah-h-h, so that's what they are! This was a good night indeed. Sardaukar. Which legion? Do you know?”
   “We . . . don't know,” Hawat said.
   “Sardaukar,” the Fremen mused. “Yet they wear Harkonnen clothing. Is that not strange?”
   “The Emperor does not wish it known he fights against a Great House,” Hawat said.
   “But you know they are Sardaukar.”
   “Who am I?” Hawat asked bitterly.
   “You are Thufir Hawat,” the man said matter-of-factly. “Well, we would have learned it in time. We've sent three of them captive to be questioned by Liet's men.”
   Hawat's aide spoke slowly, disbelief in every word: “You . . . captured Sardaukar?”
   “Only three of them,” the Fremen said. “They fought well.”
   If only we'd had the time to link up with these Fremen, Hawat thought. It was a sour lament in his mind. If only we could've trained them and armed them. Great Mother, what a fighting force we'd have had!
   “Perhaps you delay because of worry over the Lisan al-Gaib,” the Fremen said. “If he is truly the Lisan al-Gaib, harm cannot touch him. Do not spend thoughts on a matter which has not been proved.”
   “I serve the . . . Lisan al-Gaib,” Hawat said. “His welfare is my concern. I've pledged myself to this.”
   “You are pledged to his water?”
   Hawat glanced at his aide, who was still staring at the Fremen, returned his attention to the squatting figure. “To his water, yes.”
   “You wish to return to Arrakeen, to the place of his water?”
   “To . . . yes, to the place of his water.”
   “Why did you not say at first it was a water matter?” The Fremen stood up, seated his nose plugs firmly.
   Hawat motioned with his head for his aide to return to the others. With a tired shrug, the man obeyed. Hawat heard a low-voiced conversation arise among the men.
   The Fremen said: “There is always a way to water.”
   Behind Hawat, a man cursed. Hawat's aide called: “Thufir! Arkie just died.”
   The Fremen put a fist to his ear. “The bond of water! It's a sign!” He stared at Hawat. “We have a place nearby for accepting the water. Shall I call my men?”
   The aide returned to Hawat's side, said: “Thufir, a couple of the men left wives in Arrakeen. They're . . . well, you know how it is at a time like this.”
   The Fremen still held his fist to his ear. “Is it the bond of water, Thufir Hawat?” he demanded.
   Hawat's mind was racing. He sensed now the direction of the Fremen's words, but feared the reaction of the tired men under the rock overhang when they understood it.
   “The bond of water,” Hawat said.
   “Let our tribes be joined,” the Fremen said, and he lowered his fist.
   As though that were the signal, four men slid and dropped down from the rocks above them. They darted back under the overhang, rolled the dead man in a loose robe, lifted him and began running with him along the cliff wall to the right. Spurts of dust lifted around their running feet.
   It was over before Hawat's tired men could gather their wits. The group with the body hanging like a sack in its enfolding robe was gone around a turn in the cliff.
   One of Hawat's men shouted: “Where they going with Arkie? He was–”
   “They're taking him to . . . bury him,” Hawat said.
   “Fremen don't bury their dead!” the man barked. “Don't you try any tricks on us, Thufir. We know what they do. Arkie was one of–”
   “Paradise were sure for a man who died in the service of Lisan al-Gaib,” the Fremen said. “If it is the Lisan al-Gaib you serve, as you have said it, why raise mourning cries? The memory of one who died in this fashion will live as long as the memory of man endures.”
   But Hawat's men advanced, angry looks on their faces. One had captured a lasgun. He started to draw it.
   “Stop right where you are!” Hawat barked. He fought down the sick fatigue that gripped his muscles. “These people respect our dead. Customs differ, but the meaning's the same.”
   “They're going to render Arkie down for his water,” the man with the lasgun snarled.
   “Is it that your men wish to attend the ceremony?” the Fremen asked.
   He doesn't even see the problem, Hawat thought. The naivete of the Fremen was frightening.
   “They're concerned for a respected comrade,” Hawat said.
   “We will treat your comrade with the same reverence we treat our own,” the Fremen said. “This is the bond of water. We know the rites. A man's flesh is his own; the water belongs to the tribe.”
   Hawat spoke quickly as the man with the lasgun advanced another step. “Will you now help our wounded?”
   “One does not question the bond,” the Fremen said. “We will do for you what a tribe does for its own. First, we must get all of you suited and see to the necessities.”
   The man with the lasgun hesitated.
   Hawat's aide said: “Are we buying help with Arkie's . . . water?”
   “Not buying,” Hawat said. “We've joined these people.”
   “Customs differ,” one of his men muttered.
   Hawat began to relax.
   “And they'll help us get to Arrakeen?”
   “We will kill Harkonnens,” the Fremen said. He grinned. “And Sardaukar.” He stepped backward, cupped his hands beside his ears and tipped his head back, listening. Presently, he lowered his hands, said: “An aircraft comes. Conceal yourselves beneath the rock and remain' motionless.”
   At a gesture from Hawat, his men obeyed.
   The Fremen took Hawat's arm, pressed him back with the others. “We will fight in the time of fighting,” the man said. He reached beneath his robes, brought out a small cage, lifted a creature from it.
   Hawat recognized a tiny bat. The bat turned its head and Hawat saw its blue-within-blue eyes.
   The Fremen stroked the bat, soothing it, crooning to it. He bent over the animal's head, allowed a drop of saliva to fall from his tongue into the bat's upturned mouth. The bat stretched its wings, but remained on the Fremen's opened hand. The man took a tiny tube, held it beside the bat's head and chattered into the tube; then, lifting the creature high, he threw it upward.
   The bat swooped away beside the cliff and was lost to sight.
   The Fremen folded the cage, thrust it beneath his robe. Again, he bent his head, listening. “They quarter the high country,” he said. “One wonders who they seek up there.”
   “It's known that we retreated in this direction,” Hawat said.
   “One should never presume one is the sole object of a hunt,” the Fremen said. “Watch the other side of the basin. You will see a thing.”
   Time passed.
   Some of Hawat's men stirred, whispering.
   “Remain silent as frightened animals,” the Fremen hissed.
   Hawat discerned movement near the opposite cliff–flitting blurs of tan on tan.
   “My little friend carried his message,” the Fremen said. “He is a good messenger–day or night. I'll be unhappy to lose that one.”
   The movement across the sink faded away. On the entire four to five kilometer expanse of sand nothing remained but the growing pressure of the day's heat–blurred columns of rising air.
   “Be most silent now,” the Fremen whispered.
   A file of plodding figures emerged from a break in the opposite cliff, headed directly across the sink. To Hawat, they appeared to be Fremen, but a curiously inept band. He counted six men making heavy going of it over the dunes.
   A “thwok-thwok” of ornithopter wings sounded high to the right behind Hawat's group. The craft came over the cliff wall above them–an Atreides 'thopter with Harkonnen battle colors splashed on it. The 'thopter swooped toward the men crossing the sink.
   The group there stopped on a dune crest, waved.
   The 'thopter circled once over them in a tight curve, came back for a dust-shrouded landing in front of the Fremen. Five men swarmed from the 'thopter and Hawat saw the dust-repellent shimmering of shields and, in their motions, the hard competence of Sardaukar.
   “Aiihh! They use their stupid shields,” the Fremen beside Hawat hissed. He glanced toward the open south wall of the sink.
   “They are Sardaukar,” Hawat whispered.
   “Good.”
   The Sardaukar approached the waiting group of Fremen in an enclosing half-circle. Sun glinted on blades held ready. The Fremen stood in a compact group, apparently indifferent.
   Abruptly, the sand around the two groups sprouted Fremen. They were at the ornithopter, then in it. Where the two groups had met at the dune crest, a dust cloud partly obscured violent motion.
   Presently, dust settled. Only Fremen remained standing.
   “They left only three men in their 'thopter,” the Fremen beside Hawat said. “That was fortunate. I don't believe we had to damage the craft in taking it.”
   Behind Hawat, one of his men whispered: “Those were Sardaukar!”
   “Did you notice how well they fought?” the Fremen asked.
   Hawat took a deep breath. He smelled the burned dust around him, felt the heat, the dryness. In a voice to match that dryness, he said: “Yes, they fought well, indeed.”
   The captured 'thopter took off with a lurching flap of wings, angled upward to the south in a steep, wing-tucked climb.
   So these Fremen can handle 'thopters, too, Hawat thought.
   On the distant dune, a Fremen waved a square of green cloth: once . . . twice.
   “More come!” the Fremen beside Hawat barked. “Be ready. I'd hoped to have us away without more inconvenience.”
   Inconvenience! Hawat thought.
   He saw two more 'thopters swooping from high in the west onto an area of sand suddenly devoid of visible Fremen. Only eight splotches of blue–the bodies of the Sardaukar in Harkonnen uniforms–remained at the scene of violence.
   Another 'thopter glided in over the cliff wall above Hawat. He drew in a sharp breath as he saw it–a big troop carrier. It flew with the slow, spread-wing heaviness of a full load–like a giant bird coming to its nest.
   In the distance, the purple finger of a lasgun beam flicked from one of the diving 'thopters. It laced across the sand, raising a sharp trail of dust.
   “The cowards!” the Fremen beside Hawat rasped.
   The troop carrier settled toward the patch of blue-clad bodies. Its wings crept out to full reach, began the cupping action of a quick stop.
   Hawat's attention was caught by a flash of sun on metal to the south, a 'thopter plummeting there in a power dive, wings folded flat against its sides, its jets a golden flare against the dark silvered gray of the sky. It plunged like an arrow toward the troop carrier which was unshielded because of the lasgun activity around it. Straight into the carrier the diving 'thopter plunged.
   A flaming roar shook the basin. Rocks tumbled from the cliff walls all around. A geyser of red-orange shot skyward from the sand where the carrier and its companion 'thopters had been–everything there caught in the flame.
   It was the Fremen who took off in that captured 'thopter, Hawat thought. He deliberately sacrificed himself to get that carrier. Great Mother! What are these Fremen?
   “A reasonable exchange,” said the Fremen beside Hawat. “There must've been three hundred men in that carrier. Now, we must see to their water and make plans to get another aircraft.” He started to step out of their rock-shadowed concealment.
   A rain of blue uniforms came over the cliff wall in front of him, falling in low-suspensor slowness. In the flashing instant, Hawat had time to see that they were Sardaukar, hard faces set in battle frenzy, that they were unshielded and each carried a knife in one hand, a stunner in the other.
