"Before it starts calling . . . a . . . worm."
"Oh. I'm ready to go."
He slipped away from her side and she heard his progress back up their fissure.
The night is a tunnel, she thought, a hole into tomorrow . . . if we 're to have a tomorrow. She shook her head. Why must I be so morbid? I was trained better than that!
Paul returned, took up the pack, led the way down to the first spreading dune where he stopped and listened as his mother came up behind him. He heard her soft progress and the cold single-grain dribbles of sound--the desert's own code spelling out its measure of safety.
"We must walk without rhythm," Paul said and he called up memory of men walking the sand . . . both prescient memory and real memory.
"Watch how I do it," he said. "This is how Fremen walk the sand."
He stepped out onto the windward face of the dune, following the curve of it, moved with a dragging pace.
Jessica studied his progress for ten steps, followed, imitating him. She saw the sense of it: they must sound like the natural shifting of sand . . . like the wind. But muscles protested this unnatural, broken pattern: Step . . . drag
. . . drag . . . step . . . step . . . wait . . . drag . . . step . . .
Time stretched out around them. The rock face ahead seemed to grow no nearer. The one behind still lowered high.
"Lump! Lump! Lump! Lump!"
It was a drumming from the cliff behind.
"The thumper," Paul hissed.
Its pounding continued and they found difficulty avoiding the rhythm of it in their stride.
"Lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . ."
They moved in a moonlit bowl punctured by that hollowed thumping. Down and up through spilling dunes: step . . .drag . . . wait . . . step . . . Across pea sand that rolled under their feet: drag . . . wait . . . step . . .
And all the while their ears searched for a special hissing.
The sound, when it came, started so low that their own dragging passage masked it. But it grew . . . louder and louder . . . out of the west.
"Lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . lump . . . " drummed the thumper.
The hissing approach spread across the night behind them. They turned their heads as they walked, saw the mound of the coursing worm.
"Keep moving," Paul whispered. "Don't look back."
A grating sound of fury exploded from the rock shadows they had left. It was a flailing avalanche of noise.
"Keep moving," Paul repeating.
He saw that they had reached an unmarked point where the two rock faces--the one ahead and the one behind--appeared equally remote.
And still behind them, that whipping, frenzied tearing of rocks dominated the night.
They moved on and on and on . . . Muscles reached a stage of mechanical aching that seemed to stretch out indefinitely, but Paul saw that the beckoning, escarpment ahead of them had climbed higher.
Jessica moved in a void of concentration, aware that the pressure of her will alone kept her walking. Dryness ached in her mouth, but the sounds behind drove away all hope of stopping for a sip from her stillsuit's catchpockets.
"Lump . . . lump . . . "
Renewed frenzy erupted from the distant cliff, drowning out the thumper.
Silence!
"Faster," Paul whispered.
She nodded, knowing he did not see the gesture, but needing the action to tell herself that it was necessary to demand even more from muscles that already were being taxed to their limits--the unnatural movement . . .
The rock face of safety ahead of them climbed into the stars, and Paul saw a plane of flat sand stretching out at the base. He stepped onto it, stumbled in his fatigue, righted himself with an involuntary out-thrusting of a foot.
Resonant booming shook the sand around them.
Paul lurched sideways two steps.
"Boom! Boom!"
"Drum sand!" Jessica hissed.
Paul recovered his balance. A sweeping glance took in the sand around them, the rock escarpment perhaps two hundred meters away.
Behind them, he heard a hissing--like the wind, like a riptide where there was no water.
