Carson opened his eyes, and found himself looking upward into a flickering blue dimness.
It was hot, and he was lying on sand, and a sharp rock embedded in the sand was hurting his back. He rolled over to his side, off the rock, and them pushed himself up to a sitting position.
“I’m crazy,” he thought. “Crazy—or dead—or something.” The sand was blue, bright blue. And there wasn’t any such thing as bright blue sand on Earth or any of the planets.
Blue sand.
Blue sand under a blue dome that wasn’t the sky nor yet a room, but a circumscribed area—somehow he knew it was circumscribed and finite even though he couldn’t see to the top of it.
He picked up some of the sand in his hand and let it run through his fingers. It trickled down onto his bare leg. Bare?
Naked. He was stark naked, and already his body was dripping perspiration from the enervating heat, coated blue with sand wherever sand had touched it.
But elsewhere his body was white.
He thought: Then this sand is really blue. If it seemed blue only because of the blue light, then I’d be blue also. But I’m white, so the sand is blue. Blue sand. There isn’t any blue sand. There isn’t any place like this place I’m in.
Sweat was running down in his eyes.
It was hot, hotter than hell. Only hell—the hell of the ancients—was supposed to be red and not blue.
But if this place wasn’t hell, what was it? Only Mercury, among the planets, had heat like this and this wasn’t Mercury. And Mercury was some four billion miles from—
It came back to him then, where he’d been. In the little one-man scouter, outside the orbit of Pluto, scouting a scant million miles to one side of the Earth Armada drawn up in battle array there to intercept the Outsiders.
That sudden strident nerve-shattering ringing of the alarm bell when the rival scouter—the Outsider ship—had come within range of his detectors—
No one knew who the Outsiders were, what they looked like, from what far galaxy they came, other than that it was in the general direction of the Pleiades.
First, sporadic raids on Earth colonies and outposts. Isolated battles between Earth patrols and small groups of Outsider spaceships; battles sometimes won and sometimes lost, but never to date resulting in the capture of an alien vessel. Nor had any member of a raided colony ever survived to describe the Outsiders who had left the ships, if indeed they had left them.
Not a too-serious menace, at first, for the raids had not been too numerous or destructive. And individually, the ships had proved slightly inferior in armament to the best of Earth’s fighters, although somewhat superior in speed and maneuverability. A sufficient edge in speed, in fact, to give the Outsiders their choice of running or fighting, unless surrounded.
Nevertheless, Earth had prepared for serious trouble, for a showdown, building the mightiest armada of all time. It had been waiting now, that armada, for a long time. But now the showdown was coming.
Scouts twenty billion miles out had detected the approach of a mighty fleet—a showdown fleet—of the Outsiders. Those scouts had never come back, but their radiotronic messages had. And now Earth’s armada, all ten thousand ships and half-million fighting spacemen, was out there, outside Pluto’s orbit, waiting to intercept and battle to the death.
And an even battle it was going to be, judging by the advance reports of the men of the far picket line who had given their lives to report—before they had died—on the size and strength of the alien fleet.
Anybody’s battle, with the mastery of the solar system hanging in the balance, on an even chance. A last and only chance, for Earth and all her colonies lay at the utter mercy of the Outsiders if they ran that gauntlet—
Oh yes. Bob Carson remembered now.
Not that it explained blue sand and flickering blueness. But that strident alarming of the bell and his leap for the control panel. His frenzied fumbling as he strapped himself into the seat. The dot in the visiplate that grew larger.
The dryness of his mouth. The awful knowledge that this was it. For him, at least, although the main fleets were still out of range of one another.
This, his first taste of battle. Within three seconds or less he’d be victorious, or a charred cinder. Dead.
Three seconds—that’s how long a space-battle lasted. Time enough to count to three, slowly, and then you’d won or you were dead. One hit completely took care of a lightly armed and armored little one-man craft like a scouter.
Frantically—as, unconsciously, his dry lips shaped the word “One”—he worked at the controls to keep that growing dot centered on the crossed spiderwebs of the visiplate. His hands doing that, while his right foot hovered over the pedal that would fire the bolt. The single bolt of concentrated hell that had to hit—or else. There wouldn’t be time for any second shot.
“Two.” He didn’t know he’d said that, either. The dot in the visiplate wasn’t a dot now. Only a few thousand miles away, it showed up in the magnification of the plate as though it were only a few hundred yards off. It was a sleek, fast little scouter, about the size of his.
And an alien ship, all right.
“Thr—” His foot touched the bolt-release pedal—
And then the Outsider had swerved suddenly and was off the cross-hairs. Carson punched keys frantically, to follow.
For a tenth of a second, it was out of the visiplate entirely, and then as the nose of his scouter swung after it, he saw it again, diving straight toward the ground.
The ground?
It was an optical illusion of some sort. It had to be, that planet—or whatever it was—that now covered the visiplate. Whatever it was, it couldn’t be there. Couldn’t possibly. There wasn’t any planet nearer than Neptune three billion miles away—with Pluto around on the opposite side of the distant pinpoint sun.
His detectors! They hadn’t shown any object of planetary dimensions, even of asteroid dimensions. They still didn’t.
So it couldn’t be there, that whatever-it-was he was diving into, only a few hundred miles below him.
And in his sudden anxiety to keep from crashing, he forgot even the Outsider ship. He fired the front braking rockets, and even as the sudden change of speed slammed him forward against the seat straps, he fired full right for an emergency turn. Pushed them down and held them down, knowing that he needed everything the ship had to keep from crashing and that a turn that sudden would black him out for a moment.
It did black him out.
And that was all. Now he was sitting in hot blue sand, stark naked but otherwise unhurt. No sign of his spaceship and—for that matter—no sign of space. That curve overhead wasn’t a sky, whatever else it was.
He scrambled to his feet.
Gravity seemed a little more than Earth-normal. Not much more.
Flat sand stretching away, a few scrawny bushes in clumps here and there. The bushes were blue, too, but in varying shades, some lighter than the blue of the sand, some darker.