   A thrown knife caught Hawat's Fremen companion in the throat, hurting him backward, twisting face down. Hawat had only time to draw his own knife before blackness of a stunner projectile felled him.

= = = = = =

   Muad'Dib could indeed, see the Future, but you must understand the limits of this power. Think of sight. You have eyes, yet cannot see without light. If you are on the floor of a valley, you cannot see beyond your valley. Just so, Muad'Dib could not always choose to look across the mysterious terrain. He tells us that a single obscure decision of prophecy, perhaps the choice of one word over another, could change the entire aspect of the future. He tells us “The vision of time is broad, but when you pass through it, time becomes a narrow door.” And always, he fought the temptation to choose a clear, safe course, warning “That path leads ever down into stagnation.”
   –from “Arrakis Awakening” by the Princess Irulan

   As the ornithopters glided out of the night above them, Paul grabbed his mother's arm, snapped: “Don't move!”
   Then he saw the lead craft in the moonlight, the way its wings cupped to brake for landing, the reckless dash of the hands at the controls.
   “It's Idaho,” he breathed.
   The craft and its companions settled into the basin like a covey of birds coming to nest. Idaho was out of his 'thopter and running toward them before the dust settled. Two figures in Fremen robes followed him. Paul recognized one: the tall, sandy-bearded Kynes.
   “This way!” Kynes called and he veered left.
   Behind Kynes, other Fremen were throwing fabric covers over their ornithopters. The craft became a row of shallow dunes.
   Idaho skidded to a stop in front of Paul, saluted. “M'Lord, the Fremen have a temporary hiding place nearby where we–”
   “What about that back there?”
   Paul pointed to the violence above the distant cliff–the jetflares, the purple beams of lasguns lacing the desert.
   A rare smile touched Idaho's round, placid face. “M'Lord . . . Sire, I've left them a little sur–”
   Glaring white light filled the desert–bright as a sun, etching their shadows onto the rock floor of the ledge. In one sweeping motion, Idaho had Paul's arm in one hand, Jessica's shoulder in the other, hurling them down off the ledge into the basin. They sprawled together in the sand as the roar of an explosion thundered over them. Its shock wave tumbled chips off the rock ledge they had vacated.
   Idaho sat up, brushed sand from himself.
   “Not the family atomics!” Jessica said. “I thought–”
   “You planted a shield back there,” Paul said.
   "A big one turned to full force," Idaho said. "A lasgun beam touched it and . . . " He shrugged.
   “Subatomic fusion,” Jessica said. “That's a dangerous weapon.”
   “Not weapon, m'Lady, defense. That scum will think twice before using lasguns another time.”
   The Fremen from the ornithopters stopped above them. One called in a low voice: “We should get under cover, friends.”
   Paul got to his feet as Idaho helped Jessica up.
   “That blast will attract considerable attention, Sire,” Idaho said.
   Sire, Paul thought.
   The word had such a strange sound when directed at him. Sire had always been his father.
   He felt himself touched briefly by his powers of prescience, seeing himself infected by the wild race consciousness that was moving the human universe toward chaos. The vision left him shaken, and he allowed Idaho to guide him along the edge of the basin to a rock projection. Fremen there were opening a way down into the sand with their compaction tools.
   “May I take your pack, Sire?” Idaho asked.
   “It's not heavy, Duncan,” Paul said.
   “You have no body shield,” Idaho said. “Do you wish mine?” He glanced at the distant cliff. “Not likely there'll be any more lasgun activity about.”
   “Keep your shield, Duncan. Your right arm is shield enough for me.”
   Jessica saw the way the praise took effect, how Idaho moved closer to Paul, and she thought: Such a sure hand my son has with his people.
   The Fremen removed a rock plug that opened a passage down into the native basement complex of the desert. A camouflage cover was rigged for the opening.
   “This way,” one of the Fremen said, and he led them down rock steps into darkness.
   Behind them, the cover blotted out the moonlight. A dim green glow came alive ahead, revealing the steps and rock walls, a turn to the left. Robed Fremen were all around them now, pressing downward. They rounded the corner, found another down-slanting passage. It opened into a rough cave chamber.
   Kynes stood before them, jubba hood thrown back. The neck of his stillsuit glistening in the green light. His long hair and beard were mussed. The blue eyes without whites were a darkness under heavy brows.
   In the moment of encounter, Kynes wondered at himself: Why am I helping these people? It's the most dangerous thing I've ever done. It could doom me with them.
   Then he looked squarely at Paul, seeing the boy who had taken on the mantle of manhood, masking grief, suppressing all except the position that now must be assumed–the dukedom. And Kynes realized in that moment the dukedom still existed and solely because of this youth–and this was not a thing to be taken lightly.
   Jessica glanced once around the chamber, registering it on her senses in the Bene Gesserit way–a laboratory, a civil place full of angles and squares in the ancient manner.
   “This is one of the Imperial Ecological Testing Stations my father wanted as advance bases,” Paul said.
   His father wanted! Kynes thought.
   And again Kynes wondered at himself. Am I foolish to aid these fugitives? Why am I doing it? It'd be so easy to take them now, to buy the Harkonnen trust with them.
   Paul followed his mother's example, gestalting the room, seeing the workbench down one side, the walls of featureless rock. Instruments lined the bench–dials glowing, wire gridex planes with fluting glass emerging from them. An ozone smell permeated the place.
   Some of the Fremen moved on around a concealing angle in the chamber and new sounds started there–machine coughs, the whinnies of spinning belts and multidrives.
   Paul looked to the end of the room, saw cages with small animals in them stacked against the wall.
   “You've recognized this place correctly,” Kynes said. “For what would you use such a place, Paul Atreides?”
   “To make this planet a fit place for humans,” Paul said.
   Perhaps that's why I help them, Kynes thought.
   The machine sounds abruptly hummed away to silence. Into this void there came a thin animal squeak from the cages. It was cut off abruptly as though in embarrassment.
   Paul returned his attention to the cages, saw that the animals were brown-winged bats. An automatic feeder extended from the side wall across the cages.
   A Fremen emerged from the hidden area of the chamber, spoke to Kynes: “Liet, the field-generator equipment is not working. I am unable to mask us from proximity detectors.”
   “Can you repair it?” Kynes asked.
   "Not quickly. The parts . . . " The man shrugged.
   “Yes,” Kynes said. “Then we'll do without machinery. Get a hand pump for air out to the surface.”
   “Immediately.” The man hurried away.
   Kynes turned back to Paul. “You gave a good answer.”
   Jessica marked the easy rumble of the man's voice. It was a royal voice, accustomed to command. And she had not missed the reference to him as Liet. Liet was the Fremen alter ego, the other face of the tame planetologist.
   “We're most grateful for your help, Doctor Kynes,” she said.
   “Mm-m-m, we'll see,” Kynes said. He nodded to one of his men. “Spice coffee in my quarters, Shamir.”
   “At once, Liet,” the man said.
   Kynes indicated an arched opening in the side wall of the chamber. “If you please?”
   Jessica allowed herself a regal nod before accepting. She saw Paul give a hand signal to Idaho, telling him to mount guard here.
   The passage, two paces deep, opened through a heavy door into a square office lighted by golden glowglobes. Jessica passed her hand across the door as she entered, was startled to identify plasteel.
   Paul stepped three paces into the room, dropped his pack to the floor. He heard the door close behind him, studied the place–about eight meters to a side, walls of natural rock, curry-colored, broken by metal filing cabinets on their right. A low desk with milk glass top shot full of yellow bubbles occupied the room's center. Four suspensor chairs ringed the desk.
   Kynes moved around Paul, held a chair for Jessica. She sat down, noting the way her son examined the room.
   Paul remained standing for another eyeblink. A faint anomaly in the room's air currents told him there was a secret exit to their right behind the filing cabinets.
   “Will you sit down, Paul Atreides?” Kynes asked.
   How carefully he avoids my title, Paul thought. But he accepted the chair, remained silent while Kynes sat down.
   “You sense that Arrakis could be a paradise,” Kynes said. “Yet, as you see, the Imperium sends here only its trained hatchetmen, its seekers after the spice!”
   Paul held up his thumb with its ducal signet. “Do you see this ring?”
   “Yes.”
   “Do you know its significance?”
   Jessica turned sharply to stare at her son.
   “Your father lies dead in the ruins of Arrakeen,” Kynes said. “You are technically the Duke.”
   “I'm a soldier of the Imperium,” Paul said, “technically a hatchetman.”
   Kynes face darkened. “Even with the Emperor's Sardaukar standing over your father's body?”
   “The Sardaukar are one thing, the legal source of my authority is another,” Paul said.
   “Arrakis has its own way of determining who wears the mantle of authority,” Kynes said.
   And Jessica, turning back to look at him, thought: There's steel in this man that no one has taken the temper out of . . . and we've need of steel. Paul's doing a dangerous thing.
   Paul said: “The Sardaukar on Arrakis are a measure of how much our beloved Emperor feared my father. Now, I will give the Padishah Emperor reasons to fear the–”
   “Lad,” Kynes said, “there are things you don't–”
   “You will address me as Sire or my Lord,” Paul said.
   Gently, Jessica thought.
   Kynes stared at Paul, and Jessica noted the glint of admiration in the planetologist's face, the touch of humor there.
   “Sire,” Kynes said.
   “I am an embarrassment to the Emperor,” Paul said. “I am an embarrassment to all who would divide Arrakis as their spoil. As I live, I shall continue to be such an embarrassment that I stick in their throats and choke them to death!”
   “Words,” Kynes said.
   Paul stared at him. Presently, Paul said: “You have a legend of the Lisan al-Gaib here, the Voice from the Outer World, the one who will lead the Fremen to paradise. Your men have–”
   “Superstition!” Kynes said.
   "Perhaps, "Paul agreed. "Yet perhaps not. Superstitions sometimes have strange roots and stranger branchings."
   “You have a plan,” Kynes said. “This much is obvious . . . Sire.”
   “Could your Fremen provide me with proof positive that the Sardaukar are here in Harkonnen uniform?”
   “Quite likely.”
   “The Emperor will put a Harkonnen back in power here,” Paul said. “Perhaps even Beast Rabban. Let him. Once he has involved himself beyond escaping his guilt, let the Emperor face the possibility of a Bill of Particulars laid before the Landsraad. Let him answer there where–”
   “Paul!” Jessica said.
