Over a razor-edged horizon the shimmering atmosphere was filled with pastel colors of sunrise. In a brief instant the clean stillness of Arrakis allowed warm light to flood over the wrinkled landscape . . . a sudden deluge of brightness and rising heat. The white sun lurched above the horizon, without much precursor glow in the arid air.

Now that he had finally arrived on the desert world, Pardot Kynes drew a deep breath, then remembered to put the face mask over his nose and mouth to prevent extreme moisture loss. His sparse, sandy hair blew in a light breeze. He had only been on Arrakis four days, and already he sensed that this barren place held more mysteries than a lifetime could ever unravel.

He would have preferred to have been left to his own devices. He wanted to wander alone across the Great Bled with his instruments and logbooks, studying the character of lava rock and the stratified layers of dunes.

However, when Glossu Rabban, nephew of the Baron and heir apparent to House Harkonnen, announced his intention to go into the deep desert to hunt one of the legendary sandworms, such an opportunity was too great for Kynes to ignore.

As a mere Planetologist in the entourage, a scientist instead of a warrior, he felt like the odd man out. Harkonnen desert troops brought along weaponry and explosives from the armored central keep. They took a troop transport led by a man named Thekar, who claimed to have once lived in a desert village, though he was now a water merchant in Carthag. He had more of a Fremen look to him than he admitted, though none of the Harkonnens seemed to notice.

Rabban had no specific plan for tracking one of the huge sinuous beasts. He didn’t want to go to a spice-harvesting site, where his crew might disrupt the work. He wanted to hunt down and kill such a beast by himself. He just brought along all the weaponry he could imagine and relied upon his instinctive talent for destruction. . . .

Days earlier, Kynes had arrived on Arrakis by diplomatic shuttle, landing in the dirty though relatively new city. Eager to get started, he had presented his Imperial assignment papers to the Baron himself. The lean, red-haired man had scrutinized Kynes’s orders carefully, then verified the Imperial seal. He pursed his thick lips before he grudgingly promised his cooperation. “So long as you know enough to stay out of the way of real work.”

Kynes had bowed. “I like nothing better than to be alone and out of the way, m’Lord Baron.”

He’d spent his first two days in the city purchasing desert gear, talking to people from the outlying villages, learning what he could about the legends of the desert, the warnings, the customs, the mysteries to explore. Understanding the importance of such things, Kynes spent a substantial sum to obtain the best stillsuit he could find for desert survival, as well as a paracompass, water distilleries, and reliable note-keeping devices.

It was said that many tribes of the enigmatic Fremen lived in the trackless wastes. Kynes wanted to talk with them, to understand how they squeezed survival from such a harsh environment. But the out-of-place Fremen seemed reticent within the boundaries of Carthag, and they hurried away whenever he tried to talk with them. . . .

Kynes didn’t much care for the city himself. House Harkonnen had erected the new headquarters en masse when, four decades earlier, Guild manipulations had given them Arrakis as a quasi-fief to govern. Carthag had been built with the rapidity of inexhaustible human labor, without finesse or attention to detail: blocky buildings constructed of substandard materials for ostentatious purposes or functionality. No elegance whatsoever.

Carthag did not appear to belong here; its architecture and placement were offensive to his sensibilities. Kynes had an innate ability to see how the fabric of an ecosystem meshed, how the pieces fit together in a natural world. But this population center was wrong, like a pustule on the skin of the planet.

Another outpost to the southwest, Arrakeen, was a more primitive city that had grown slowly, naturally, nestled against a mountainous barrier called the Shield Wall. Perhaps Kynes should have gone there first. But political requirements had forced him to establish his base with the rulers of the planet.

At least that had given him the opportunity to search for one of the giant sandworms.