Out from under the nearest bush ran a little thing that was like a lizard, except that it had more than four legs. It was blue, too. Bright blue. It saw him and ran back again under the bush.
He looked up again, trying to decide what was overhead. It wasn’t exactly a roof, but it was dome-shaped. It flickered and was hard to look at. But definitely, it curved down to the ground, to the blue sand, all around him.
He wasn’t far from being under the center of the dome. At a guess, it was a hundred yards to the nearest wall, if it was a wall. It was as though a blue hemisphere of something, about two hundred and fifty yards in circumference, was inverted over the flat expanse of the sand.
And everything blue, except one object. Over near a far curving wall there was a red object. Roughly spherical, it seemed to be about a yard in diameter. Too far for him to see clearly through the flickering blueness. But, unaccountably, he shuddered.
He wiped sweat from his forehead, or tried to, with the back of his hand.
Was this a dream, a nightmare? This heat, this sand, that vague feeling of horror he felt when he looked toward the red thing?
A dream? No, one didn’t go to sleep and dream in the midst of a battle in space.
Death? No, never. If there were immortality, it wouldn’t be a senseless thing like this, a thing of blue heat and blue sand and a red horror.
Then he heard the voice—
Inside his head he heard it, not with his ears. It came from nowhere or everywhere.
“Through spaces and dimensions wandering,” rang the words in his mind, “and in this space and this time I find two people about to wage a war that would exterminate one and so weaken the other that it would retrogress and never fulfill its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust whence it came. And I say this must not happen.”
“Who … what are you?” Carson didn’t say it aloud, but the question formed itself in his brain.
“You would not understand completely. I am—” There was a pause as though the voice sought—in Carson’s brain—for a word that wasn’t there, a word he didn’t know. “I am the end of evolution of a race so old the time can not be expressed in words that have meaning to your mind. A race fused into a single entity, eternal—
“An entity such as your primitive race might become”—again the groping for a word—“time from now. So might the race you call, in your mind, the Outsiders. So I intervene in the battle to come, the battle between fleets so evenly matched that destruction of both races will result. One must survive. One must progress and evolve.”
“One?” thought Carson. “Mine, or—?”
“It is in my power to stop the war, to send the Outsiders back to their galaxy. But they would return, or your race would sooner or later follow them there. Only by remaining in this space and time to intervene constantly could I prevent them from destroying one another, and I cannot remain.
“So I shall intervene now. I shall destroy one fleet completely without loss to the other. One civilization shall thus survive.”
Nightmare. This had to be nightmare, Carson thought. But he knew it wasn’t.
It was too mad, too impossible, to be anything but real.
He didn’t dare ask the question—which? But his thoughts asked it for him.
“The stronger shall survive,” said the voice. “That I can not—and would not—change. I merely intervene to make it a complete victory, not”—groping again—“not Pyrrhic victory to a broken race.
“From the outskirts of the not-yet battle I plucked two individuals, you and an Outsider. I see from your mind that in your early history of nationalisms battles between champions, to decide issues between races, were not unknown.
“You and your opponent are here pitted against one another, naked and unarmed, under conditions equally unfamiliar to you both, equally unpleasant to you both. There is no time limit, for here there is no time. The survivor is the champion of his race. That race survives.”
“But—” Carson’s protest was too inarticulate for expression, but the voice answered it.
“It is fair. The conditions are such that the accident of physical strength will not completely decide the issue. There is a barrier. You will understand. Brain-power and courage will be more important than strength. Most especially courage, which is the will to survive.”
“But while this goes on, the fleets will—”
“No, you are in another space, another time. For as long as you are here, time stands still in the universe you know. I see you wonder whether this place is real. It is, and it is not. As I—to your limited understanding—am and am not real. My existence is mental and not physical. You saw me as a planet; it could have been as a dustmote or a sun.
“But to you this place is now real. What you suffer here will be real. And if you die here, your death will be real. If you die, your failure will be the end of your race. That is enough for you to know.”
And then the voice was gone.
And he was alone, but not alone. For as Carson looked up, he saw that the red thing, the red sphere of horror which he now knew was the Outsider, was rolling toward him.
Rolling.
It seemed to have no legs or arms that he could see, no features. It rolled across the blue sand with the fluid quickness of a drop of mercury. And before it, in some manner he could not understand, came a paralyzing wave of nauseating, retching, horrid hatred.
Carson looked about him frantically. A stone, lying in the sand a few feet away, was the nearest thing to a weapon. It wasn’t large, but it had sharp edges, like a slab of flint. It looked a bit like blue flint.
He picked it up, and crouched to receive the attack. It was coming fast, faster than he could run.
No time to think out how he was going to fight it, and how anyway could he plan to battle a creature whose strength, whose characteristics, whose method of fighting he did not know? Rolling so fast, it looked more than ever like a perfect sphere.
Ten yards away. Five. And then it stopped.
Rather, it was stopped. Abruptly the near side of it flattened as though it had run up against an invisible wall. It bounced, actually bounced back.
Then it rolled forward again, but more slowly, more cautiously. It stopped again, at the same place. It tried again, a few yards to one side.
There was a barrier there of some sort. It clicked, then, in Carson’s mind. That thought projected into his mind by the Entity who had brought them there: “—accident of physical strength will not completely decide the issue. There is a barrier.”
A force-field, of course. Not the Netzian Field, known to Earth science, for that glowed and emitted a crackling sound. This one was invisible, silent.
It was a wall that ran from side to side of the inverted hemisphere; Carson didn’t have to verify that himself. The Roller was doing that; rolling sideways along the barrier, seeking a break in it that wasn’t there.
Carson took half a dozen steps forward, his left hand groping out before him, and then his hand touched the barrier. It felt smooth, yielding, like a sheet of rubber rather than like glass. Warm to his touch, but no warmer than the sand underfoot. And it was completely invisible, even at close range.
He dropped the stone and put both hands against it, pushing. It seemed to yield, just a trifle. But no farther than that trifle, even when he pushed with all his weight. It felt like a sheet of rubber backed up by steel. Limited resiliency, and then firm strength.