   “Granted that the Landsraad High Council accepts your case,” Kynes said, “there could be only one outcome: general warfare between the Imperium and the Great Houses.”
   “Chaos,” Jessica said.
   “But I'd present my case to the Emperor,” Paul said, “and give him an alternative to chaos.”
   Jessica spoke in a dry tone: “Blackmail?”
   “One of the tools of statecraft, as you've said yourself,” Paul said, and Jessica heard the bitterness in his voice. “The Emperor has no sons, only daughters.”
   “You'd aim for the throne?” Jessica asked.
   “The Emperor will not risk having the Imperium shattered by total war,” Paul said. “Planets blasted, disorder everywhere–he'll not risk that.”
   “This is a desperate gamble you propose,” Kynes said.
   “What do the Great Houses of the Landsraad fear most?” Paul asked. “They fear most what is happening here right now on Arrakis–the Sardaukar picking them off one by one. That's why there is a Landsraad. This is the glue of the Great Convention. Only in union do they match the Imperial forces.”
   “But they're–”
   “This is what they fear,” Paul said. “Arrakis would become a rallying cry. Each of them would see himself in my father–cut out of the herd and killed.”
   Kynes spoke to Jessica: “Would his plan work?”
   “I'm no Mentat,” Jessica said.
   “But you are Bene Gesserit.”
   She shot a probing stare at him, said: “His plan has good points and bad points . . . as any plan would at this stage. A plan depends as much upon execution as it does upon concept.”
   " 'Law is the ultimate science,' " Paul quoted. “Thus it reads above the Emperor's door. I propose to show him law.”
   “And I'm not sure I could trust the person who conceived this plan,” Kynes said. “Arrakis has its own plan that we–”
   “From the throne,” Paul said, “I could make a paradise of Arrakis with the wave of a hand. This is the coin I offer for your support.”
   Kynes stiffened. “My loyalty's not for sale, Sire.”
   Paul stared across the desk at him, meeting the cold glare of those blue-within-blue eyes, studying the bearded face, the commanding appearance. A harsh smile touched Paul's lips and he said: “Well spoken. I apologize.”
   Kynes met Paul's stare and, presently, said: “No Harkonnen ever admitted error. Perhaps you're not like them, Atreides.”
   “It could be a fault in their education,” Paul said. “You say you're not for sale, but I believe I've the coin you'll accept. For your loyalty I offer my loyalty to you . . . totally.”
   My son has the Atreides sincerity, Jessica thought. He has that tremendous, almost naive honor–and what a powerful force that truly is.
   She saw that Paul's words had shaken Kynes.
   “This is nonsense,” Kynes said. “You're just a boy and–”
   “I'm the Duke,” Paul said. “I'm an Atreides. No Atreides has ever broken such a bond.”
   Kynes swallowed.
   “When I say totally,” Paul said, “I mean without reservation. I would give my life for you.”
   “Sire!” Kynes said, and the word was torn from him, but Jessica saw that he was not now speaking to a boy of fifteen, but to a man, to a superior. Now Kynes meant the word.
   In this moment he'd give his life for Paul, she thought. How do the Atreides accomplish this thing so quickly, so easily?
   “I know you mean this,” Kynes said. “Yet the Harkon–”
   The door behind Paul slammed open. He whirled to see reeling violence–shouting, the clash of steel, wax-image faces grimacing in the passage.
   With his mother beside him, Paul leaped for the door, seeing Idaho blocking the passage, his blood-pitted eyes there visible through a shield blur, claw hands beyond him, arcs of steel chopping futilely at the shield. There was the orange fire-mouth of a stunner repelled by the shield. Idaho's blades were through it all, flick-flicking, red dripping from them.
   Then Kynes was beside Paul and they threw their weight against the door.
   Paul had one last glimpse of Idaho standing against a swarm of Harkonnen uniforms–his jerking, controlled staggers, the black goat hair with a red blossom of death in it. Then the door was closed and there came a snick as Kynes threw the bolts.
   “I appear to've decided,” Kynes said.
   “Someone detected your machinery before it was shut down,” Paul said. He pulled his mother away from the door, met the despair in her eyes.
   “I should've suspected trouble when the coffee failed to arrive,” Kynes said.
   “You've a bolt hole out of here,” Paul said. “Shall we use it?”
   Kynes took a deep breath, said: “This door should hold for at least twenty minutes against all but a lasgun.”
   “They'll not use a lasgun for fear we've shields on this side,” Paul said.
   “Those were Sardaukar in Harkonnen uniform,” Jessica whispered.
   They could hear pounding on the door now, rhythmic blows.
   Kynes indicated the cabinets against the right-hand wall, said: “This way.” He crossed to the first cabinet, opened a drawer, manipulated a handle within it. The entire wall of cabinets swung open to expose the black mouth of a tunnel. “This door also is plasteel,” Kynes said.
   “You were well prepared,” Jessica said.
   “We lived under the Harkonnens for eighty years,” Kynes said. He herded them into the darkness, closed the door.
   In the sudden blackness, Jessica saw a luminous arrow on the floor ahead of her.
   Kynes' voice came from behind them: “We'll separate here. This wall is tougher. It'll stand for at least an hour. Follow the arrows like that one on the floor. They'll be extinguished by your passage. They lead through a maze to another exit where I've secreted a 'thopter. There's a storm across the desert tonight. Your only hope is to run for that storm, dive into the top of it, ride with it. My people have done this in stealing 'thopters. If you stay high in the storm you'll survive.”
   “What of you?” Paul asked.
   “I'll try to escape another way. If I'm captured . . . well, I'm still Imperial Planetologist. I can say I was your captive.”
   Running like cowards, Paul thought. But how else can I live to avenge my father? He turned to face the door.
   Jessica heard him move, said “Duncan's dead, Paul. You saw the wound. You can do nothing for him.”
   “I'll take full payment for them all one day,” Paul said.
   “Not unless you hurry now,” Kynes said.
   Paul felt the man's hand on his shoulder.
   “Where will we meet, Kynes?” Paul asked.
   “I'll send Fremen searching for you. The storm's path is known. Hurry now, and the Great Mother give you speed and luck.”
   They heard him go, a scrambling in the blackness.
   Jessica found Paul's hand, pulled him gently. “We must not get separated,” she said.
   “Yes.”
   He followed her across the first arrow, seeing it go black as they touched it. Another arrow beckoned ahead.
   They crossed it, saw it extinguish itself, saw another arrow ahead.
   They were running now.
   Plans within plans within plans within plans, Jessica thought. Have we become part of someone else's plan now?
   The arrows led them around turnings, past side openings only dimly sensed in the faint luminescence. Their way slanted downward for a time, then up, ever up. They came finally to steps, rounded a corner and were brought short by a glowing wall with a dark handle visible in its center.
   Paul pressed the handle.
   The wall swung away from them. Light flared to reveal a rock-hewn cavern with an ornithopter squatting in its center. A flat gray wall with a doorsign on it loomed beyond the aircraft.
   “Where did Kynes go?” Jessica asked.
   “He did what any good guerrilla leader would,” Paul said. “He separated us into two parties and arranged that he couldn't reveal where we are if he's captured. He won't really know.”
   Paul drew her into the room, noting how their feet kicked up dust on the floor.
   “No one's been here for a long time,” he said.
   “He seemed confident the Fremen could find us,” she said.
   “I share that confidence.”
   Paul released her hand, crossed to the ornithopter's left door, opened it, and secured his pack in the rear. “This ship's proximity masked,” he said. “Instrument panel has remote door control, light control. Eighty years under the Harkonnens taught them to be thorough.”
   Jessica leaned against the craft's other side, catching her breath.
   “The Harkonnens will have a covering force over this area,” she said. “They're not stupid.” She considered her direction sense, pointed right. “The storm we saw is that way.”
   Paul nodded, fighting an abrupt reluctance to move. He knew its cause, but found no help in the knowledge. Somewhere this night he had passed a decision-nexus into the deep unknown. He knew the time-area surrounding them, but the here-and-now existed as a place of mystery. It was as though he had seen himself from a distance go out of sight down into a valley. Of the countless paths up out of that valley, some might carry a Paul Atreides back into sight, but many would not.
   “The longer we wait the better prepared they'll be,” Jessica said.
   “Get in and strap yourself down,” he said.
   He joined her in the ornithopter, still wrestling with the thought that this was blind ground, unseen in any prescient vision. And he realized with an abrupt sense of shock that he had been giving more and more reliance to prescient memory and it had weakened him for this particular emergency.
   “If you rely only on your eyes, your other senses weaken.” It was a Bene Gesserit axiom. He took it to himself now, promising never again to fall into that trap . . . if he lived through this.
   Paul fastened his safety harness, saw that his mother was secure, checked the aircraft. The wings were at full spread-rest, their delicate metal interleavings extended. He touched the retractor bar, watched the wings shorten for jet-boost take-off the way Gurney Halleck had taught him. The starter switch moved easily. Dials on the instrument panel came alive as the jetpods were armed. Turbines began their low hissing.
   “Ready?” he asked.
   “Yes.”
   He touched the remote control for lights.
   Darkness blanketed them.
   His hand was a shadow against the luminous dials as he tripped the remote door control. Grating sounded ahead of them. A cascade of sand swished away to silence. A dusty breeze touched Paul's cheeks. He closed his door, feeling the sudden pressure.
   A wide patch of dust-blurred stars framed in angular darkness appeared where the door-wall had been. Starlight defined a shelf beyond, a suggestion of sand ripples.
   Paul depressed the glowing action-sequence switch on his panel. The wings snapped back and down, hurling the 'thopter out of its nest. Power surged from the jetpods as the wings locked into lift attitude.
   Jessica let her hands ride lightly on the dual controls, feeling the sureness of her son's movements. She was frightened, yet exhilarated. Now, Paul's training is our only hope, she thought. His youth and swiftness.
   Paul fed more power to the jetpods. The 'thopter banked, sinking them into their seats as a dark wall lifted against the stars ahead. He gave the craft more wing, more power. Another burst of lifting wingbeats and they came out over rocks, silver-frosted angles and outcroppings in the starlight. The dust-reddened second moon showed itself above the horizon to their right, defining the ribbon trail of the storm.
   Paul's hands danced over the controls. Wings snicked in to beetle stubs. G-force pulled at their flesh as the craft came around in a tight bank.
   “Jetflares behind us!” Jessica said.