The large ’thopter transport carrying Rabban’s hunting party lifted off, and soon Kynes received his initial glimpse of the true desert. Kynes peered out the windowplaz at the rippled wastelands below. From experiences in other desert regions, he was able to identify dune patterns . . . shapes and sinuous curves that revealed much about seasonal wind patterns, prevailing air currents, and the severity of storms. So much could be learned from studying these ripples and lines, the fingerprints of weather. He pressed his face to the plaz observation ports; none of the other passengers appeared to be interested at all.

The Harkonnen troops fidgeted, hot in their heavy blue uniforms and armor. Their weapons clattered against each other and scraped the floor plates. The men seemed uneasy without their personal body-shields, but the presence of a shield and its Holtzman field would drive any nearby worms into a killing frenzy. Today, Rabban himself wanted to do the killing.

Glossu Rabban, the twenty-one-year-old son of the planet’s former lackluster governor, sat up front near the pilot, looking for targets out on the sand. With severely cropped brown hair, he was broad-shouldered, deep-voiced, and short-tempered. Icy pale blue eyes looked out from a sunburned face. He seemed to do everything possible to be the opposite of his father.

“Will we see worm tracks from the sky?” he asked.

Behind him, Thekar the desert guide leaned very close, as if wishing to remain within Rabban’s personal space. “The sands shift and mask the passage of a worm. Often they travel deep. You will not see a worm moving until it approaches the surface and is ready to attack.”

The tall, angular Kynes listened intently, taking mental notes. He wanted to record all of these details in his logbook, but that would have to wait until later.

“Then how are we going to find one? I heard the open desert is crawling with worms.”

“Not that simple, m’Lord Rabban,” Thekar responded. “The great worms have their own domains, some extending to hundreds of square kilometers. Within these boundaries they hunt and kill any intruders.”

Growing impatient, Rabban turned around in his seat. His skin grew darker. “How do we know where to find a worm’s domain?”

Thekar smiled, and his dark, close-set eyes took on a distant look. “All of the desert is owned by Shai-Hulud.”

“By what? Stop evading my questions.” Within another moment, Kynes was sure Rabban would cuff the desert man across the jaw.

“You have been on Arrakis for so long, and you did not know this, m’Lord Rabban? The Fremen consider the great sandworms to be gods,” Thekar answered quietly. “They name him, collectively, Shai-Hulud.”

“Then today we shall kill a god,” Rabban announced in a loud voice, causing the other hunters in the back of the compartment to cheer. He turned sharply toward the desert guide. “I depart for Giedi Prime in two days, and must have a trophy to take back with me. This hunt will be successful.”

Giedi Prime, Kynes thought. Ancestral homeworld of House Harkonnen. At least I won’t have to worry about him once he’s gone.

“You will have your trophy, m’Lord,” Thekar promised.

“No doubt about that,” Rabban said, but in a more ominous tone.

Seated alone in the rear of the troop transport, huddled in his desert gear, Kynes felt uncomfortable in such company. He had no interest in the glorious ambitions of the Baron’s nephew . . . but if this excursion gave him a good look at one of the monsters, it could be worth months of intensive effort on his own.

Rabban stared out through the front of the transport; his hard, squinting eyes were surrounded by thick folds of skin. He scrutinized the desert as if it were a delicacy he intended to eat, seeing none of the beauty Kynes noted in the landscape.

“I have a plan, and this is how we’ll follow it.” Rabban turned to the troops and opened the comsystem to the spotter ornithopters flying in formation around the transport. They cruised out over the expanse of open sand. The dune ripples below looked like wrinkles on an old man’s skin.

“That outcropping of rock down there”— he gestured, and read off the coordinates—“will be our base. About three hundred meters from the rock we’ll touch down in the open sand, where we’ll drop Thekar with a gadget he calls a thumper. Then we’ll lift off to the safety of the rock outcroppings, where the worm can’t go.”

The lean desert man looked up in alarm. “Leave me out there? But m’Lord, I’m not—”

“You gave me the idea.” He turned back to address the uniformed troops. “Thekar here says that this Fremen device, a thumper, will bring a worm. We’ll plant one along with enough explosives to take care of the beast when it comes. Thekar, we will leave you behind to rig the explosives and trigger the thumper. You can run across the sands and make it to safety with us before a worm can come, right?” Rabban gave him a delicious little grin.