He stood on tiptoe and reached as high as he could and the barrier was still there.
He saw the Roller coming back, having reached one side of the arena. That feeling of nausea hit Carson again, and he stepped back from the barrier as it went by. It didn’t stop.
But did the barrier stop at ground level? Carson knelt down and burrowed in the sand. It was soft, light, easy to dig in. At two feet down the barrier was still there.
The Roller was coming back again. Obviously, it couldn’t find a way through at either side.
There must be a way through, Carson thought. Some way we can get at each other, else this duel is meaningless.
But no hurry now, in finding that out. There was something to try first. The Roller was back now, and it stopped just across the barrier, only six feet away. It seemed to be studying him, although for the life of him, Carson couldn’t find external evidence of sense organs on the thing. Nothing that looked like eyes or ears, or even a mouth. There was though, he saw now, a series of grooves—perhaps a dozen of them altogether, and he saw two tentacles suddenly push out from two of the grooves and dip into the sand as though testing its consistency. Tentacles about an inch in diameter and perhaps a foot and a half long.
But the tentacles were retractable into the grooves and were kept there except when in use. They were retracted when the thing rolled and seemed to have nothing to do with its method of locomotion. That, as far as Carson could judge, seemed to be accomplished by some shifting—just how he couldn’t even imagine—of its center of gravity.
He shuddered as he looked at the thing. It was alien, utterly alien, horribly different from anything on Earth or any of the life forms found on the other solar planets. Instinctively, somehow, he knew its mind was as alien as its body.
But he had to try. If it had no telepathic powers at all, the attempt was foredoomed to failure, yet he thought it had such powers. There had, at any rate, been a projection of something that was not physical at the time a few minutes ago when it had first started for him. An almost tangible wave of hatred.
If it could project that, perhaps it could read his mind as well, sufficiently for his purpose.
Deliberately, Carson picked up the rock that had been his only weapon, then tossed it down again in a gesture of relinquishment and raised his empty hands, palms up, before him.
He spoke aloud, knowing that although the words would be meaningless to the creature before him, speaking them would focus his own thoughts more completely upon the message.
“Can we not have peace between us?” he said, his voice sounding strange in the utter stillness. “The Entity who brought us here has told us what must happen if our races fight—extinction of one and weakening and retrogression of the other. The battle between them, said the Entity, depends upon what we do here. Why can not we agree to an external peace—your race to its galaxy, we to ours?”
Carson blanked out his mind to receive a reply.
It came, and it staggered him back, physically. He actually recoiled several steps in sheer horror at the depth and intensity of the hatred and lust-to-kill of the red images that had been projected at him. Not as articulate words—as had come to him the thoughts of the Entity—but as wave upon wave of fierce emotion.
For a moment that seemed an eternity he had to struggle against the mental impact of that hatred, fight to clear his mind of it and drive out the alien thoughts to which he had given admittance by blanking out his own thoughts. He wanted to retch.
Slowly his mind cleared as, slowly, the mind of a man wakening from nightmare clears away the fear-fabric of which the dream was woven. He was breathing hard and he felt weaker, but he could think.
He stood studying the Roller. It had been motionless during the mental duel it had so nearly won. Now it rolled a few feet to one side, to the nearest of the blue bushes. Three tentacles whipped out of their grooves and began to investigate the bush.
“O.K.,” Carson said, “so it’s war then.” He managed a wry grin. “If I got your answer straight, peace doesn’t appeal to you.” And, because he was, after all, a quiet young man and couldn’t resist the impulse to be dramatic, he added, “To the death!”
But his voice, in that utter silence, sounded very silly, even to himself. It came to him, then, that this was to the death. Not only his own death or that of the red spherical thing which he now thought of as the Roller, but death to the entire race of one or the other of them. The end of the human race, if he failed.
It made him suddenly very humble and very afraid to think that. More than to think it, to know it. Somehow, with a knowledge that was above even faith, he knew that the Entity who had arranged this duel had told the truth about its intentions and its powers. It wasn’t kidding.
The future of humanity depended upon him. It was an awful thing to realize, and he wrenched his mind away from it. He had to concentrate on the situation at hand.
There had to be some way of getting through the barrier, or of killing through the barrier.
Mentally? He hoped that wasn’t all, for the Roller obviously had stronger telepathic powers than the primitive, undeveloped ones of the human race. Or did it?
He had been able to drive the thoughts of the Roller out of his own mind; could it drive out his? If its ability to project were stronger, might not its receptivity mechanism be more vulnerable?
He stared at it and endeavored to concentrate and focus all his thoughts upon it.
“Die,” he thought. “You are going to die. You are dying. You are—”
He tried variations on it, and mental pictures. Sweat stood out on his forehead and he found himself trembling with the intensity of the effort. But the Roller went ahead with its investigation of the bush, as utterly unaffected as though Carson had been reciting the multiplication table.
So that was no good.
He felt a bit weak and dizzy from the heat and his strenuous effort at concentration. He sat down on the blue sand to rest and gave his full attention to watching and studying the Roller. By close study, perhaps, he could judge its strength and detect its weaknesses, learn things that would be valuable to know when and if they should come to grips.
It was breaking off twigs. Carson watched carefully, trying to judge just how hard it worked to do that. Later, he thought, he could find a similar bush on his own side, break off twigs of equal thickness himself, and gain a comparison of physical strength between his own arms and hands and those tentacles.
The twigs broke off hard; the Roller was having to struggle with each one, he saw. Each tentacle, he saw, bifurcated at the tip into two fingers, each tipped by a nail or claw. The claws didn’t seem to be particularly long or dangerous. No more so than his own fingernails, if they were let to grow a bit.
No, on the whole, it didn’t look too tough to handle physically. Unless, of course, that bush was made of pretty tough stuff. Carson looked around him and, yes, right within reach was another bush of identical type.
He reached over and snapped off a twig. It was brittle, easy to break. Of course, the Roller might have been faking deliberately but he didn’t think so.