   “I saw them.”
   He slammed the power arm forward.
   Their 'thopter leaped like a frightened animal, surged southwest toward the storm and the great curve of desert. In the near distance, Paul saw scattered shadows telling where the line of rocks ended, the basement complex sinking beneath the dunes. Beyond stretched moonlit fingernail shadows–dunes diminishing one into another.
   And above the horizon climbed the flat immensity of the storm like a wall against the stars.
   Something jarred the 'thopter.
   “Shellburst!” Jessica gasped. “They're using some kind of projectile weapon.”
   She saw a sudden animal grin on Paul's face. “They seem to be avoiding their lasguns,” he said.
   “But we've no shields!”
   “Do they know that?”
   Again the 'thopter shuddered.
   Paul twisted to peer back. “Only one of them appears to be fast enough to keep up with us.”
   He returned his attention to their course, watching the storm wall grow high in front of them. It loomed like a tangible solid.
   “Projectile launchers, rockets, all the ancient weaponry–that's one thing we'll give the Fremen,” Paul whispered.
   “The storm,” Jessica said. “Hadn't you better turn?”
   “What about the ship behind us?”
   “He's pulling up.”
   “Now!”
   Paul stubbed the wings, banked hard left into the deceptively slow boiling of the storm wall, felt his cheeks pull in the G-force.
   They appeared to glide into a slow clouding of dust that grew heavier and heavier until it blotted out the desert and the moon. The aircraft became a long, horizontal whisper of darkness lighted only by the green luminosity of the instrument panel.
   Through Jessica's mind flashed all the warnings about such storms–that they cut metal like butter, etched flesh to bone and ate away the bones. She felt the buffeting of dust-blanketed wind. It twisted them as Paul fought the controls. She saw him chop the power, felt the ship buck. The metal around them hissed and trembled.
   “Sand!” Jessica shouted.
   She saw the negative shake of his head in the light from the panel. “Not much sand this high.”
   But she could feel them sinking deeper into the maelstrom.
   Paul sent the wings to their full soaring length, heard them creak with the strain. He kept his eyes fixed on the instruments, gliding by instinct, fighting for altitude.
   The sound of their passage diminished.
   The 'thopter began rolling off to the left. Paul focused on the glowing globe within the attitude curve, fought his craft back to level flight.
   Jessica had the eerie feeling that they were standing still, that all motion was external. A vague tan flowing against the windows, a rumbling hiss reminded her of the powers around them.
   Winds to seven or eight hundred kilometers an hour, she thought. Adrenaline edginess gnawed at her. I must not fear, she told herself, mouthing the words of the Bene Gesserit litany. Fear is the mind-killer.
   Slowly her long years of training prevailed.
   Calmness returned.
   “We have the tiger by the tail,” Paul whispered. “We can't go down, can't land . . . and I don't think I can lift us out of this. We'll have to ride it out.”
   Calmness drained out of her. Jessica felt her teeth chattering, clamped them together. Then she heard Paul's voice, low and controlled, reciting the litany:
   “Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past me I will turn to see fear's path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”

= = = = = =

   What do you despise? By this are you truly known.
   –from “Manual of Muad'Dib” by the Princess Irulan

   “They are dead, Baron,” said Iakin Nefud, the guard captain. “Both the woman and the boy are certainly dead.”
   The Baron Vladimir Harkonnen sat up in the sleep suspensors of his private quarters. Beyond these quarters and enclosing him like a multishelled egg stretched the space frigate he had grounded on Arrakis. Here in his quarters, though, the ship's harsh metal was disguised with draperies, with fabric paddings and rare art objects.
   “It is a certainty,” the guard captain said. “They are dead.”
   The Baron shifted his gross body in the suspensors, focused his attention on an ebaline statue of a leaping boy in a niche across the room. Sleep faded from him. He straightened the padded suspensor beneath the fat folds of his neck, stared across the single glowglobe of his bedchamber to the doorway where Captain Nefud stood blocked by the pentashield.
   “They're certainly dead, Baron,” the man repeated.
   The Baron noted the trace of semuta dullness in Nefud's eyes. It was obvious the man had been deep within the drug's rapture when he received this report, and had stopped only to take the antidote before rushing here.
   “I have a full report,” Nefud said.
   Let him sweat a little, the Baron thought. One must always keep the tools of statecraft sharp and ready. Power and fear–sharp and ready.
   “Have you seen their bodies?” the Baron rumbled.
   Nefud hesitated.
   “Well?”
   “M'Lord . . . they were seen to dive into a sandstorm . . . winds over eight hundred kilometers. Nothing survives such a storm, m'Lord. Nothing! One of our own craft was destroyed in the pursuit.”
   The Baron stared at Nefud, noting the nervous twitch in the scissors line of the man's jaw muscles, the way the chin moved as Nefud swallowed.
   “You have seen the bodies?” the Baron asked.
   “M'Lord–”
   “For what purpose do you come here rattling your armor?” the Baron roared. “To tell me a thing is certain when it is not? Do you think I'll praise you for such stupidity, give you another promotion?”
   Nefud's face went bone pale.
   Look at the chicken, the Baron thought. I am surrounded by such useless clods. If I scattered sand before this creature and told him it was grain, he'd peek at it.
   “The man Idaho led us to them, then?” the Baron asked.
   “Yes, m'Lord!”
   Look how he blurts out his answer, the Baron thought. He said: “They were attempting to flee to the Fremen, eh?”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   “Is there more to this . . . report?”
   “The Imperial Planetologist, Kynes, is involved, m'Lord. Idaho joined this Kynes under mysterious circumstances . . . I might even say suspicious circumstances.”
   “So?”
   “They . . . ah, fled together to a place in the desert where it's apparent the boy and his mother were hiding. In the excitement of the chase, several of our groups were caught in a lasgun-shield explosion.”
   “How many did we lose?”
   “I'm . . . ah, not sure yet, m'Lord.”
   He's lying, the Baron thought. It must've been pretty bad.
   “The Imperial lackey, this Kynes,” the Baron said. “He was playing a double game, eh?”
   “I'd stake my reputation on it, m'Lord.”
   His reputation!
   “Have the man killed,” the Baron said.
   “M'Lord! Kynes is the Imperial Planetologist, His Majesty's own serv–”
   “Make it look like an accident, then!”
   “M'Lord, there were Sardaukar with our forces in the subjugation of this Fremen nest. They have Kynes in custody now.”
   “Get him away from them. Say I wish to question him.”
   “If they demur?”
   “They will not if you handle it correctly.”
   Nefud swallowed. “Yes, m'Lord.”
   “The man must die,” the Baron rumbled. “He tried to help my enemies.”
   Nefud shifted from one foot to the other.
   “Well?”
   “M'Lord, the Sardaukar have . . . two persons in custody who might be of interest to you. They've caught the Duke's Master of Assassins.”
   “Hawat? Thufir Hawat?”
   “I've seen the captive myself, m'Lord. 'Tis Hawat.”
   “I'd not've believed it possible!”
   “They say he was knocked out by a stunner, m'Lord. In the desert where he couldn't use his shield. He's virtually unharmed. If we can get our hands on him, he'll provide great sport.”
   “This is a Mentat you speak of,” the Baron growled. “One doesn't waste a Mentat. Has he spoken? What does he say of his defeat? Could he know the extent of . . . but no.”
   “He has spoken only enough, m'Lord, to reveal his belief that the Lady Jessica was his betrayer.”
   “Ah-h-h-h-h.”
   The Baron sank back, thinking; then: “You're sure? It's the Lady Jessica who attracts his anger?”
   “He said it in my presence, m'Lord.”
   “Let him think she's alive, then.”
   “But, m'Lord–”
   “Be quiet. I wish Hawat treated kindly. He must be told nothing of the late Doctor Yueh, his true betrayer. Let it be said that Doctor Yueh died defending his Duke. In a way, this may even be true. We will, instead, feed his suspicions against the Lady Jessica.”
   “M'Lord, I don't–”
   “The way to control and direct a Mentat, Nefud, is through his information. False information–false results.”
   "Yes, m'Lord, but . . . "
   “Is Hawat hungry? Thirsty?”
   “M'Lord, Hawat's still in the hands of the Sardaukar!”
   “Yes. Indeed, yes. But the Sardaukar will be as anxious to get information from Hawat as I am. I've noticed a thing about our allies, Nefud. They're not very devious . . .politically. I do believe this is a deliberate thing; the Emperor wants it that way. Yes. I do believe it. You will remind the Sardaukar commander of my renown at obtaining information from reluctant subjects.”
   Nefud looked unhappy. “Yes, m'Lord.”
   “You will tell the Sardaukar commander that I wish to question both Hawat and this Kynes at the same time, playing one off against the other. He can understand that much, I think.”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   "And once we have them in our hands . . . " The Baron nodded.
   “M'Lord, the Sardaukar will want an observer with you during any . . . questioning.”
   “I'm sure we can produce an emergency to draw off any unwanted observers, Nefud.”
   “I understand, m'Lord. That's when Kynes can have his accident.”
   “Both Kynes and Hawat will have accidents then, Nefud. But only Kynes will have a real accident. It's Hawat I want. Yes. Ah, yes.”
   Nefud blinked, swallowed. He appeared about to ask a question, but remained silent.
   “Hawat will be given both food and drink,” the Baron said. “Treated with kindness, with sympathy. In his water you will administer the residual poison developed by the late Piter de Vries. And you will see that the antidote becomes a regular part of Hawat's diet from this point on . . . unless I say otherwise.”
   “The antidote, yes.” Nefud shook his head. “But–”
   “Don't be dense, Nefud. The Duke almost killed me with that poison-capsule tooth. The gas he exhaled into my presence deprived me of my most valuable Mentat, Piter. I need a replacement.”
   “Hawat?”
   “Hawat.”
   “But–”
   “You're going to say Hawat's completely loyal to the Atreides. True, but the Atreides are dead. We will woo him. He must be convinced he's not to blame for the Duke's demise. It was all the doing of that Bene Gesserit witch. He had an inferior master, one whose reason was clouded by emotion. Mentats admire the ability to calculate without emotion, Nefud. We will woo the formidable Thufir Hawat.”
   “Woo him. Yes, m'Lord.”
