«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 quickly.
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 black hopelessness, when pain sapped his will and he wished that he were dead. He envied the lizard he’d just killed. It didn’t have to live on and suffer. And he did. It would be hours, it might be days, before the blood poisoning killed him.
If only he could use that knife on himself—
But he knew he wouldn’t. As long as he was alive, there was the millionth chance—
He was straining, pushing on the barrier with the flat of his hands, and he noticed his arms, how thin and scrawny they were now. He must really have been here a long time, for days, to get as thin as that.
How much longer now, before he died? How much more heat and thirst and pain could flesh stand?
For a little while he was almost hysterical again, and then came a time of deep calm, and a thought that was startling.
The lizard he had just killed. It 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. He’d thought, because the lizard was dead.
But it hadn’t been dead; it had been 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 projection, a mental hazard.
And 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.
No use weighing the odds of success. Not when, if he didn’t try it, those odds were infinitely to zero.
He crawled along the barrier to the dune of sand, about four feet high, which he’d scooped out in trying—how many days ago?—to dig under the barrier or to reach water.
That mound was 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 over the top, and lay there against the barrier, his weight leaning against it 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 think he was dead, he hoped—he thought it had probably drawn the same deduction about the nature of the barrier that he had drawn. But it would come cautiously. He would have a little time—
He struck.
Pain brought him back to consciousness. A sudden, sharp pain in his hip that was different from the throbbing pain in his head and the throbbing pain in his leg.
But 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 lay still, but opened his eyes just a slit, and saw that he had guessed rightly. The Roller was coming closer. It was twenty feet away and 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.
As nearly as possible, he was keeping his mind a blank, lest its telepathic ability detect consciousness in him. And with his mind blanked out that way, the impact of its thoughts upon his mind was nearly soul-shattering.
He felt sheer horror at the utter alienness, the differentness of those thoughts. Things that he felt but could not understand and could never express, because no terrestrial language had words, no terrestrial mind had images to fit them. The mind of a spider, he thought, or the mind of a praying mantis or a Martian sand-serpent, raised to intelligence and put in telepathic rapport with human minds, would be a homely familiar thing, compared to this.
He understood now that the Entity had been right: Man or Roller, and the universe was not a place that could hold them both. Farther apart than god and devil, there could never be even a balance between them.
Closer. Carson waited until it was only feet away, until its clawed tentacles reached out—
Oblivious to agony now, he sat up, raised and flung the harpoon with all the strength that remained to him. Or he thought it was all; sudden final strength flooded through him, along with a sudden forgetfulness of pain as definite as a nerve block.
As the Roller, deeply stabbed by the harpoon, rolled away, Carson tried to get to his feet to run after it. He couldn’t do that; he fell, but kept crawling.
It reached the end of the rope, and he was jerked forward by the pull on his wrist. It dragged him a few feet and then stopped. Carson kept on going, pulling himself toward it hand over hand along the rope.
It stopped there, writhing tentacles trying in vain to pull out the harpoon. It seemed to shudder and quiver, and then it must have realized that it couldn’t get away, for it rolled back toward him, clawed tentacles reaching out.
Stone knife in hand, he met it. He stabbed, again and again, while those horrid claws ripped skin and flesh and muscle from his body.
He stabbed and slashed, and at last it was still.
A bell was ringing, and it took him a while after he’d opened his eyes to tell where he was and what it was. He was strapped into the seat of his scouter, and the visiplate before him showed only empty space. No Outsider ship and no impossible planet
The bell was the communications plate signal; someone wanted him to switch power into the receiver. Purely reflex action enabled him to reach forward and throw the lever.
The face of Brander, captain of the Magellan, mother-ship of his group of scouters, flashed into the screen. His face was pale and his black eyes glowing with excitement.
«Magellan to Carson,» he snapped. «Come on in. The fight’s over. We’ve won!»
The screen went blank; Brander would be signaling the other scouters of his command.
Slowly, Carson set the controls for the return. Slowly, unbelievingly, he unstrapped himself from the seat and went back to get a drink at the cold-water tank. For some reason, he was unbelievably thirsty. He drank six glasses.
He leaned there against the wall, trying to think.
Had it happened? He was in good health, sound, uninjured. His thirst had been mental rather than physical; his throat hadn’t been dry. His leg—
He pulled up his trouser leg and looked at the calf. There was a long white scar there, but a perfectly healed scar. It hadn’t been there before. He zipped open the front of his shirt and saw that his chest and abdomen were criss-crossed with tiny, almost unnoticeable, perfectly healed scars.
It had happened.
The scouter, under automatic control, was already entering the hatch of the mother-ship. The grapples pulled it into its individual lock, and a moment later a buzzer indicated that the lock was air-filled. Carson opened the hatch and stepped outside, went through the double door of the lock.