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strode across the room.
    Paul looked up at the grizzled old man who stopped at a corner of the table.
Hawat’s eyes were two pools of alertness in a dark and deeply seamed face.
    “I heard you coming down the hall,” Paul said. “And I heard you open the
door.”
    “The sounds I make could be imitated.”
    “I’d know the difference.”
    He might at that, Hawat thought. That witch-?mother of his is giving him the
deep training, certainly. I wonder what her precious school thinks of that?
Maybe that’s why they sent the old Proctor here — to whip our dear Lady Jessica
into line.
    Hawat pulled up a chair across from Paul, sat down facing the door. He did
it pointedly, leaned back and studied the room. It struck him as an odd place
suddenly, a stranger-?place with most of its hardware already gone off to
Arrakis. A training table remained, and a fencing mirror with its crystal prisms
quiescent, the target dummy beside it patched and padded, looking like an
ancient foot soldier maimed and battered in the wars.
    There stand I, Hawat thought.
    “Thufir, what’re you thinking?” Paul asked.
    Hawat looked at the boy. “I was thinking we’ll all be out of here soon and
likely never see the place again.”
    “Does that make you sad?”
    “Sad? Nonsense! Parting with friends is a sadness. A place is only a place.”
He glanced at the charts on the table. “And Arrakis is just another place.”
    “Did my father send you up to test me?”
    Hawat scowled — the boy had such observing ways about him. He nodded.
“You’re thinking it’d have been nicer if he’d come up himself, but you must know
how busy he is. He’ll be along later.”
    “I’ve been studying about the storms on Arrakis.”
    “The storms. I see.”
    “They sound pretty bad.”
    “That’s too cautious a word: bad. Those storms build up across six or seven
thousand kilometers of flatlands, feed on anything that can give them a push —
coriolis force, other storms, anything that has an ounce of energy in it. They
can blow up to seven hundred kilometers an hour, loaded with everything loose
that’s in their way — sand, dust, everything. They can eat flesh off bones and
etch the bones to slivers.”
    “Why don’t they have weather control?”
“Arrakis has special problems, costs are higher, and there’d be maintenance
and the like. The Guild wants a dreadful high price for satellite control and
your father’s House isn’t one of the big rich ones, lad. You know that.”
    “Have you ever seen the Fremen?”
    The lad’s mind is darting all over today, Hawat thought.
    “Like as not I have seen them,” he said. “There’s little to tell them from
the folk of the graben and sink. They all wear those great flowing robes. And
they stink to heaven in any closed space. It’s from those suits they wear —
call them ’stillsuits’ — that reclaim the body’s own water.”
    Paul swallowed, suddenly aware of the moisture in his mouth, remembering a
dream of thirst. That people could want so for water they had to recycle their
body moisture struck him with a feeling of desolation. “Water’s precious there,”
he said.
    Hawat nodded, thinking: Perhaps I’m doing it, getting across to him the
importance of this planet as an enemy. It’s madness to go in there without that
caution in our minds.
    Paul looked up at the skylight, aware that it had begun to rain. He saw the
spreading wetness on the gray meta-?glass. “Water,” he said.
    “You’ll learn a great concern for water,” Hawat said. “As the Duke’s son
you’ll never want for it, but you’ll see the pressures of thirst all around
you.”
    Paul wet his lips with his tongue, thinking back to the day a week ago and
the ordeal with the Reverend Mother. She, too, had said something about water
starvation.
    “You’ll learn about the funeral plains,” she’d said, “about the wilderness
that is empty, the wasteland where nothing lives except