   “Hawat, unfortunately, had a master whose resources were poor, one who could not elevate a Mentat to the sublime peaks of reasoning that are a Mentat's right. Hawat will see a certain element of truth in this. The Duke couldn't afford the most efficient spies to provide his Mentat with the required information.” The Baron stared at Nefud. “Let us never deceive ourselves, Nefud. The truth is a powerful weapon. We know how we overwhelmed the Atreides. Hawat knows, too. We did it with wealth.”
   “With wealth. Yes, m'Lord.”
   “We will woo Hawat,” the Baron said. “We will hide him from the Sardaukar. And we will hold in reserve . . . the withdrawal of the antidote for the poison. There's no way of removing the residual poison. And, Nefud, Hawat need never suspect. The antidote will not betray itself to a poison snooper. Hawat can scan his food as he pleases and detect no trace of poison.”
   Nefud's eyes opened wide with understanding.
   “The absence of a thing,” the Baron said, “this can be as deadly as the presence. The absence of air, eh? The absence of water? The absence of anything else we're addicted to.” The Baron nodded. “You understand me, Nefud?”
   Nefud swallowed. “Yes, m'Lord.”
   Then get busy. Find the Sardaukar commander and set things in motion."
   “At once, m'Lord.” Nefud bowed, turned, and hurried away.
   Hawat by my side! the Baron thought. The Sardaukar will give him to me. If they suspect anything at all it's that I wish to destroy the Mentat. And this suspicion I'll confirm! The fools! One of the most formidable Mentats in all history, a Mentat trained to kill, and they'll toss him to me like some silly toy to be broken. I will show them what use can be made of such a toy.
   The Baron reached beneath a drapery beside his suspensor bed, pressed a button to summon his older nephew, Rabban. He sat back, smiling.
   And all the Atreides dead!
   The stupid guard captain had been right, of course. Certainly, nothing survived in the path of a sandblast storm on Arrakis. Not an ornithopter . . . or its occupants. The woman and the boy were dead. The bribes in the right places, the unthinkable expenditure to bring overwhelming military force down onto one planet . . . all the sly reports tailored for the Emperor's ears alone, all the careful scheming were here at last coming to full fruition.
   Power and fear–fear and power!
   The Baron could see the path ahead of him. One day, a Harkonnen would be Emperor. Not himself, and no spawn of his loins. But a Harkonnen. Not this Rabban he'd summoned, of course. But Rabban's younger brother, young Feyd-Rautha. There was a sharpness to the boy that the Baron enjoyed . . . a ferocity.
   A lovely boy, the Baron thought. A year or two more–say, by the time he's seventeen, I'll know for certain whether he's the tool that House Harkonnen requires to gain the throne.
   “M'Lord Baron.”
   The man who stood outside the doorfield of the Baron's bedchamber was low built, gross of face and body, with the Harkonnen paternal line's narrow-set eyes and bulge of shoulders. There was yet some rigidity in his fat, but it was obvious to the eye that he'd come one day to the portable suspensors for carrying his excess weight.
   A muscle-minded tank-brain, the Baron thought. No Mentat, my nephew . . . not a Piter de Vries, but perhaps something more precisely devised for the task at hand. If I give him freedom to do it, he'll grind over everything in his path. Oh, how he'll be hated here on Arrakis!
   “My dear Rabban,” the Baron said. He released the doorfield, but pointedly kept his body shield at full strength, knowing that the shimmer of it would be visible above the bedside glowglobe.
   “You summoned me,” Rabban said. He stepped into the room, flicked a glance past the air disturbance of the body shield, searched for a suspensor chair, found none.
   “Stand closer where I can see you easily,” the Baron said.
   Rabban advanced another step, thinking that the damnable old man had deliberately removed all chairs, forcing a visitor to stand.
   “The Atreides are dead,” the Baron said. “The last of them. That's why I summoned you here to Arrakis. This planet is again yours.”
   Rabban blinked. “But I thought you were going to advance Piter de Vries to the–”
   “Piter, too, is dead.”
   “Piter?”
   “Piter.”
   The Baron reactivated the doorfield, blanked it against all energy penetration.
   “You finally tired of him, eh?” Rabban asked.
   His voice fell flat and lifeless in the energy-blanketed room.
   “I will say a thing to you just this once,” the Baron rumbled. “You insinuate that I obliterated Piter as one obliterates a trifle.” He snapped fat fingers. “Just like that, eh? I am not so stupid, Nephew. I will take it unkindly if ever again you suggest by word or action that I am so stupid.”
   Fear showed in the squinting of Rabban's eyes. He knew within certain limits how far the old Baron would go against family. Seldom to the point of death unless there were outrageous profit or provocation in it. But family punishments could be painful.
   “Forgive me, m'Lord Baron,” Rabban said. He lowered his eyes as much to hide his own anger as to show subservience.
   “You do not fool me, Rabban,” the Baron said.
   Rabban kept his eyes lowered, swallowed.
   “I make a point,” the Baron said. “Never obliterate a man unthinkingly, the way an entire fief might do it through some due process of law. Always do it for an overriding purpose–and know your purpose!”
   Anger spoke in Rabban: “But you obliterated the traitor, Yueh! I saw his body being carried out as I arrived last night.”
   Rabban stared at his uncle, suddenly frightened by the sound of those words.
   But the Baron smiled. “I'm very careful about dangerous weapons,” he said. “Doctor Yueh was a traitor. He gave me the Duke.” Strength poured into the Baron's voice. “I suborned a doctor of the Suk School! The Inner School! You hear, boy? But that's a wild sort of weapon to leave lying about. I didn't obliterate him casually.”
   “Does the Emperor know you suborned a Suk doctor?”
   This was a penetrating question, the Baron thought. Have I misjudged this nephew?
   “The Emperor doesn't know it yet,” the Baron said. “But his Sardaukar are sure to report it to him. Before that happens, though, I'll have my own report in his hands through CHOAM Company channels. I will explain that I luckily discovered a doctor who pretended to the conditioning. A false doctor, you understand? Since everyone knows you cannot counter the conditioning of a Suk School, this will be accepted.”
   “Ah-h-h, I see,” Rabban murmured.
   And the Baron thought: Indeed, I hope you do see. I hope you do see how vital it is that this remain secret. The Baron suddenly wondered at himself. Why did I do that? Why did I boast to this fool nephew of mine–the nephew I must use and discard? The Baron felt anger at himself. He felt betrayed.
   “It must be kept secret,” Rabban said. “I understand.”
   The Baron sighed. “I give you different instructions about Arrakis this time, Nephew. When last you ruled this place, I held you in strong rein. This time, I have only one requirement.”
   “M'Lord?”
   “Income.”
   “Income?”
   “Have you any idea, Rabban, how much we spent to bring such military force to bear on the Atreides? Do you have even the first inkling of how much the Guild charges for military transport?”
   “Expensive, eh?”
   “Expensive!”
   The Baron shot a fat arm toward Rabban. “If you squeeze Arrakis for every cent it can give us for sixty years, you'll just barely repay us!”
   Rabban opened his mouth, closed it without speaking.
   “Expensive,” the Baron sneered. “The damnable Guild monopoly on space would've ruined us if I hadn't planned for this expense long ago. You should know, Rabban, that we bore the entire brunt of it. We even paid for transport of the Sardaukar.”
   And not for the first time, the Baron wondered if there ever would come a day when the Guild might be circumvented. They were insidious–bleeding off just enough to keep the host from objecting until they had you in their fist where they could force you to pay and pay and pay.
   Always, the exorbitant demands rode upon military ventures. “Hazard rates,” the oily Guild agents explained. And for every agent you managed to insert as a watchdog in the Guild Bank structure, they put two agents into your system.
   Insufferable!
   “Income then,” Rabban said.
   The Baron lowered his arm, made a fist. “You must squeeze.”
   “And I may do anything I wish as long as I squeeze?”
   “Anything.”
   “The cannons you brought,” Rabban said. “Could I–”
   “I'm removing them,” the Baron said.
   “But you–”
   “You won't need such toys. They were a special innovation and are now useless. We need the metal. They cannot go against a shield, Rabban. They were merely the unexpected. It was predictable that the Duke's men would retreat into cliff caves on this abominable planet. Our cannon merely sealed them in.”
   “The Fremen don't use shields.”
   “You may keep some lasguns if you wish.”
   “Yes, m 'Lord. And I have a free hand.”
   “As long as you squeeze.”
   Rabban's smile was gloating. “I understand perfectly, m'Lord.”
   “You understand nothing perfectly,” the Baron growled. “Let us have that clear at the outset. What you do understand is how to carry out my orders. Has it occurred to you, nephew, that there are at least five million persons on this planet?”
   “Does m'Lord forget that I was his regent-siridar here before? And if m'Lord will forgive me, his estimate may be low. It's difficult to count a population scattered among sinks and pans the way they are here. And when you consider the Fremen of–”
   “The Fremen aren't worth considering!”
   “Forgive me, m'Lord, but the Sardaukar believe otherwise.”
   The Baron hesitated, staring at his nephew. “You know something?”
   “M'Lord had retired when I arrived last night. I . . . ah, took the liberty of contacting some of my lieutenants from . . . ah, before. They've been acting as guides to the Sardaukar. They report that a Fremen band ambushed a Sardaukar force somewhere southeast of here and wiped it out.”
   “Wiped out a Sardaukar force?”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   “Impossible!”
   Rabban shrugged.
   “Fremen defeating Sardaukar,” the Baron sneered.
   “I repeat only what was reported to me,” Rabban said. “It is said this Fremen force already had captured the Duke's redoubtable Thufir Hawat.”
   “Ah-h-h-h-h-h.”
   The Baron nodded, smiling.
   “I believe the report,” Rabban said. “You've no idea what a problem the Fremen were.”
   “Perhaps, but these weren't Fremen your lieutenants saw. They must've been Atreides men trained by Hawat and disguised as Fremen. It's the only possible answer.”
   Again, Rabban shrugged. “Well, the Sardaukar think they were Fremen. The Sardaukar already have launched a program to wipe out all Fremen.”
   “Good!”
   “But–”
   “It'll keep the Sardaukar occupied. And we'll soon have Hawat. I know it! I can feel it! Ah, this has been a day! The Sardaukar off hunting a few useless desert bands while we get the real prize!”
   "M'Lord . . . " Rabban hesitated, frowning. "I've always felt that we underestimated the Fremen, both in numbers and in–"
   “Ignore them, boy! They're rabble. It's the populous towns, cities, and villages that concern us. A great many people there, eh?”
   “A great many, m'Lord.”
   “They worry me, Rabban.”