On the other hand, where was it vulnerable? Just how would he go about killing it, if he got the chance? He went back to studying it. The outer hide looked pretty tough. He’d need a sharp weapon of some sort. He picked up the piece of rock again. It was about twelve inches long, narrow, and fairly sharp on one end. If it chipped like flint, he could make a serviceable knife out of it.
The Roller was continuing its investigations of the bushes. It rolled again, to the nearest one of another type. A little blue lizard, many-legged like the one Carson had seen on his side of the barrier, darted out from under the bush.
A tentacle of the Roller lashed out and caught it, picked it up. Another tentacle whipped over and began to pull legs off the lizard, as coldly and calmly as it had pulled twigs off the bush. The creature struggled frantically and emitted a shrill squealing sound that was the first sound Carson had heard here other than the sound of his own voice.
Carson shuddered and wanted to turn his eyes away. But he made himself continue to watch; anything he could learn about his opponent might prove valuable. Even this knowledge of its unnecessary cruelty. Particularly, he thought with a sudden vicious surge of emotion, this knowledge of its unnecessary cruelty. It would make it a pleasure to kill the thing, if and when the chance came.
He steeled himself to watch the dismembering of the lizard, for that very reason.
But he felt glad when, with half its legs gone, the lizard quit squealing and struggling and lay limp and dead in the Roller’s grasp.
It didn’t continue with the rest of the legs. Contemptuously it tossed the dead lizard away from it, in Carson’s direction. It arced through the air between them and landed at his feet.
It had come through the barrier! The barrier wasn’t there any more!
Carson was on his feet in a flash, the knife gripped tightly in his hand, and leaped forward. He’d settle this thing here and now! With the barrier gone—
But it wasn’t gone. He found that out the hard way, running head on into it and nearly knocking himself silly. He bounced back, and fell.
And as he sat up, shaking his head to clear it, he saw something coming through the air toward him, and to duck it, he threw himself flat again on the sand, and to one side. He got his body out of the way, but there was a sudden sharp pain in the calf of his left leg.
He rolled backward, ignoring the pain, and scrambled to his feet. It was a rock, he saw now, that had struck him. And the Roller was picking up another one now, swinging it back gripped between two tentacles, getting ready to throw again.
It sailed through the air toward him, but he was easily able to step out of its way. The Roller, apparently, could throw straight, but not hard nor far. The first rock had struck him only because he had been sitting down and had not seen it coming until it was almost upon him.
Even as he stepped aside from that weak second throw, Carson drew back his right arm and let fly with the rock that was still in his hand. If missiles, he thought with sudden elation, can cross the barrier, then two can play at the game of throwing them. And the good right arm of an Earthman—
He couldn’t miss a three-foot sphere at only four-yard range, and he didn’t miss. The rock whizzed straight, and with a speed several times that of the missiles the Roller had thrown. It hit dead center, but it hit flat, unfortunately, instead of point first.
But it hit with a resounding thump, and obviously it hurt. The Roller had been reaching for another rock, but it changed its mind and got out of there instead. By the time Carson could pick up and throw another rock, the Roller was forty yards back from the barrier and going strong.
His second throw missed by feet, and his third throw was short. The Roller was back out of range—at least out of range of a missile heavy enough to be damaging.
Carson grinned. That round had been his. Except—
He quit grinning as he bent over to examine the calf of his leg. A jagged edge of the stone had made a pretty deep cut, several inches long. It was bleeding pretty freely, but he didn’t think it had gone deep enough to hit an artery. If it stopped bleeding of its own accord, well and good. If not, he was in for trouble.
Finding out one thing, though, took precedence over that cut. The nature of the barrier.
He went forward to it again, this time groping with his hands before him. He found it; then holding one hand against it, he tossed a handful of sand at it with the other hand. The sand went right through. His hand didn’t.
Organic matter versus inorganic? No, because the dead lizard had gone through it, and a lizard, alive or dead, was certainly organic. Plant life? He broke off a twig and poked it at the barrier. The twig went through, with no resistance, but when his fingers gripping the twig came to the barrier, they were stopped.
He couldn’t get through it, nor could the Roller. But rocks and sand and a dead lizard—
How about a live lizard? He went hunting, under bushes, until he found one, and caught it. He tossed it gently against the barrier and it bounced back and scurried away across the blue sand.
That gave him the answer, in so far as he could determine it now. The screen was a barrier to living things. Dead or inorganic matter could cross it.
That off his mind, Carson looked at his injured leg again. The bleeding was lessening, which meant he wouldn’t need to worry about making a tourniquet. But he should find some water, if any was available, to clean the wound.
Water—the thought of it made him realize that he was getting awfully thirsty. He’d have to find water, in case this contest turned out to be a protracted one.
Limping slightly now, he started off to make a full circuit of his half of the arena. Guiding himself with one hand along the barrier, he walked to his right until he came to the curving sidewall. It was visible, a dull blue-gray at close range, and the surface of it felt just like the central barrier.
He experimented by tossing a handful of sand at it, and the sand reached the wall and disappeared as it went through. The hemispherical shell was a force-field, too. But an opaque one, instead of transparent like the barrier.
He followed it around until he came back to the barrier, and walked back along the barrier to the point from which he’d started.
No sign of water.
Worried now, he started a series of zigzags back and forth between the barrier and the wall, covering the intervening space thoroughly.
No water. Blue sand, blue bushes, and intolerable heat. Nothing else.
It must be his imagination, he told himself angrily, that he was suffering that much from thirst. How long had he been here? Of course, no time at all, according to his own spacetime frame. The Entity had told him time stood still out there, while he was here. But his body processes went on here, just the same. And according to his body’s reckoning, how long had he been here? Three or four hours, perhaps. Certainly not long enough to be suffering seriously from thirst.
But he was suffering from it; his throat dry and parched. Probably the intense heat was the cause. It was hot! A hundred and thirty Fahrenheit, at a guess. A dry, still heat without the slightest movement of air.
He was limping rather badly, and utterly fagged out when he’d finished the futile exploration of his domain.