“I— I . . .” Thekar stammered. “It appears I have no choice.”

“Even if you can’t make it, the worm will probably go for the thumper first. The explosives will get the beast before you become its next target.”

“I take comfort in that, m’Lord,” Thekar said.

Intrigued by the Fremen device, Kynes considered obtaining one for himself. He wished he could watch this desert native up close to witness how he ran across the sands, how he eluded pursuit from the vibration-sensitive “Old Man of the Desert.” But the Planetologist knew enough to remain quiet and avoid Rabban’s notice, hoping that the hot-blooded young Harkonnen wouldn’t volunteer him to assist Thekar.

Inside the personnel compartment at the back of the craft, the Bator— a commander of a small troop— and his underlings looked through the weapons stockpile, removing lasguns for themselves. They rigged explosives to the stakelike mechanism that Thekar had brought along. A thumper.

With curious eyes, Kynes could see that it was just a spring-wound clockwork device that would thunk out a loud, rhythmic vibration. When plunged into the sand, the thumper would send reverberations deep below the desert to where “Shai-Hulud” could hear them.

“As soon as we land, you’d better rig up these explosives fast,” Rabban said to Thekar. “The engines of these ornithopters will do a good job of attracting the worm, even without the help of your Fremen toy.”

“I know that all too well, m’Lord,” Thekar said. His olive skin now had a grayish, oily tinge of terror.

The ornithopter struts kissed the sands, throwing up loose dust. The hatch opened, and Thekar— determined, now— grabbed his thumper and sprang out, landing with spread feet on the soft desert. He flashed a longing glance back up at the flying craft, then turned toward the dubious safety of the line of solid rock some three hundred meters away.

The Bator handed the explosives down to the hapless desert man, while Rabban gestured for them to hurry. “I hope you don’t become worm food, my friend,” he said with a laugh. Even before the doors could close on the ornithopter, the pilot lifted off the sands again, leaving Thekar alone.

Kynes and the other Harkonnen soldiers rushed to the starboard side of the transport, crowding the windowplaz to watch their guide’s desperate actions out on the open sands. The desert man had reverted to a different, feral human being as they watched.

“Excuse me. Just how much explosive does it take to kill a worm?” Kynes asked curiously.

“Thekar should have plenty, Planetologist,” the Bator answered. “We gave him enough to wipe out an entire city square.”

Kynes turned his attention back to the drama below. As the craft rose higher, Thekar worked in a flurry, grabbing the explosive components, piling them in a mound and linking them together with shigawire cables. Kynes could see tiny ready lights winking on. Then the whip-thin man stabbed his thumper into the sand next to the deadly cache, as if he were pounding a stake into the heart of the desert.

The troop ’thopter swerved and arrowed straight toward the bulwark of rock where the great hunter Rabban would wait in comfort and safety. Thekar triggered the thumper’s spring-wound mechanism and began to run.

Inside the ornithopter, some of the soldiers placed bets on the outcome.

Within moments the craft alighted on the ridge of blackened, pitted rock that looked like a reef in the soft desert. The pilot shut down his engines, and the ’thopter doors opened. Rabban shoved his troops aside to be the first to stand upon the shimmering rock. The others in the party piled out afterward; Kynes waited his turn and emerged from the rear.

The guards took up watch positions, directing the oil lenses of their binoculars at the small running figure. Rabban stood tall, holding a high-powered lasgun, though Kynes couldn’t imagine what he intended to do with the weapon at this point. Through a spotting-scope, the Baron’s nephew stared out into the heat-addled air, seeing the ripples and mirages. He centered on the clacking thumper and the dark landmark of piled explosives.

One of the high spotter ’thopters reported possible wormsign about two kilometers to the south.

Out on the desert, Thekar ran frantically, kicking up sand. He advanced toward the archipelago of safety, the rocky islands in the sea of sand— but he was still many minutes away.