   “Worry you?”
   “Oh . . . ninety per cent of them are of no concern. But there are always a few . . . Houses Minor and so on, people of ambition who might try a dangerous thing. If one of them should get off Arrakis with an unpleasant story about what happened here, I'd be most displeased. Have you any idea how displeased I'd be?”
   Rabban swallowed.
   “You must take immediate measures to hold a hostage from each House Minor,” the Baron said. “As far as anyone off Arrakis must learn, this was straightforward House-to-House battle. The Sardaukar had no part in it, you understand? The Duke was offered the usual quarter and exile, but he died in an unfortunate accident before he could accept. He was about to accept, though. That is the story. And any rumor that there were Sardaukar here, it must be laughed at.”
   “As the Emperor wishes it,” Rabban said.
   “As the Emperor wishes it.”
   “What about the smugglers?”
   “No one believes smugglers, Rabban. They are tolerated, but not believed. At any rate, you'll be spreading some bribes in that quarter . . . and taking other measures which I'm sure you can think of.”
   “Yes, m'Lord.”
   “Two things from Arrakis, then, Rabban: income and a merciless fist. You must show no mercy here. Think of these clods as what they are–slaves envious of their masters and waiting only the opportunity to rebel. Not the slightest vestige of pity or mercy must you show them.”
   “Can one exterminate an entire planet?” Rabban asked.
   “Exterminate?” Surprise showed in the swift turning of the Baron's head. “Who said anything about exterminating?”
   “Well, I presumed you were going to bring in new stock and–”
   “I said squeeze. Nephew, not exterminate. Don't waste the population, merely drive them into utter submission. You must be the carnivore, my boy.” He smiled, a baby's expression in the dimple-fat face. “A carnivore never stops. Show no mercy. Never stop. Mercy is a chimera. It can be defeated by the stomach rumbling its hunger, by the throat crying its thirst. You must be always hungry and thirsty.” The Baron caressed his bulges beneath the suspensors. “Like me.”
   “I see, m'Lord.”
   Rabban swung his gaze left and right.
   “It's all clear then, Nephew?”
   “Except for one thing. Uncle: the planetologist, Kynes.”
   “Ah, yes, Kynes.”
   “He's the Emperor's man, m'Lord. He can come and go as he pleases. And he's very close to the Fremen . . . married one.”
   “Kynes will be dead by tomorrow's nightfall.”
   “That's dangerous work, Uncle, killing an Imperial servant.”
   “How do you think I've come this far this quickly?” the Baron demanded. His voice was low, charged with unspeakable adjectives. “Besides, you need never have feared Kynes would leave Arrakis. You're forgetting that he's addicted to the spice.”
   “Of course!”
   “Those who know will do nothing to endanger their supply,” the Baron said. “Kynes certainly must know.”
   "I forgot, "Rabban said.
   They stared at each other in silence.
   Presently, the Baron said: “Incidentally, you will make my own supply one of your first concerns. I've quite a stockpile of private stuff, but that suicide raid by the Duke's men got most of what we'd stored for sale.”
   Rabban nodded. “Yes, m'Lord.”
   The Baron brightened. "Now, tomorrow morning, you will assemble what remains of organization here and you'll say to them: 'Our Sublime Padishah Emperor has charged me to take possession of this planet and end all dispute.' "
   “I understand, m'Lord.”
   “This time, I'm sure you do. We will discuss it in more detail tomorrow. Now, leave me to finish my sleep.”
   The Baron deactivated his doorfield, watched his nephew out of sight.
   A tank-brain, the Baron thought. Muscle-minded tank-brain. They will be bloody pulp here when he's through with them. Then, when I send in Feyd-Rautha to take the load off them, they'll cheer their rescuer. Beloved Feyd-Rautha. Benign Feyd-Rautha, the compassionate one who saves them from a beast. Feyd-Rautha, a man to follow and die for. The boy will know by that time how to oppress with impunity. I'm sure he's the one we need. He'll learn. And such a lovely body. Really a lovely boy.

= = = = = =

   At the age of fifteen, he had already learned silence.
   –from “A Child's History of Muad'Dib” by the Princess Irulan

   As Paul fought the 'thopter's controls, he grew aware that he was sorting out the interwoven storm forces, his more than Mentat awareness computing on the basis of fractional minutiae. He felt dust fronts, billowings, mixings of turbulence, an occasional vortex.
   The cabin interior was an angry box lighted by the green radiance of instrument dials. The tan flow of dust outside appeared featureless, but his inner sense began to see through the curtain.
   I must find the right vortex, he thought.
   For a long time now he had sensed the storm's power diminishing, but still it shook them. He waited out another turbulence.
   The vortex began as an abrupt billowing that rattled the entire ship. Paul defied all fear to bank the 'thopter left.
   Jessica saw the maneuver on the attitude globe.
   “Paul!” she screamed.
   The vortex turned them, twisting, tipping. It lifted the 'thopter like a chip on a geyser, spewed them up and out–a winged speck within a core of winding dust lighted by the second moon.
   Paul looked down, saw the dust-defined pillar of hot wind that had disgorged them, saw the dying storm trailing away like a dry river into the desert–moon-gray motion growing smaller and smaller below as they rode the updraft.
   “We're out of it,” Jessica whispered.
   Paul turned their craft away from the dust in swooping rhythm while he scanned the night sky.
   “We've given them the slip,” he said.
   Jessica felt her heart pounding. She forced herself to calmness, looked at the diminishing storm. Her time sense said they had ridden within that compounding of elemental forces almost four hours, but part of her mind computed the passage as a lifetime. She felt reborn.
   It was like the litany, she thought. We faced it and did not resist. The storm passed through us and around us. It's gone, but we remain.
   “I don't like the sound of our wing motion,” Paul said. “We suffered some damage in there.”
   He felt the grating, injured flight through his hands on the controls. They were out of the storm, but still not out into the full view of his prescient vision. Yet, they had escaped, and Paul sensed himself trembling on the verge of a revelation.
   He shivered.
   The sensation was magnetic and terrifying, and he found himself caught on the question of what caused this trembling awareness. Part of it, he felt, was the spice-saturated diet of Arrakis. But he thought part of it could be the litany, as though the words had a power of their own.
   "I shall not fear . . . "
   Cause and effect: he was alive despite malignant forces, and he felt himself poised on a brink of self-awareness that could not have been without the litany's magic.
   Words from the Orange Catholic Bible rang through his memory: “What senses do we lack that we cannot see or hear another world all around us?”
   “There's rock all around,” Jessica said.
   Paul focused on the 'thopter's launching, shook his head to clear it. He looked where his mother pointed, saw uplifting rock shapes black on the sand ahead and to the right. He felt wind around his ankles, a stirring of dust in the cabin. There was a hole somewhere, more of the storm's doing.
   “Better set us down on sand,” Jessica said. “The wings might not take full brake.”
   He nodded toward a place ahead where sandblasted ridges lifted into moonlight above the dunes. “I'll set us down near those rocks. Check your safety harness.”
   She obeyed, thinking: We've water and stillsuits. If we can find food, we can survive a long time on this desert. Fremen live here. What they can do we can do.
   “Run for those rocks the instant we're stopped,” Paul said. “I'll take the pack.”
   "Run for . . . " She fell silent, nodded. "Worms."
   “Our friends, the worms,” he corrected her. “They'll get this 'thopter. There'll be no evidence of where we landed.”
   How direct his thinking, she thought.
   They glided lower . . . lower . . .
   There came a rushing sense of motion to their passage–blurred shadows of dunes, rocks lifting like islands. The 'thopter touched a dune top with a soft lurch, skipped a sand valley, touched another dune.
   He's killing our speed against the sand, Jessica thought, and permitted herself to admire his competence.
   “Brace yourself!” Paul warned.
   He pulled back on the wing brakes, gently at first, then harder and harder. He felt them cup the air, their aspect ratio dropping faster and faster. Wind screamed through the lapped coverts and primaries of the wings' leaves.
   Abruptly, with only the faintest lurch of warning, the left wing, weakened by the storm, twisted upward and in, slamming across the side of the 'thopter. The craft skidded across a dune top, twisting to the left. It tumbled down the opposite face to bury its nose in the next dune amid a cascade of sand. They lay stopped on the broken wing side, the right wing pointing toward the stars.
   Paul jerked off his safety harness, hurled himself upward across his mother, wrenching the door open. Sand poured around them into the cabin, bringing a dry smell of burned flint. He grabbed the pack from the rear, saw that his mother was free of her harness. She stepped up onto the side of the right-hand seat and out onto the 'thopter's metal skin. Paul followed, dragging the pack by its straps.
   “Run!” he ordered.
   He pointed up the dune face and beyond it where they could see a rock tower undercut by sandblast winds.
   Jessica leaped off the 'thopter and ran, scrambling and sliding up the dune. She heard Paul's panting progress behind. They came out onto a sand ridge that curved away toward the rocks.
   “Follow the ridge,” Paul ordered. “It'll be faster.”
   They slogged toward the rocks, sand gripping their feet.
   A new sound began to impress itself on them: a muted whisper, a hissing, an abrasive slithering.
   “Worm,” Paul said.
   It grew louder.
   “Faster!” Paul gasped.
   The first rock shingle, like a beach slanting from the sand, lay no more than ten meters ahead when they heard metal crunch and shatter behind them.
   Paul shifted his pack to his right arm, holding it by the straps. It slapped his side as he ran. He took his mother's arm with his other hand. They scrambled onto the lifting rock, up a pebble-littered surface through a twisted, wind-carved channel. Breath came dry and gasping in their throats.
   “I can't run any farther,” Jessica panted.
   Paul stopped, pressed her into a gut of rock, turned and looked down onto the desert. A mound-in-motion ran parallel to their rock island–moonlit ripples, sand waves, a cresting burrow almost level with Paul's eyes at a distance of about a kilometer. The flattened dunes of its track curved once–a short loop crossing the patch of desert where they had abandoned their wrecked ornithopter.
   Where the worm had been there was no sign of the aircraft.
   The burrow mound moved outward into the desert, coursed back across its own path, questing.
   “It's bigger than a Guild spaceship,” Paul whispered. “I was told worms grew large in the deep desert, but I didn't realize . . . how big.”
   “Nor I,” Jessica breathed.
   Again, the thing turned out away from the rocks, sped now with a curving track toward the horizon. They listened until the sound of its passage was lost in gentle sand stirrings around them.
