Spear? Well, he could make that. It would be useless as a throwing weapon at any distance, but would be a handy thing at close range, if he ever got to close range.
And making one would give him something to do. Help keep his mind from wandering, as it was beginning to do. Sometimes now, he had to concentrate a while before he could remember why he was here, why he had to kill the Roller.
Luckily 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? There was something in that idea, he thought. 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 the end.
It was crude, but strong.
And the rope. With the thin tough 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.
Then when he had tied the last knot and there was nothing more he could do, the heat and the weariness and the pain in his leg and the dreadful thirst were suddenly a thousand times worse than they had been before.
«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 away from the barrier. Ten yards, twenty—
The jar of something thudding against the sand near him waked him from a confused and horrible dream to a more confused and more 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 around and saw the Roller twenty yards away, at the barrier.
It rolled away 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 ability. Seeing him lying motionless, it had dared come up to the barrier to throw at him. Luckily, it didn’t realize how weak he was, or it could have stayed there and kept on throwing stones.
Had he slept long? He didn’t think so, because he felt just as he had before. Not rested at all, no thirstier, no different. Probably he’d been there only a few minutes.
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 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 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, 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 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. 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—
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.