He stared across at the motionless Roller and hoped it was as miserable as he was. And quite possibly it wasn’t enjoying this, either. The Entity had said the conditions here were equally unfamiliar and equally uncomfortable for both of them. Maybe the Roller came from a planet where two-hundred degree heat was the norm. Maybe it was freezing while he was roasting.
Maybe the air was as much too thick for it as it was too thin for him. For the exertion of his explorations had left him panting. The atmosphere here, he realized now, was not much thicker than that on Mars.
No water.
That meant a deadline, for him at any rate. Unless he could find a way to cross that barrier or to kill his enemy from this side of it, thirst would kill him, eventually.
It gave him a feeling of desperate urgency. He must hurry.
But he made himself sit down a moment to rest, to think.
What was there to do? Nothing, and yet so many things. The several varieties of bushes, for example. They didn’t look promising, but he’d have to examine them for possibilities. And his leg—he’d have to do something about that, even without water to clean it. Gather ammunition in the form of rocks. Find a rock that would make a good knife.
His leg hurt rather badly now, and he decided that came first. One type of bush had leaves—or things rather similar to leaves. He pulled off a handful of them and decided, after examination, to take a chance on them. He used them to clean off the sand and dirt and caked blood, then made a pad of fresh leaves and tied it over the wound with tendrils from the same bush.
The tendrils proved unexpectedly tough and strong. They were slender, and soft and pliable, yet he couldn’t break them at all. He had to saw them off the bush with the sharp edge of a piece of the blue flint. Some of the thicker ones were over a foot long, and he filed away in his memory, for future reference, the fact that a bunch of the thick ones, tied together, would make a pretty serviceable rope. Maybe he’d be able to think of a use for rope.
Next he made himself a knife. The blue flint did chip. From a foot-long splinter of it, he fashioned himself a crude but lethal weapon. And of tendrils from the bush, he made himself a rope-belt through which he could thrust the flint knife, to keep it with him all the time and yet have his hands free.
He went back to studying the bushes. There were three other types. One was leafless, dry, brittle, rather like a dried tumbleweed. Another was of soft, crumbly wood, almost like punk. It looked and felt as though it would make excellent tinder for a fire. The third type was the most nearly woodlike. It had fragile leaves that wilted at a touch, but the stalks, although short, were straight and strong.
It was horribly, unbearable hot.
He limped up to the barrier, felt to make sure that it was still there. It was.
He stood watching the Roller for a while. It was keeping a safe distance back from the barrier, out of effective stone-throwing range. It was moving around back there, doing something. He couldn’t tell what it was doing.
Once it stopped moving, came a little closer, and seemed to concentrate its attention on him. Again Carson had to fight off a wave of nausea. He threw a stone at it and the Roller retreated and went back to whatever it had been doing before.
At least he could make it keep its distance.
And, he thought bitterly, a devil of a lot of good that did him. Just the same, he spent the next hour or two gathering stones of suitable size for throwing, and making several neat piles of them, near his side of the barrier.
His throat burned now. It was difficult for him to think about anything except water.
But he had to think about other things. About getting through that barrier, under or over it, getting at that red sphere and killing it before this place of heat and thirst killed him first.
The barrier went to the wall upon either side, but how high and how far under the sand?
For just a moment, Carson’s mind was too fuzzy to think out how he could find out either of those things. Idly, sitting there in the hot sand—and he didn’t remember sitting down—he watched a blue lizard crawl from the shelter of one bush to the shelter of another.
From under the second bush, it looked out at him.
Carson grinned at it. Maybe he was getting a bit punch-drunk, because he remembered suddenly the old story of the desert-colonists on Mars, taken from an older desert story of Earth—“Pretty soon you get so lonesome you find yourself talking to the lizards, and then not so long after that you find the lizards talking back to you—”
He should have been concentrating, of course, on how to kill the Roller, but instead he grinned at the lizard and said, “Hello, there.”
The lizard took a few steps toward him. “Hello,” it said.
Carson was stunned for a moment, and then he put back his head and roared with laughter. It didn’t hurt his throat to do so, either; he hadn’t been that thirsty.
Why not? Why should the Entity who thought up this nightmare of a place not have a sense of humor, along with the other powers he had? Talking lizards, equipped to talk back in my own language, if I talk to them—It’s a nice touch.
He grinned at the lizard and said, “Come on over.” But the lizard turned and ran away, scurrying from bush to bush until it was out of sight.
He was thirsty again.
And he had to do something. He couldn’t win this contest by sitting here sweating and feeling miserable. He had to do something. But what?
Get through the barrier. But he couldn’t get through it, or over it. But was he certain he couldn’t get under it? And come to think of it, didn’t one sometimes find water by digging? Two birds with one stone—
Painfully now, Carson limped up to the barrier and started digging, scooping up sand a double handful at a time. It was slow, hard work because the sand ran in at the edges and the deeper he got the bigger in diameter the hole had to be. How many hours it took him, he didn’t know, but he hit bedrock four feet down. Dry bedrock; no sign of water.
And the force-field of the barrier went down clear to the bedrock. No dice. No water. Nothing.
He crawled out of the hole and lay there panting, and then raised his head to look across and see what the Roller was doing. It must be doing something back there.
It was. It was making something out of wood from the bushes, tied together with tendrils. A queerly shaped framework about four feet high and roughly square. To see it better, Carson climbed up onto the mound of sand he had excavated from the hole, and stood there staring.
There were two long levers sticking out of the back of it, one with a cup-shaped affair on the end of it. Seemed to be some sort of a catapult, Carson thought.
Sure enough, the Roller was lifting a sizable rock into the cup-shaped outfit. One of his tentacles moved the other lever up and down for awhile, and then he turned the machine slightly as though aiming it and the lever with the stone flew up and forward.
The stone raced several yards over Carson’s head, so far away that he didn’t have to duck, but he judged the distance it had traveled, and whistled softly. He couldn’t throw a rock that weight more than half that distance. And even retreating to the rear of his domain wouldn’t put him out of range of that machine, if the Roller shoved it forward almost to the barrier.
Another rock whizzed over. Not quite so far away this time.