   Paul took a deep breath, looked up at the moon-frosted escarpment, and quoted from the Kitab al-Ibar: “Travel by night and rest in black shade through the day.” He looked at his mother. “We still have a few hours of night. Can you go on?”
   “In a moment.”
   Paul stepped out onto the rock shingle, shouldered the pack and adjusted its straps. He stood a moment with a paracompass in his hands.
   “Whenever you're ready,” he said.
   She pushed herself away from the rock, feeling her strength return. “Which direction?”
   “Where this ridge leads.” He pointed.
   “Deep into the desert,” she said.
   “The Fremen desert,” Paul whispered.
   And he paused, shaken by the remembered high relief imagery of a prescient vision he had experienced on Caladan. He had seen this desert. But the set of the vision had been subtly different, like an optical image that had disappeared into his consciousness, been absorbed by memory, and now failed of perfect registry when projected onto the real scene. The vision appeared to have shifted and approached him from a different angle while he remained motionless.
   Idaho was with us in the vision, he remembered. But now Idaho is dead.
   “Do you see a way to go?” Jessica asked, mistaking his hesitation.
   “No,” he said, “But we'll go anyway.”
   He settled his shoulders more firmly in the pack, struck out up a sand-carved channel in the rock. The channel opened onto a moonlit floor of rock with benched ledges climbing away to the south.
   Paul headed for the first ledge, clambered onto it. Jessica followed.
   She noted presently how their passage became a matter of the immediate and particular–the sand pockets between rocks where their steps were slowed, the wind-carved ridge that cut their hands, the obstruction that forced a choice: Go over or go around? The terrain enforced its own rhythms. They spoke only when necessary and then with the hoarse voices of their exertion.
   “Careful here–this ledge is slippery with sand.”
   “Watch you don't hit your head against this overhang.”
   “Stay below this ridge; the moon's at our backs and it'd show our movement to anyone out there.”
   Paul stopped in a bight of rock, leaned the pack against a narrow ledge.
   Jessica leaned beside him, thankful for the moment of rest. She heard Paul pulling at his stillsuit tube, sipped her own reclaimed water. It tasted brackish, and she remembered the waters of Caladan–a tall fountain enclosing a curve of sky, such a richness of moisture that it hadn't been noticed for itself . . . only for its shape, or its reflection, or its sound as she stopped beside it.
   To stop, she thought. To rest . . . truly rest.
   It occurred to her that mercy was the ability to stop, if only for a moment. There was no mercy where there could be no stopping.
   Paul pushed away from the rock ledge, turned, and climbed over a sloping surface. Jessica followed with a sigh.
   They slid down onto a wide shelf that led around a sheer rock face. Again, they fell into the disjointed rhythm of movement across this broken land.
   Jessica felt that the night was dominated by degrees of smallness in substances beneath their feet and hands–boulders or pea gravel or flaked rock or pea sand or sand itself or grit or dust or gossamer powder.
   The powder clogged nose filters and had to be blown out. Pea sand and pea gravel rolled on a hard surface and could spill the unwary. Rock flakes cut.
   And the omnipresent sand patches dragged against their feet.
   Paul stopped abruptly on a rock shelf, steadied his mother as she stumbled into him.
   He was pointing left and she looked along his arm to see that they stood atop a cliff with the desert stretched out like a static ocean some two hundred meters below. It lay there full of moon-silvered waves–shadows of angles that lapsed into curves and, in the distance, lifted to the misted gray blur of another escarpment.
   “Open desert,” she said.
   “A wide place to cross,” Paul said, and his voice was muffled by the filter trap across his face.
   Jessica glanced left and right–nothing but sand below.
   Paul stared straight ahead across the open dunes, watching the movement of shadows in the moon's passage. “About three or four kilometers across,” he said.
   “Worms,” she said.
   “Sure to be.”
   She focused on her weariness, the muscle ache that dulled her senses. “Shall we rest and eat?”
   Paul slipped out of the pack, sat down and leaned against it. Jessica supported herself by a hand on his shoulder as she sank to the rock beside him. She felt Paul turn as she settled herself, heard him scrabbling in the pack.
   “Here,” he said.
   His hand felt dry against hers as he pressed two energy capsules into her palm
   She swallowed them with a grudging spit of water from her stillsuit tube.
   “Drink all your water,” Paul said. “Axiom: the best place to conserve your water is in your body. It keeps your energy up. You're stronger. Trust your stillsuit.”
   She obeyed, drained her catchpockets, feeling energy return. She thought then how peaceful it was here in this moment of their tiredness, and she recalled once hearing the minstrel-warrior Gurney Halleck say, “Better a dry morsel and quietness therewith than a house full of sacrifice and strife.”
   Jessica repeated the words to Paul.
   “That was Gurney,” he said.
   She caught the tone of his voice, the way he spoke as of someone dead, thought: And well poor Gurney might be dead. The Atreides forces were either dead or captive or lost like themselves in this waterless void.
   "Gurney always had the right quotation," Paul said. "I can hear him now: 'And I will make the rivers dry, and sell the land into the hand of the wicked; and I will make the land waste, and all that is therein, by the hand of strangers.' "
   Jessica closed her eyes, found herself moved close to tears by the pathos in her son's voice.
   Presently, Paul said: “How do you . . . feel?”
   She recognized that his question was directed at her pregnancy, said: “Your sister won't be born for many months yet. I still feel . . . physically adequate.”
   And she thought: How stiffly formal I speak to my own son! Then, because it was the Bene Gesserit way to seek within for the answer to such an oddity, she searched and found the source of her formality: I'm afraid of my son; I fear his strangeness; I fear what he may see ahead of us, what he may tell me.
   Paul pulled his hood down over his eyes, listened to the bug-hustling sounds of the night. His lungs were charged with his own silence. His nose itched. He rubbed it, removed the filter and grew conscious of the rich smell of cinnamon.
   “There's melange spice nearby,” he said.
   An eider wind feathered Paul's cheeks, ruffled the folds of his burnoose. But this wind carried no threat of storm; already he could sense the difference.
   “Dawn soon,” he said.
   Jessica nodded.
   “There's a way to get safely across that open sand,” Paul said. “The Fremen do it.”
   “The worms?”
   “If we were to plant a thumper from our Fremkit back in the rocks here,” Paul said. “It'd keep a worm occupied for a time.”
   She glanced at the stretch of moonlighted desert between them and the other escarpment. “Four kilometers worth of time?”
   "Perhaps. And if we crossed there making only natural sounds, the kind that don't attract the worms . . . "
   Paul studied the open desert, questing in his prescient memory, probing the mysterious allusions to thumpers and maker hooks in the Fremkit manual that had come with their escape pack. He found it odd that all he sensed was pervasive terror at thought of the worms. He knew as though it lay just at the edge of his awareness that the worms were to be respected and not feared . . . if . . . if . . .
   He shook his head.
   “It'd have to be sounds without rhythm,” Jessica said.
   “What? Oh. Yes. If we broke our steps . . . the sand itself must shift down at times. Worms can't investigate every little sound. We should be fully rested before we try it, though.”
   He looked across at that other rock wall, seeing the passage of time in the vertical moonshadows there. “It'll be dawn within the hour.”
   “Where'll we spend the day?” she asked.
   Paul turned left, pointed. “The cliff curves back north over there. You can see by the way it's wind-cut that's the windward face. There'll be crevasses there, deep ones.”
   “Had we better get started?” she asked.
   He stood, helped her to her feet. “Are you rested enough for a climb down? I want to get as close as possible to the desert floor before we camp.”
   “Enough.” She nodded for him to lead the way.
   He hesitated, then lifted the pack, settled it onto his shoulders and turned along the cliff.
   If only we had suspensors, Jessica thought. It'd be such a simple matter to jump down there. But perhaps suspensors are another thing to avoid in the open desert. Maybe they attract the worms the way a shield does.
   They came to a series of shelves dropping down and, beyond them, saw a fissure with its ledge outlined by moonshadow leading along the vestibule.
   Paul led the way down, moving cautiously but hurrying because it was obvious the moonlight could not last much longer. They wound down into a world of deeper and deeper shadows. Hints of rock shape climbed to the stars around them. The fissure narrowed to some ten meters' width at the brink of a dim gray sandslope that slanted downward into darkness.
   “Can we do down?” Jessica whispered.
   “I think so.”
   He tested the surface with one foot.
   “We can slide down,” he said. “I'll go first. Wait until you hear me stop.”
   “Careful,” she said.
   He stepped onto the slope and slid and slipped down its soft surface onto an almost level floor of packed sand. The place was deep within the rock walls.
   There came the sound of sand sliding behind him. He tried to see up the slope in the darkness, was almost knocked over by the cascade. It trailed away to silence.
   “Mother?” he said.
   There was no answer.
   “Mother?”
   He dropped the pack, hurled himself up the slope, scrambling, digging, throwing sand like a wild man. “Mother!” he gasped. “Mother, where are you?”
   Another cascade of sand swept down on him, burying him to the hips. He wrenched himself out of it.
   She's been caught in the sandslide, he thought. Buried in it. I must be calm and work this out carefully. She won't smother immediately. She'll compose herself in bindu suspension to reduce her oxygen needs. She knows I'll dig for her.
   In the Bene Gesserit way she had taught him, Paul stilled the savage beating of his heart, set his mind as a blank slate upon which the past few moments could write themselves. Every partial shift and twist of the slide replayed itself in his memory, moving with an interior stateliness that contrasted with the fractional second of real time required for the total recall.
   Presently, Paul moved slantwise up the slope, probing cautiously until he found the wall of the fissure, an outcurve of rock there. He began to dig, moving the sand with care not to dislodge another slide. A piece of fabric came under his hands. He followed it, found an arm. Gently, he traced the arm, exposed her face.
   “Do you hear me?” he whispered.
   No answer.
   He dug faster, freed her shoulders. She was limp beneath his hands, but he detected a slow heartbeat.
   Bindu suspension, he told himself.
   He cleared the sand away to her waist, draped her arms over his shoulders and pulled downslope, slowly at first, then dragging her as fast as he could, feeling the sand give way above. Faster and faster he pulled her, gasping with the effort, fighting to keep his balance. He was out on the hard-packed floor of the fissure then, swinging her to his shoulder and breaking into a staggering run as the entire sandslope came down with a loud hiss that echoed and was magnified within the rock walls.
