Big Book of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  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 peoples 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 1 prevent them from destroying one another, and 1 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.

  Again 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 faster, faster that 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 retrogession 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 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 the 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 i
ts ability to project were stronger, might not its receptive 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.