Big Book of Science Fiction (19 page)

On the other hand, where was it
vulnerable? Just how would he go about killing it, if he got the chance? He
went back to studying it. The outer hide looked pretty tough. He’d need a sharp
weapon of some sort. He picked up the piece of rock again. It was about twelve
inches long, narrow, and fairly sharp on one end. If it chipped like flint, he
could make a serviceable knife out of it.

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

Carson shuddered and wanted to
turn his eyes away. But he made himself continue to watch; anything he could
learn about his opponent might prove valuable. Even this knowledge of its
unnecessary cruelty. Particularly, he thought with a sudden vicious surge of
emotion, this knowledge of its unnecessary cruelty. It would make it a pleasure
to kill the thing, if and when the chance came.

He steeled himself to watch the
dismembering of the lizard, for that very reason.

But he felt glad when, with half
its legs gone, the lizard quit squealing and struggling and lay limp and dead
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. It arched through the air between them and landed at his feet.

It had come through the barrier!
The barrier wasn’t there any more!

Carson was on his feet in a
flash, the knife gripped tightly in his hand, and leaped 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.

And as he sat up, shaking his
head to clear it, he saw something coming through the air toward him, and to
duck it, he threw himself flat again on the sand, and 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 backward, 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 one now, swinging it back gripped
between two tentacles, getting ready to throw again.

It sailed through the air toward
him, but he was easily able to step out of its way. The Roller, apparently,
could throw straight, but not 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 sudden elation,
can cross the barrier, then two can play at the game of throwing them. And the
good right arm of an Earthman—

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 it hit flat, unfortunately, instead of point first.

But it hit with a resounding
thump, and obviously it hurt. The Roller had been reaching for another rock,
but it 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 back out of range—at least out of
range of a missile heavy enough to be damaging.

Carson grinned. That round had
been his. Except—

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

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

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 full 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-gray 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 around 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 angrily, that he was suffering
that
much from thirst. How
long had he been here? 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. And according to
his body’s reckoning, how long had he been here? Three or four hours, perhaps.
Certainly not long enough to be suffering seriously from thirst.

But he was suffering from it; his
throat 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 out when he’d finished the futile exploration of his domain.

He stared across at the
motionless Roller and hoped it was as miserable as he was. And quite possibly
it wasn’t enjoying this, either. The Entity had said the conditions here were
equally unfamiliar and equally 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 now, was not much
thicker than that 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. He
must
hurry.

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 soft and pliable, yet he couldn’t
break them at all. He had to saw them off the bush with the sharp edge of a
piece of the 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 woodlike. It had fragile leaves that wilted at a
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 back 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 and 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 devil
of 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 neat
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 first.

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

For just 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.