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, and 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 the 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.
'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 snapped 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 was 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—
