Freddy looked up at him, troubled, uncertain. "I think she is. She's lying down near the bottom of the dune, right where it slopes up again toward another dune. It's like one, big, hollow dune. I didn't see her move. I guess she must have fainted. He's there, too, lying face down in the sand halfway up the dune, like he was hurt...."
"All right," Corriston said. "Now you'd better stay here with your father."
"Can't I go back with you? I was afraid to climb down to her alone. I was afraid he'd catch me and kill me, and then no one would ever know I'd found her. He'd be warned and try to get away—"
"It was the right thing to do, the level-headed thing," Corriston said. "You couldn't have used better judgment."
"Then it's all right if I go back with you?"
Corriston shook his head. "No, Freddy. I'd rather you didn't. Don't you understand? You've done more than your share. Now it's my turn."
Freddy tightened his lips and stared for a moment at the glitter of sunlight on the caterpillar tread of the nearest tractor. Finally he said, "All right, Lieutenant Corriston. If it's an order."
"It's an order, Freddy."
Corriston gave Freddy's shoulder a pat. Then, after the briefest pause, he said: "There's no substitute for the kind of fast-thinking resourcefulness you've just displayed, Freddy. In a dozen years you'll be heading an expedition and it won't be the kind that gets bogged down after the first thousand miles. You can take my word for that."
He turned then and walked toward the ship. In a moment he had passed the ship and was moving out into the desert beyond, and Freddy wondered how a man could remain so calm in an affair of life and death such as this. It was just as well, perhaps, that he could not see Corriston's face as he moved still further away from the ship into a loneliness of desert and sky.