"You talk to him, Corriston," he said. "You've been living through a short stretch of hell. If he's really found her—"
Corriston needed no urging. He swayed a little forward, steadied himself and broke into a run, meeting Freddy almost midway between the nearest tractor and the hollow where Drever was crouching.
Freddy's eyes seemed almost too large for so young a face, large and immensely serious. But along with the seriousness Corriston could sense something else, a taper glow of excitement burning bright.
Freddy had gone exploring. As he told Corriston about it, the words seemed to flow from him as if they had a mysterious life of their own, and were somehow reshaping Freddy, making him over into a grown man with a heavy stubble of beard and eyes that had looked on far places and a thousand brilliant suns.
Freddy had found Helen Ramsey by following her footprints in the sand. Corriston let Freddy tell it in his own words, shaken by doubts for a moment, but finally convinced that the lad couldn't possibly be making any of it up.
"There wasn't a footprint anywhere near the ship, Lieutenant Corriston. The sandstorm covered them over. I looked everywhere just to be sure. I mean there wasn't any prints that could have been made by a woman leaving the ship with a man. The sand was trampled in a few places, because about ten minutes ago Mr. Macklin and two other men started looking too. But that was all.
"I remembered then that the sand sometimes stays nearly smooth close to very high dunes, even in a storm. There's a—a windbreaking buffer zone where the dunes keep the sand from piling up. I asked Mr. Macklin about that once and he told me. I got to thinking that if I just wandered off I could be back again before anyone missed me."
Freddy turned and gestured toward the ship. "You can see the dunes from here. Not the ones right behind the ship. Those two bigger ones over there ... that sort of look like the humps on a camel. I guess nobody would have been crazy enough to go looking for prints that far away from the ship. But if I hadn't done it I wouldn't have found her. That's for sure."
Corriston said: "You're so much the opposite of crazy, Freddy, that I'm afraid you're trying to spare me. It's hard to hurt someone you like, but I've got to have the truth."
His hand tightened on Freddy's shoulder. "Do you understand, Freddy? I must know. Don't lie to spare me. Is she all right?"