Kynes watched the odd manner in which Thekar placed his footsteps. He seemed to jitter and hop erratically, running like a spastic insect. Kynes wondered if this was some sort of arrhythmic pattern to fool an oncoming sandworm. Was this technique something that desert travelers learned? If so, who could teach it to Kynes? He had to know everything about this place and its people, the worms and the spice and the dunes. Not only was it his Imperial directive: Pardot Kynes wanted to know for himself. Once he became involved in a project, he hated unanswered questions.

The group waited, and time passed slowly. The soldiers talked. The desert man continued his peculiar running, moving imperceptibly closer. Kynes could feel the stillsuit micro-sandwich layers sucking up his droplets of sweat.

He knelt and studied the umber rock at his feet. Basaltic lava, it contained eroded pockets that had been formed from leftover gaseous bubbles in the molten rock, or softer stone eaten away by the legendary Coriolis storms of Arrakis.

Kynes picked up a handful of sand and let it run through his fingers. Not unexpectedly, he saw that the grains of sand were quartz particles, shimmering in the sun with a few flecks of darker material that might have been magnetite.

At other places he had seen rusty colorations in the sand, striations of tan, orange, and coral, hinting at various oxides. Some of the coloring could also have been from weathered deposits of the spice melange, but Kynes had never seen unprocessed spice in the wild before. Not yet.

Finally, the spotter ’thopters overhead confirmed an approaching worm. A large one, moving fast.

The guards rose to their feet. Looking out onto the blurry landscape, Kynes saw a ripple on the sand, like an immense finger being drawn beneath the surface, disturbing the upper layers. The size of it astounded him.

“Worm’s coming in from the side!” the Bator called.

“It’s going straight for Thekar!” Rabban shouted, with cruel glee. “He’s between the worm and the thumper. Awww, bad luck.” His wide face now showed a different kind of anticipation.

Even from this distance, Kynes could see Thekar put on a burst of speed, forgetting his staggering walk as he saw the mound of the approaching worm tunneling toward him faster and faster. Kynes could well imagine the look of horror and hopeless despair on the desert man’s face.

Then with a grim resolve and a sudden desperation, Thekar came to a full stop and lay flat on the sand, motionless, staring up at the sky, perhaps praying fervently to Shai-Hulud.

With the tiny footstep vibrations stopped, the distant thumper seemed as loud as an Imperial band. Thump, thump, thump. The worm paused— then altered its path to head straight toward the cache of explosives.

Rabban gave a twitch of a shrug, nonchalant acceptance of an irrelevant defeat.

Kynes could hear the underground hiss of shifting sands, the approach of the behemoth. It came closer and closer, attracted like an iron filing to a deadly magnet. As it neared the thumper, the worm dived deeper underground, circled, and came up to engulf that which had attracted it, angered it— or whatever instinctive reaction these blind leviathans experienced.

When the worm rose from the sands, it revealed a mouth large enough to swallow a spacecraft, ascending higher and higher, its maw opening wider as its flexible jaws spread like the petals of a flower. In an instant it engulfed the insignificant black speck of the thumper and all the explosives. Its crystal teeth shone like tiny sharp thorns spiraling down its bottomless gullet.

From three hundred meters away, Kynes saw ridges of ancient skin, overlapping folds of armor that protected the creature in its passage beneath the ground. The worm gulped the booby-trapped bait and began to wallow into the sands again.

Rabban stood up with a demonic grin on his face and worked small transmitting controls. A hot breeze dusted his face, peppering his teeth with grains of sand. He pushed a button.

A distant thunderclap sent a tremor through the desert. The sands shifted in tiny avalanches from the fingernail dunes. The sequenced bomb ripped through the internal channels of the worm, blasting open its gut and splitting its armored segments.

As the dust cleared, Kynes saw the writhing, dying monstrosity that lay in a pool of disrupted sand, like a beached fur-whale.

