Big Book of Science Fiction (21 page)

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
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.

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