That thing could be dangerous, he decided. Maybe he’d better do something about it.
Moving from side to side along the barrier, so the catapult couldn’t bracket him, he whaled a dozen rocks at it. But that wasn’t going to be any good, he saw. They had to be light rocks, or he couldn’t throw them that far. If they hit the framework, they bounced off harmlessly. And the Roller had no difficulty, at that distance, in moving aside from those that came near it.
Besides, his arm was tiring badly. He ached all over from sheer weariness. If he could only rest awhile without having to duck rocks from that catapult at regular intervals of maybe thirty seconds each—
He stumbled back to the rear of the arena. Then he saw even that wasn’t any good. The rocks reached back there, too, only there were longer intervals between them, as though it took longer to wind up the mechanism, whatever it was, of the catapult.
Wearily he dragged himself back to the barrier again. Several times he fell and could barely rise to his feet to go on. He was, he knew, near the limit of his endurance. Yet he didn’t dare stop moving now, until and unless he could put that catapult out of action. If he fell asleep, he’d never wake up.
One of the stones from it gave him the first glimmer of an idea. It struck upon one of the piles of stones he’d gathered together near the barrier to use as ammunition, and it struck sparks.
Sparks. Fire. Primitive man had made fire by striking sparks, and with some of those dry crumbly bushes as tinder—
Luckily, a bush of that type was near him. He broke it off, took it over to a pile of stones, then patiently hit one stone against another until a spark touched the punklike wood of the bush. It went up in flames so fast that it singed his eyebrows and was burned to an ash within seconds.
But he had the idea now, and within minutes he had a little fire going in the lee of the mound of sand he’d made digging the hole an hour or two ago. Tinder bushes had started it, and other bushes which burned, but more slowly, kept it a steady flame.
The tough wirelike tendrils didn’t burn readily; that made the firebombs easy to make and throw. A bundle of faggots tied about a small stone to give it weight and a loop of the tendril to swing it by.
He made half a dozen of them before he lighted and threw the first. It went wide, and the Roller started a quick retreat, pulling the catapult after him. But Carson had the others ready and threw them in rapid succession. The fourth wedged in the catapult’s framework, and did the trick. The Roller tried desperately to put out the spreading blaze by throwing sand, but its clawed tentacles would take only a spoonful at a time and his efforts were ineffectual. The catapult burned.
The Roller moved safely away from the fire and seemed to concentrate its attention on Carson and again he felt that wave of hatred and nausea. But more weakly; either the Roller itself was weakening or Carson had learned how to protect himself against the mental attack.
He thumbed his nose at it and then sent it scuttling back to safety by throwing a stone. The Roller went clear to the back of its half of the arena and started pulling up bushes again. Probably it was going to make another catapult.
Carson verified—for the hundredth time—that the barrier was still operating, and then found himself sitting in the sand beside it because he was suddenly too weak to stand up.
His leg throbbed steadily now and the pangs of thirst were severe. But those things paled beside the utter physical exhaustion that gripped his entire body.
And the heat.
Hell must be like this, he thought. The hell that the ancients had believed in. He fought to stay awake, and yet staying awake seemed futile, for there was nothing he could do. Nothing, while the barrier remained impregnable and the Roller stayed back out of range.
But there must be something. He tried to remember things he had read in books of archaeology about the methods of fighting used back in the days before metal and plastic. The stone missile, that had come first, he thought. Well, that he already had.
The only improvement on it would be a catapult, such as the Roller had made. But he’d never be able to make one, with the tiny bits of wood available from the bushes—no single piece longer than a foot or so. Certainly he could figure out a mechanism for one, but he didn’t have the endurance left for a task that would take days.
Days? But the Roller had made one. Had they been here days already? Then he remembered that the Roller had many tentacles to work with and undoubtedly could do such work faster than he.
And besides, a catapult wouldn’t decide the issue. He had to do better than that.
Bow and arrow? No; he had tried archery once and knew his own ineptness with a bow. Even with a modern sportsman’s durasteel weapon, made for accuracy. With such a crude, pieced-together outfit as he could make here, he doubted if he could shoot as far as he could throw a rock, and knew he couldn’t shoot as straight.
Spear? Well, he could make that. It would be useless as a throwing weapon at any distance, but would be a handy thing at close range, if he ever got to close range.
And making one would give him something to do. Help keep his mind from wandering, as it was beginning to do. Sometimes now, he had to concentrate awhile before he could remember why he was here, why he had to kill the Roller.
Luckily he was still beside one of the piles of stones. He sorted through it until he found one shaped roughly like a spearhead. With a smaller stone he began to chip it into shape, fashioning sharp shoulders on the sides so that if it penetrated it would not pull out again.
Like a harpoon? There was something in that idea, he thought. A harpoon was better than a spear, maybe, for this crazy contest. If he could once get it into the Roller, and had a rope on it, he could pull the Roller up against the barrier and the stone blade of his knife would reach through that barrier, even if his hands wouldn’t.
The shaft was harder to make than the head. But by splitting and joining the main stems of four of the bushes, and wrapping the joints with the tough but thin tendrils, he got a strong shaft about four feet long, and tied the stone head in a notch cut in the end.
It was crude, but strong.
And the rope. With the thin tough tendrils he made himself twenty feet of line. It was light and didn’t look strong, but he knew it would hold his weight and to spare. He tied one end of it to the shaft of the harpoon and the other end about his right wrist. At least, if he threw his harpoon across the barrier, he’d be able to pull it back if he missed.
Then when he had tied the last knot and there was nothing more he could do, the heat and the weariness and the pain in his leg and the dreadful thirst were suddenly a thousand times worse than they had been before.
He tried to stand up, to see what the Roller was doing now, and found he couldn’t get to his feet. On the third try, he got as far as his knees and then fell flat again.
“I’ve got to sleep,” he thought. “If a showdown came now, I’d be helpless. He could come up here and kill me, if he knew. I’ve got to regain some strength.”
Slowly, painfully, he crawled back away from the barrier. Ten yards, twenty—
The jar of something thudding against the sand near him waked him from a confused and horrible dream to a more confused and more horrible reality, and he opened his eyes again to blue radiance over blue sand.