“That thing’s more than two hundred meters long!” Rabban cried, taking in the extent of his kill.

The guards cheered. Rabban turned and pounded Kynes on the back with nearly enough strength to dislocate his shoulder.

“Now there’s a trophy, Planetologist. I’m going to take this back to Giedi Prime with me.”

Almost unnoticed, Thekar finally arrived, sweating and panting, hauling himself up to safety on the rocks. He looked behind him with mixed emotions at the faraway dead creature sprawled on the sands.

Rabban led the charge as the worm ceased its final writhing. The eager guards sprinted across the sands, shouting, cheering. Kynes, anxious now to see the amazing specimen up close, hurried along, stumbling as Harkonnen troops plowed a battered path ahead of him.

Many minutes later, panting and hot, Kynes stood awestruck in front of the towering mass of the ancient worm. Its skin was scaled, covered with gravel, thick with abrasion-proof calluses. Yet between the segments that sagged open from the explosions, he saw pink, tender skin. The gaping mouth of the worm itself was like a mine shaft lined with crystal daggers.

“It’s the most fearsome creature on this miserable planet!” Rabban crowed. “And I’ve killed it!”

The soldiers peered, none of them wanting to approach closer than several meters. Kynes wondered how the Baron’s nephew intended to haul this trophy back with him. With the Harkonnen penchant for extravagance, however, he assumed Rabban would find a way.

The Planetologist turned to see that the exhausted Thekar had plodded up beside them. His eyes held a silvery sheen, as if some inner fire blazed bright. Perhaps by coming so close to death and seeing the Fremen desert god laid low by Harkonnen explosives, his perspective on the world had changed.

“Shai-Hulud,” he whispered. Then he turned to Kynes, as if sensing a kindred spirit. “This is an ancient one. One of the oldest of the worms.”

Kynes stepped forward to look at the encrusted skin, at its segments, and wondered how he might go about dissecting and analyzing the specimen. Certainly Rabban couldn’t object to that? If necessary, Kynes would invoke his assignment from the Emperor to make the man understand.

But as he approached closer, intending to touch it, he saw that the skin of the old worm was shimmering, moving, shifting. The beast itself wasn’t still alive— its nerve functions had ceased even to twitch . . . and yet its outer layers trembled and shifted, as if melting.

While Kynes stared in amazement, a rain of translucent cellular flaps dripped off the hulk of the old worm, like scales shed to the churned sand, where they vanished.

“What’s going on?” Rabban cried, his face purpling. Before his eyes the worm seemed to be evaporating. The skin sloughed off into tiny flopping amoebalike patches that jiggled and then burrowed into the sand like molten solder. The ancient behemoth slumped into the desert.

In the end, only skeletal, cartilaginous ribs and milky teeth were left. Then even these remains sank slowly, dissolving into mounds of loose gelatin covered by sand.

The Harkonnen troops stepped back to a safer distance.

To Kynes, it seemed as if he had seen a thousand years of decay in only a few seconds. Accelerated entropy. The hungry desert seemed eager to swallow every shred of evidence, to conceal the fact that a human had defeated a sandworm.

As Kynes thought about it, more in confusion and growing amazement than in dismay at losing all chance of dissecting the specimen, he wondered just how strange the life cycle of these magnificent beasts must be.

He had so much to learn about Arrakis. . . .

Rabban stood, seething and furious. The muscles in his neck stretched taut like iron cables. “My trophy!” He whirled, clenched his fists, and struck Thekar full across the face, knocking him flat onto the sands. For a moment, Kynes thought the Baron’s nephew might actually kill the desert man, but Rabban turned his rage and fury on the still-dissolving, shuddering heap of the sandworm sinking into the exploded sands.

He screamed curses at it. Then as Kynes watched, a determined look came into Rabban’s cold, menacing eyes. His sunburned face flushed a deeper red. “When I return to Giedi Prime, I’ll hunt something a lot more satisfying.” Then, as if distracted from all thoughts of the sandworm, Rabban turned and stalked away.