The Collection (6 page)

Besides, his arm was tiring badly. He ached all over.

He stumbled to the rear of the arena. 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 glimmer of an idea.
It hit one of the piles of stones he’d gathered near the barrier to use as
ammunition and struck sparks.

Sparks! Fire! Primitive man had made fire by striking
sparks, and with some of those dry crumbly bushes as tinder...

A bush of that type grew near him. He uprooted it, 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 had a little
fire going in the lee of the mound of sand he’d made. The tinder bushes started
it, and other bushes which burned more slowly kept it a steady flame.

The tough tendrils didn’t burn readily; that made the
fire-bombs easy to rig 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 its efforts
were ineffectual. The catapult burned.

The Roller moved safely away from the fire and seemed to
concentrate its attention on Carson. 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 with a stone. The Roller went 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 that the barrier was still operating, and
then found himself sitting in the sand beside it, suddenly too weak to stand
up.

His leg throbbed steadily now and the pangs of thirst were
severe. But those things paled beside the physical exhaustion that gripped his
entire body.

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 while the barrier remained impregnable and
the Roller stayed back out of range.

He tried to remember what he had read in books of archaeology
about the methods of fighting used back in the days before metal and plastic.
The stone missile had come first, he thought. Well, that he already had.

Bow and arrow? No; he’d tried archery once and knew his own
ineptness even with a modern sportsman’s dura-steel weapon, made for accuracy.
With only the crude, pieced-together outfit he could make here, he doubted if
he could shoot as far as he could throw a rock.

Spear? Well, he
could
make that. It would be useless
at any distance, but would be a handy thing at close range, if he ever got to
close range. Making one would help keep his mind from wandering, as it was
beginning to do.

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. 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 one end. It was crude, but strong.

With the 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.

He tried to stand up, to see what the Roller was doing, 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 from the barrier.

The jar of something thudding against the sand near him
wakened him from a confused and horrible dream to a more confused and 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 round and saw the Roller twenty yards
away, at the barrier.

It rolled off 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. Seeing him lying motionless, it had dared
come up to the barrier. Luckily, it didn’t realize how weak he was, or it could
have stayed there and kept on throwing stones.

He started crawling again, this time forcing himself to keep
going until he was as far as he could go, until the 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 while. 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. 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
below the knee, and the swelling showed even half-way up his thigh. The plant
tendrils he had tied round the protective pad of leaves now cut deeply into his
flesh.

To get his knife under that imbedded lashing would have been
impossible. Fortunately, the final knot was over the shin bone where the vine
cut in less deeply than elsewhere. He was able, after an effort, to untie the
knot.

A look under the pad of leaves showed him the worst:
infection and blood poisoning. Without drugs, without even water, there wasn’t
a thing he could do about it, except
die
when the poison 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. Earth and the colonized planets would become
the home of the red, rolling, alien Outsiders.

It was that thought which gave him courage to start
crawling, almost blindly, towards the barrier again, pulling himself along by
his arms and hands.

There was a chance in a million that he’d have strength left
when he got there to throw his harpoon-spear just
once,
and with deadly
effect, if the Roller would come up to the barrier, or if the barrier was gone.

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.

The Roller wasn’t at the barrier. By raising himself 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.

Carson doubted that it would ever need that second catapult.
He’d be dead, he thought, before it was finished.

***

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 a voice.

It was a small, thin voice. 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 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. Since there would be no peace unless he
followed the thing, he crawled after it.

Another sound, a high-pitched, squealing, came to his ears. There
was something lying in the sand, writhing, squealing. Something small, blue,
that looked like a lizard.

He saw it was the lizard whose legs the Roller had pulled
off, so long ago. 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.

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 hopelessness, when
pain sapped his will and he wished that he were dead, envying the lizard he’d
just killed. It didn’t have to live on and suffer.

He was pushing on the barrier with the flat of his hands
when he noticed his arms, how thin and scrawny they were. He must really have
been here a long time, for days, to get as thin as that.

For a while he was almost hysterical again, and then came a
time of deep calm and thought.

The lizard he had just killed
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.

It hadn’t been dead, merely 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
protection, a
mental
hazard.

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.

He moved along the barrier to the mound of sand, about four
feet high, which he’d scooped out while trying — how many days ago? — to dig
under the barrier or to reach water. That mound lay 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 lay there against the barrier, 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
believe he was dead, he hoped — he thought it had probably drawn the same
deduction about the nature of the barrier that he had. But it would come
cautiously; he would have a little time —He struck himself.

***

Pain brought him back to consciousness, a sudden, sharp pain
in his hip that was different from the pain in his head and leg. 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 opened his eyes just a slit, and saw that he had guessed
rightly. The Roller was coming closer. It was twenty feet away; 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.