How long had he slept? A minute? A day?
Another stone thudded nearer and threw sand on him. He got his arms under him and sat up. He turned around and saw the Roller twenty yards away, at the barrier.
It rolled away hastily as he sat up, not stopping until it was as far away as it could get.
He’d fallen asleep too soon, he realized, while he was still in range of the Roller’s throwing ability. Seeing him lying motionless, it had dared come up to the barrier to throw at him. Luckily, it didn’t realize how weak he was, or it could have stayed there and kept on throwing stones.
Had he slept long? He didn’t think so, because he felt just as he had before. Not rested at all, no thirstier, no different. Probably he’d been there only a few minutes.
He started crawling again, this time forcing himself to keep going until he was as far as he could go, until the colorless, opaque wall of the arena’s outer shell was only a yard away.
Then things slipped away again—
When he awoke, nothing about him was changed, but this time he knew that he had slept a long time.
The first thing he became aware of was the inside of his mouth; it was dry, caked. His tongue was swollen.
Something was wrong, he knew, as he returned slowly to full awareness. He felt less tired, the stage of utter exhaustion had passed. The sleep had taken care of that.
But there was pain, agonizing pain. It wasn’t until he tried to move that he knew that it came from his leg.
He raised his head and looked down at it. It was swollen terribly below the knee and the swelling showed even halfway up his thigh. The plant tendrils he had used to tie on the protective pad of leaves now cut deeply into the swollen flesh.
To get his knife under that imbedded lashing would have been impossible. Fortunately, the final knot was over the shin bone, in front, where the vine cut in less deeply than elsewhere. He was able, after an agonizing effort, to untie the knot.
A look under the pad of leaves told him the worst. Infection and blood poisoning, both pretty bad and getting worse.
And without drugs, without cloth, without even water, there wasn’t a thing he could do about it.
Not a thing, except die, when the poison had spread through his system.
He knew it was hopeless, then, and that he’d lost.
And with him, humanity. When he died here, out there in the universe he knew, all his friends, everybody, would die too. And Earth and the colonized planets would be the home of the red, rolling, alien Outsiders. Creatures out of nightmare, things without a human attribute, who picked lizards apart for the fun of it.
It was the thought of that which gave him courage to start crawling, almost blindly in pain, toward the barrier again. Not crawling on hands and knees this time, but pulling himself along only by his arms and hands.
A chance in a million, that maybe he’d have strength left, when he got there, to throw his harpoon-spear just once, and with deadly effect, if—on another chance in a million—the Roller would come up to the barrier. Or if the barrier was gone, now.
It took him years, it seemed, to get there.
The barrier wasn’t gone. It was as impassable as when he’d first felt it.
And the Roller wasn’t at the barrier. By raising up on his elbows, he could see it at the back of its part of the arena, working on a wooden framework that was a half-completed duplicate of the catapult he’d destroyed.
It was moving slowly now. Undoubtedly it had weakened, too.
But Carson doubted that it would ever need that second catapult. He’d be dead, he thought, before it was finished.
If he could attract it to the barrier, now, while he was still alive—He waved an arm and tried to shout, but his parched throat would make no sound.
Or if he could get through the barrier—
His mind must have slipped for a moment, for he found himself beating his fists against the barrier in futile rage, and made himself stop.
He closed his eyes, tried to make himself calm.
“Hello,” said the voice.
It was a small, thin voice. It sounded like—
He opened his eyes and turned his head. It was the lizard.
“Go away,” Carson wanted to say. “Go away, you’re not really there, or you’re there but not really talking. I’m imagining things again.”
But he couldn’t talk; his throat and tongue were past all speech with the dryness. He closed his eyes again.
“Hurt,” said the voice. “Kill. Hurt—kill. Come.”
He opened his eyes again. The blue ten-legged lizard was still there. It ran a little way along the barrier, came back, started off again, and came back.
“Hurt,” it said. “Kill. Come.”
Again it started off, and came back. Obviously it wanted Carson to follow it along the barrier.
He closed his eyes again. The voice kept on. The same three meaningless words. Each time he opened his eyes, it ran off and came back.
“Hurt. Kill. Come.”
Carson groaned. There would be no peace unless he followed the blasted thing. Like it wanted him to.
He followed it, crawling. Another sound, a high-pitched squealing, came to his ears and grew louder.
There was something lying in the sand, writhing, squealing. Something small, blue, that looked like a lizard and yet didn’t—
Then he saw what it was—the lizard whose legs the Roller had pulled off, so long ago. But it wasn’t dead; it had come back to life and was wriggling and screaming in agony.
“Hurt,” said the other lizard. “Hurt. Kill. Kill.”
Carson understood. He took the flint knife from his belt and killed the tortured creature. The live lizard scurried off quickly.
Carson turned back to the barrier. He leaned his hands and head against it and watched the Roller, far back, working on the new catapult.
“I could get that far,” he thought, “if I could get through. If I could get through, I might win yet. It looks weak, too. I might—”
And then there was another reaction of black hopelessness, when pain snapped his will and he wished that he were dead. He envied the lizard he’d just killed. It didn’t have to live on and suffer. And he did. It would be hours, it might be days, before the blood poisoning killed him.
If only he could use that knife on himself—
But he knew he wouldn’t. As long as he was alive, there was the millionth chance—
He was straining, pushing on the barrier with the flat of his hands, and he noticed his arms, how thin and scrawny they were now. He must really have been here a long time, for days, to get as thin as that.
How much longer now, before he died? How much more heat and thirst and pain could flesh stand?
For a little while he was almost hysterical again, and then came a time of deep calm, and a thought that was startling.
The lizard he had just killed. It had crossed the barrier, still alive. It had come from the Roller’s side; the Roller had pulled off its legs and then tossed it contemptuously at him and it had come through the barrier. He’d thought, because the lizard was dead.
But it hadn’t been dead; it had been unconscious.
