Dune

It was only Stilgar moving like a war machine, head thrust forward, feet striking the street solidly.

Swiftly, Paul explained the value of the dwarf, handed Bijaz over to Stilgar. The pace of the vision moved here with great rapidity. Stilgar sped away with Bijaz. Security Guards enveloped Paul. Orders were given to send men down the street toward the house beyond Otheym’s. The men hurried to obey, shadows among shadows.

More sacrifices, Paul thought.

“We want live prisoners,” one of the guard officers hissed.

The sound was a vision-echo in Paul’s ears. It went with solid precision here—vision/reality, tick for tick. Ornithopters drifted down across the moon.

The night was full of Imperial troopers attacking.

A soft hiss grew out of the other sounds, climbed to a roar while they still heard the sibilance. It picked up a terra-cotta glow that hid the stars, engulfed the moon.

Paul, knowing that sound and glow from the earliest nightmare glimpses of his vision, felt an odd sense of fulfillment. It went the way it must.

“Stone burner!” someone screamed.

“Stone burner!” The cry was all around him. “Stone burner . . . stone burner . . .”

Because it was required of him, Paul threw a protective arm across his face, dove for the low lip of a curb. It already was too late, of course.

Where Otheym’s house had been there stood now a pillar of fire, a blinding jet roaring at the heavens. It gave off a dirty brilliance which threw into sharp relief every ballet movement of the fighting and fleeing men, the tipping retreat of ornithopters.

For every member of this frantic throng it was too late.

The ground grew hot beneath Paul. He heard the sound of running stop. Men threw themselves down all around him, every one of them aware that there was no point in running. The first damage had been done; and now they must wait out the extent of the stone burner’s potency. The things’s radiation, which no man could outrun, already had penetrated their flesh. The peculiar result of stone-burner radiation already was at work in them. What else this weapon might do now lay in the planning of the men who had used it, the men who had defied the Great Convention to use it.

“God’s . . . a stone burner,” someone whimpered. “I . . . don’t . . . want . . . to . . . be . . . blind.”

“Who does?” The harsh voice of a trooper far down the street.

“The Tleilaxu will sell many eyes here,” someone near Paul growled. “Now, shut up and wait!”

They waited.

Paul remained silent, thinking what this weapon implied. Too much fuel in it and it’d cut its way into the planet’s core. Dune’s molten level lay deep, but the more dangerous for that. Such pressures released and out of control might split a planet, scattering lifeless bits and pieces through space.

“I think it’s dying down a bit,” someone said.

“It’s just digging deeper,” Paul cautioned. “Stay put, all of you. Stilgar will be sending help.”

“Stilgar got away?”

“Stilgar got away.”

“The ground’s hot,” someone complained.

“They dared use atomics!” a trooper near Paul protested.

“The sound’s diminishing,” someone down the street said.

Paul ignored the words, concentrated on his fingertips against the street. He could feel the rolling-rumbling of the thing—deep . . . deep . . .

“My eyes!” someone cried. “I can’t see!”

Someone closer to it than I was, Paul thought. He still could see to the end of the cul-de-sac when he lifted his head, although there was a mistiness across the scene. A red-yellow glow filled the area where Otheym’s house and its neighbor had been. Pieces of adjoining buildings made dark patterns as they crumbled into the glowing pit.

Paul climbed to his feet. He felt the stone burner die, silence beneath him. His body was wet with perspiration against the stillsuit’s slickness—too much for the suit to accommodate. The air he drew into his lungs carried the heat and sulfur stench of the burner.

As he looked at the troopers beginning to stand up around him, the mist on Paul’s eyes faded into darkness. He summoned up his oracular vision of these moments, then, turned and strode along the track that Time had carved for him, fitting himself into the vision so tightly that it could not escape. He felt himself grow aware of this place as a multitudinous possession, reality welded to prediction.

Moans and groans of his troopers arose all around him as the men realized their blindness.

“Hold fast!” Paul shouted. “Help is coming!” And, as the complaints persisted, he said: “This is Muad’Dib! I command you to hold fast! Help comes!”

Silence.

Then, true to his vision, a nearby guardsman said: “Is it truly the Emperor? Which of you can see? Tell me.”

“None of us has eyes,” Paul said. “They have taken my eyes, as well, but not my vision. I can see you standing there, a dirty wall within touching distance on your left. Now wait bravely. Stilgar comes with our friends.”