Big Book of Science Fiction

by Groff Conklin

  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 the 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. Tender 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 fire-bombs 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 that 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 a 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 tenlegged 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— v

  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 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 d
ifferentness 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.