   He stopped at the end of the fissure where it looked out on the desert's marching dunes some thirty meters below. Gently, he lowered her to the sand, uttered the word to bring her out of the catalepsis.
   She awakened slowly, taking deeper and deeper breaths.
   “I knew you'd find me,” she whispered.
   He looked back up the fissure. “It might have been kinder if I hadn't.”
   “Paul!”
   “I lost the pack,” he said. “It's buried under a hundred tons of sand . . . at least.”
   “Everything?”
   “The spare water, the stilltent–everything that counts.” He touched a pocket. “I still have the paracompass.” He fumbled at the waist sash. “Knife and binoculars. We can get a good look around the place where we'll die.”
   In that instant, the sun lifted above the horizon somewhere to the left beyond the end of the fissure. Colors blinked in the sand out on the open desert. A chorus of birds held forth their songs from hidden places among the rocks.
   But Jessica had eyes only for the despair in Paul's face. She edged her voice with scorn, said: “Is this the way you were taught?”
   “Don't you understand?” he asked. “Everything we need to survive in this place is under that sand.”
   “You found me,” she said, and now her voice was soft, reasonable.
   Paul squatted back on his heels.
   Presently, he looked up the fissure at the new slope, studying it, marking the looseness of the sand.
   “If we could immobilize a small area of that slope and the upper face of a hole dug into the sand, we might be able to put down a shaft to the pack. Water might do it, but we don't have enough water for . . .” He broke off, then: “Foam.”
   Jessica held herself to stillness lest she disturb the hyper-functioning of his mind.
   Paul looked out at the open dunes, searching with his nostrils as well as his eyes, finding the direction and then centering his attention on a darkened patch of sand below them.
   “Spice,” he said. “Its essence–highly alkaline. And I have the paracompass. Its power pack is acid-base.”
   Jessica sat up straight against the rock.
   Paul ignored her, leaped to his feet, and was off down the wind-compacted surface that spilled from the end of the fissure to the desert's floor.
   She watched the way he walked, breaking his stride–step . . . pause, step-step . . . slide . . . pause . . .
   There was no rhythm to it that might tell a marauding worm something not of the desert moved here.
   Paul reached the spice patch, shoveled a mound of it into a fold of his robe, returned to the fissure. He spilled the spice onto the sand in front of Jessica, squatted and began dismantling the paracompass, using the point of his knife. The compass face came off. He removed his sash, spread the compass parts on it, lifted out the power pack. The dial mechanism came out next, leaving an empty dished compartment in the instrument.
   “You'll need water,” Jessica said.
   Paul took the catchtube from his neck, sucked up a mouthful, expelled it into the dished compartment.
   If this fails, that's water wasted, Jessica thought. But it won't matter then, anyway.
   With his knife, Paul cut open the power pack, spilled its crystals into the water. They foamed slightly, subsided.
   Jessica's eyes caught motion above them. She looked up to see a line of hawks along the rim of the fissure. They perched there staring down at the open water.
   Great Mother! she thought. They can sense water even at that distance!
   Paul had the cover back on the paracompass, leaving off the reset button which gave a small hole into the liquid. Taking the reworked instrument in one hand, a handful of spice in the other, Paul went back up the fissure, studying the lay of the slope. His robe billowed gently without the sash to hold it. He waded part way up the slope, kicking off sand rivulets, spurts of dust.
   Presently, he stopped, pressed a pinch of the spice into the paracompass, shook the instrument case.
   Green foam boiled out of the hole where the reset button had been. Paul aimed it at the slope, spread a low dike there, began kicking away the sand beneath it, immobilizing the opened face with more foam.
   Jessica moved to a position below him, called out: “May I help?”
   “Come up and dig,” he said. “We've about three meters to go. It's going to be a near thing.” As he spoke, the foam stopped billowing from the instrument.
   “Quickly,” Paul said. “No telling how long this foam will hold the sand.”
   Jessica scrambled up beside Paul as he sifted another pinch of spice into the hole, shook the paracompass case. Again, foam boiled from it.
   As Paul directed the foam barrier, Jessica dug with her hands, hurling the sand down the slope. “How deep?” she panted.
   “About three meters,” he said. “And I can only approximate the position. We may have to widen this hole.” He moved a step aside, slipping in loose sand. “Slant your digging backward. Don't go straight down.”
   Jessica obeyed.
   Slowly, the hole went down, reaching a level even with the floor of the basin and still no sign of the pack.
   Could I have miscalculated? Paul asked himself. I'm the one that panicked originally and caused this mistake. Has that warped my ability?
   He looked at the paracompass. Less than two ounces of the acid infusion remained.
   Jessica straightened in the hole, rubbed a foam-stained hand across her cheek. Her eyes met Paul's.
   “The upper face,” Paul said. “Gently, now.” He added another pinch of spice to the container, sent the foam boiling around Jessica's hands as she began cutting a vertical face in the upper slant of the hole. On the second pass, her hands encountered something hard. Slowly, she worked out a length of strap with a plastic buckle.
   “Don't move any more of it,” Paul said and his voice was almost a whisper.
   “We're out of foam.”
   Jessica held the strap in one hand, looked up at him.
   Paul threw the empty paracompass down onto the floor of the basin, said: “Give me your other hand. Now listen carefully. I'm going to pull you to the side and downhill. Don't let go of that strap. We won't get much more spill from the top. This slope has stabilized itself. All I'm going to aim for is to keep your head free of the sand. Once that hole's filled, we can dig you out and pull up the pack.”
   “I understand,” she said.
   “Ready?”
   “Ready.” She tensed her fingers on the strap.
   With one surge, Paul had her half out of the hole, holding her head up as the foam barrier gave way and sand spilled down. When it had subsided, Jessica remained buried to the waist, her left arm and shoulder still under the sand, her chin protected on a fold of Paul's robe. Her shoulder ached from the strain put on it.
   “I still have the strap,” she said.
   Slowly, Paul worked his hand into the sand beside her, found the strap. “Together,” he said. “Steady pressure. We mustn't break it.”
   More sand spilled down as they worked the pack up. When the strap cleared the surface, Paul stopped, freed his mother from the sand. Together then they pulled the pack downslope and out of its trap.
   In a few minutes they stood on the floor of the fissure holding the pack between them.
   Paul looked at his mother. Foam stained her face, her robe. Sand was caked to her where the foam had dried. She looked as though she had been a target for balls of wet, green sand.
   “You look a mess,” he said.
   “You're not so pretty yourself,” she said.
   They started to laugh, then sobered.
   “That shouldn't have happened,” Paul said. “I was careless.”
   She shrugged, feeling caked sand fall away from her robe.
   “I'll put up the tent,” he said. “Better slip off that robe and shake it out.” He turned away, taking the pack.
   Jessica nodded, suddenly too tired to answer.
   “There's anchor holes in the rock,” Paul said. “Someone's tented here before.”
   Why not? she thought as she brushed at her robe. This was a likely place–deep in rock walls and facing another cliff some four kilometers away–far enough above the desert to avoid worms but close enough for easy access before a crossing.
   She turned, seeing that Paul had the tent up, its rib-domed hemisphere blending with the rock walls of the fissure. Paul stepped past her, lifting his binoculars. He adjusted their internal pressure with a quick twist, focused the oil lenses on the other cliff lifting golden tan in morning light across open sand.
   Jessica watched as he studied that apocalyptic landscape, his eyes probing into sand rivers and canyons.
   “There are growing things over there,” he said.
   Jessica found the spare binoculars in the pack beside the tent, moved up beside Paul.
   “There,” he said, holding the binoculars with one hand and pointing with the other.
   She looked where he pointed.
   “Saguaro,” she said. “Scrawny stuff.”
   “There may be people nearby,” Paul said.
   “That could be the remains of a botanical testing station,” she warned.
   “This is pretty far south into the desert,” he said. He lowered his binoculars, rubbed beneath his filter baffle, feeling how dry and chapped his lips were, sensing the dusty taste of thirst in his mouth. “This has the feeling of a Fremen place,” he said.
   “Are we certain the Fremen will be friendly?” she asked.
   “Kynes promised their help.”
   But there's desperation in the people of this desert, she thought. I felt some of it myself today. Desperate people might kill us for our water.
   She closed her eyes and, against this wasteland, conjured in her mind a scene from Caladan. There had been a vacation trip once on Caladan–she and the Duke Leto, before Paul's birth. They'd flown over the southern jungles, above the weed-wild shouting leaves and rice paddies of the deltas. And they had seen the ant lines in the greenery–man-gangs carrying their loads on suspensor-buoyed shoulder poles. And in the sea reaches there'd been the white petals of trimaran dhows.
   All of it gone.
   Jessica opened her eyes to the desert stillness, to the mounting warmth of the day. Restless heat devils were beginning to set the air aquiver out on the open sand. The other rock face across from them was like a thing seen through cheap glass.
   A spill of sand spread its brief curtain across the open end of the fissure. The sand hissed down, loosed by puffs of morning breeze, by the hawks that were beginning to lift away from the clifftop. When the sandfall was gone, she still heard it hissing. It grew louder, a sound that once heard, was never forgotten.
   “Worm,” Paul whispered.
   It came from their right with an uncaring majesty that could not be ignored. A twisting burrow-mound of sand cut through the dunes within their field of vision. The mound lifted in front, dusting away like a bow wave in water. Then it was gone, coursing off to the left.
   The sound diminished, died.
   “I've seen space frigates that were smaller,” Paul whispered.
   She nodded, continuing to stare across the desert. Where the worm had passed there remained that tantalizing gap. It flowed bitterly endless before them, beckoning beneath its horizontal collapse of skyline.
   “When we've rested,” Jessica said, “we should continue with your lessons.”
   He suppressed a sudden anger, said: “Mother, don't you think we could do without . . .”
   “Today you panicked,” she said. “You know your mind and bindu-nervature perhaps better than I do, but you've much yet to learn about your body's prana-musculature. The body does things of itself sometimes, Paul, and I can teach you about this. You must learn to control every muscle, every fiber of your body. You need review of the hands. We'll start with finger muscles, palm tendons, and tip sensitivity.” She turned away. “Come, into the tent, now.”
   He flexed the fingers of his left hand, watching her crawl through the sphincter valve, knowing that he could not deflect her from this determination . . . that he must agree.
   Whatever has been done to me, I've been a party to it, he thought.
   Review of the hand!
   He looked at his hand. How inadequate it appeared when measured against such creatures as that worm.