A live lizard couldn’t go through the barrier, but an unconscious one could. The barrier was not a barrier, then, to living flesh, but to conscious flesh. It was a mental projection, a mental hazard.
And with that thought, Carson started crawling along the barrier to make his last desperate gamble. A hope so forlorn that only a dying man would have dared try it.
No use weighing the odds of success. Not when, if he didn’t try it, those odds were infinitely to zero.
He crawled along the barrier to the dune of sand, about four feet high, which he’d scooped out in trying—how many days ago?—to dig under the barrier or to reach water.
That mound was right at the barrier, its farther slope half on one side of the barrier, half on the other.
Taking with him a rock from the pile nearby, he climbed up to the top of the dune and over the top, and lay there against the barrier, his weight leaning against it so that if the barrier were taken away he’d roll on down the short slope, into the enemy territory.
He checked to be sure that the knife was safely in his rope belt, that the harpoon was in the crook of his left arm and that the twenty-foot rope was fastened to it and to his wrist.
Then with his right hand he raised the rock with which he would hit himself on the head. Luck would have to be with him on that blow; it would have to be hard enough to knock him out, but not hard enough to knock him out for long.
He had a hunch that the Roller was watching him, and would see him roll down through the barrier, and come to investigate. It would think he was dead, he hoped—he thought it had probably drawn the same deduction about the nature of the barrier that he had drawn. But it would come cautiously. He would have a little time—
He struck.
Pain brought him back to consciousness. A sudden, sharp pain in his hip that was different from the throbbing pain in his head and the throbbing pain in his leg.
But he had, thinking things out before he had struck himself, anticipated that very pain, even hoped for it, and had steeled himself against awakening with a sudden movement.
He lay still, but opened his eyes just a slit, and saw that he had guessed rightly. The Roller was coming closer. It was twenty feet away and the pain that had awakened him was the stone it had tossed to see whether he was alive or dead.
He lay still. It came closer, fifteen feet away, and stopped again. Carson scarcely breathed.
As nearly as possible, he was keeping his mind a blank, lest its telepathic ability detect consciousness in him. And with his mind blanked out that way, the impact of its thoughts upon his mind was nearly soul-shattering.
He felt sheer horror at the utter alienness, the differentness of those thoughts. Things that he felt but could not understand and could never express, because no terrestrial language had words, no terrestrial mind had images to fit them. The mind of a spider, he thought, or the mind of a praying mantis or a Martian sand-serpent, raised to intelligence and put in telepathic rapport with human minds, would be a homely familiar thing, compared to this.
He understood now that the Entity had been right: Man or Roller, and the universe was not a place that could hold them both. Farther apart than god and devil, there could never be even a balance between them.
Closer. Carson waited until it was only feet away, until its clawed tentacles reached out—
Oblivious to agony now, he sat up, raised and flung the harpoon with all the strength that remained to him. Or he thought it was all; sudden final strength flooded through him, along with a sudden forgetfulness of pain as definite as a nerve block.
As the Roller, deeply stabbed by the harpoon, rolled away, Carson tried to get to his feet to run after it. He couldn’t do that; he fell, but kept crawling.
It reached the end of the rope, and he was jerked forward by the pull of his wrist. It dragged him a few feet and then stopped. Carson kept on going, pulling himself toward it hand over hand along the rope.
It stopped there, writhing tentacles trying in vain to pull out the harpoon. It seemed to shudder and quiver, and then it must have realized that it couldn’t get away, for it rolled back toward him, clawed tentacles reaching out.
Stone knife in hand, he met it. He stabbed, again and again, while those horrid claws ripped skin and flesh and muscle from his body.
He stabbed and slashed, and at last it was still.
A bell was ringing, and it took him a while after he’d opened his eyes to tell where he was and what it was. He was strapped into the seat of his scouter, and the visiplate before him showed only empty space. No Outsider ship and no impossible planet.
The bell was the communications plate signal; someone wanted him to switch power into the receiver. Purely reflex action enabled him to reach forward and throw the lever.
The face of Brander, captain of the Magellan, mother-ship of his group of scouters, flashed into the screen. His face was pale and his black eyes glowed with excitement.
“Magellan to Carson,” he snapped. “Come on in. The fight’s over. We’ve won!”
The screen went blank; Brander would be signaling the other scouters of his command.
Slowly, Carson set the controls for the return. Slowly, unbelievingly, he unstrapped himself from the seat and went back to get a drink at the cold-water tank. For some reason, he was unbelievably thirsty. He drank six glasses.
He leaned there against the wall, trying to think.
Had it happened? He was in good health, sound, uninjured. His thirst had been mental rather than physical; his throat hadn’t been dry. His leg—
He pulled up his trouser leg and looked at the calf. There was a long white scar there, but a perfectly healed scar. It hadn’t been there before. He zipped open the front of his shirt and saw that his chest and abdomen was criss-crossed with tiny, almost unnoticeable, perfectly healed scars.
It had happened.
The scouter, under automatic control, was already entering the hatch of the mother-ship. The grapples pulled it into its individual lock, and a moment later a buzzer indicated that the lock was air-filled. Carson opened the hatch and stepped outside, went through the double door of the lock.
He went right to Brander’s office, went in, and saluted.
Brander still looked dizzily dazed. “Hi, Carson,” he said. “What you missed! What a show!”
“What happened, sir?”
“Don’t know, exactly. We fired one salvo, and their whole fleet went up in dust! Whatever it was jumped from ship to ship in a flash, even the ones we hadn’t aimed at and that were out of range! The whole fleet disintegrated before our eyes, and we didn’t get the paint of a single ship scratched!
“We can’t even claim credit for it. Must have been some unstable component in the metal they used, and our sighting shot just set it off. Man, oh man, too bad you missed all the excitement.”
Carson managed to grin. It was a sickly ghost of a grin, for it would be days before he’d be over the mental impact of his experience, but the captain wasn’t watching, and didn’t notice.
“Yes, sir,” he said. Common sense, more than modesty, told him he’d be branded forever as the worst liar in space if he ever said any more than that. “Yes, sir, too bad I missed all the excitement.”