He was not confident the machine would function at all. Then Liet gazed back across the sea of dunes toward the approaching tempest. The wind of the demon in the open desert. Winds across the open flatlands are amplified by the planet s revolutionary motion.
Gusts can reach speeds up to seven hundred kilometers per hour.
As his father talked, the young man busied himself sealing the egg-shaped weather pod, checking the vent closures, the heavy doorway hatch, the stored emergency supplies. In pampered societies Liet would have been considered a boy, but life among the hard-edged Fremen had given him a tightly coiled adulthood that few others achieved even at twice his age. He was better equipped to handle an emergency than his father. The elder Kynes scratched his sandy-gray beard. A good storm like this can stretch across four degrees of latitude.