The Collection (5 page)

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 as it had pulled twigs off the bush. The creature struggled frantically
and emitted a shrill squealing that was the first sound Carson had heard here,
other than the sound of his own voice.

Carson made himself continue to watch; anything he could
learn about his opponent might prove valuable, even knowledge of its
unnecessary cruelty — particularly, he thought with sudden emotion, knowledge
of its unnecessary cruelty. It would make it a pleasure to kill the thing, if
and when the chance came.

With half its legs gone, the lizard stopped squealing and
lay limp 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. The lizard arced
through the air between them and landed at his feet.

It had come through the barrier! The barrier wasn’t there anymore!
Carson was on his feet in a flash, the knife gripped tightly in his hand,
leaping 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.

As he sat up, shaking his head to clear it, he saw something
coming through the air towards him, and threw himself flat again on the sand,
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 backwards, 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, swinging it back gripped between two tentacles, ready to
throw again.

It sailed through the air towards him, but he was able to
step out of its way. The Roller, apparently, could throw straight, but neither
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 elation, can cross the barrier, then two can play
at the game of throwing them.

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 hit
flat instead of point first. But it hit with a resounding thump, and obviously
hurt. The Roller had been reaching for another rock, but 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 out of range of any missile heavy enough to be damaging.

Carson grinned. That round had been his.

He stopped grinning as he bent over to examine the calf of his
leg. A jagged edge of the stone had made a 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. 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 against the barrier and it bounced back and scurried away
across the blue sand.

That gave him the answer, so far as he could determine it
now. The screen was a barrier to living things. Dead or inorganic matter could
cross it.

With 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 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-grey 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 round 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 that he was
suffering
that
much from thirst. How long had he been there? Of course,
no time at all, according to his own space-time 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. According to his body’s reckoning, how long had he been
here? Three or four hours, perhaps. Certainly not long enough to be suffering
from thirst.

Yet he was suffering from it; his throat was 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 when he
finished the futile exploration of his domain.

He stared across at the motionless Roller and hoped it was
as miserable as he was. The Entity had said the conditions here were equally
unfamiliar and 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, was not much thicker than 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, 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 pliable, yet he couldn’t break them at all, and had to saw them off
the bush with the sharp edge of 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
wood-like. It had fragile leaves that wilted at the touch, but the stalks,
although short, were straight and strong.

It was horribly, unbearably 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 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; 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 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
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.

The barrier went to the wall upon either side, but how high,
and how far under the sand?

For 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, recalling the old story of the
desert-colonists on Mars, taken from an older 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 towards 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 humour, 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 had to get past the barrier. 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?

Painfully now, Carson limped up to the barrier and started
digging, scooping up sand a double handful at a time. It was slow 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 with no sign of water.

The force-field of the barrier went down clear to the
bedrock.

He crawled out of the hole and lay there panting, then
raised his head to look across and see what the Roller was doing.

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 on to the mound of sand he had
excavated 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. Seemed to be some sort of a catapult,
Carson thought.

Sure enough, the Roller was lifting a sizable rock into the
cup-shape. One of his tentacles moved the other lever up and down for a while,
and then he turned the machine slightly, aiming it, and the lever with the
stone flew up and forward.

The stone curved several yards over Carson’s head, so far
away that he didn’t have to duck, but he judged the distance it had travelled,
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 pushed it forward to the barrier.

Another rock whizzed over, not quite so far away this time.

Moving from side to side along the barrier, so the catapult
couldn’t bracket him, he hurled 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. The Roller had no
difficulty, at that distance, in moving aside from those that came near it.