Big Book of Science Fiction (18 page)

“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 its
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.

It was breaking off twigs. Carson
watched carefully, trying to judge just how hard it worked to do that. Later,
he thought, he could find a similar bush on his own side, break off twigs of
equal thickness himself, and gain a comparison of physical strength between his
own arms and hands and those tentacles.

The twigs broke off hard; the
Roller was having to struggle with each one, he saw. Each tentacle, he saw,
bifurcated at the tip into two fingers, each tipped by a nail or claw. The claws
didn’t seem to be particularly long or dangerous. No more so than his own
fingernails, if they were let to grow a bit.

No, on the whole, it didn’t look
too tough to handle physically. Unless, of course, that bush was made of pretty
tough stuff. Carson looked around him and, yes, right within reach was another
bush of identically the same type.

He reached over and snapped off a
twig. It was brittle, easy to break. Of course, the Roller might have been
faking deliberately but he didn’t think so.