The Collection (4 page)

But, unaccountably, he shuddered.

He wiped sweat from his forehead, or tried to, with the back
of his hand.

Was this a dream, a nightmare? This heat, this sand, that
vague feeling of horror he felt when he looked towards that red thing?

A dream? No, one didn’t go to sleep and dream in the midst
of a battle in space.

Death? No, never. If there were immortality, it wouldn’t be
a senseless thing like this, a thing of blue heat and blue sand and a red
horror.

Then he heard the voice.

Inside his head he heard it, not with his ears. It came from
nowhere or everywhere.

‘Through spaces and
dimensions wandering,’
rang the words
in his mind,
‘and in this space and this time, I find two peoples about to
exterminate one and so weaken the other that it would retrogress and never
fulfil its destiny, but decay and return to mindless dust whence it came. And I
say this must not happen.’

‘Who ... what are you?’ Carson didn’t say it aloud, but the
question formed itself in his brain.

‘You would not understand
completely. I am
—
‘There was a pause as though the voice sought — in Carson’s brain — for a word
that wasn’t there, a word he didn’t know.
‘I
am the end of evolution of a race so old the time cannot be expressed in words
that have meaning to your mind. A race fused into a single entity, eternal.

‘An entity such as your
primitive race might become’
— again the groping for a word —
‘time from now. So might the race you call, in your
mind, the Outsiders. So I intervene in the battle to come, the battle between
fleets so evenly matched that destruction of both races will result. One must
survive. One must progress and evolve.’

‘One?’ thought Carson. ‘Mine or—

‘It is in my power to stop
the war, to send the Outsiders back to their galaxy. But they would return, or
your race would sooner or later follow them there. Only by remaining in this
space and time to intervene constantly could I prevent them from destroying one
another, and I cannot remain.

‘So I shall intervene now.
I shall destroy one fleet completely without loss to the other. One
civilization shall thus survive.’

Nightmare. This had to be nightmare, Carson thought. But he
knew it wasn’t.

It was too mad, too impossible, to be anything but real.

He didn’t dare ask
the
question —
which?
But
his thoughts asked it for him.

‘The stronger shall
survive,
’
said the voice.
‘That I
cannot
— 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 dust-mote 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 sphere of horror that he now knew was the
Outsider, was rolling towards him.

Rolling.

It seemed to have no legs or arms that he could see, no
features. It rolled across the sand with the fluid quickness of a drop of
mercury. And before it, in some manner he could not understand, came a wave of
nauseating 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 fast, faster than he could run.

No time to think out how he was going to fight it; 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 cautiously. It
stopped again, at the same place. it tried again, a few yards to one side.

Then it rolled forward again, but 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 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 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. And 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, or else this
duel is meaningless.

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 observed, a series of grooves, perhaps a dozen of them altogether,
and he saw two tentacles push out from two of the grooves and dip into the sand
as though testing its consistency. These were about an inch in diameter and
perhaps a foot and a half long.

The tentacles were retractable into the grooves and were
kept there except when in use. They 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 imagine — of its center of gravity.

He shuddered as he looked at the thing. It was alien,
horribly different from anything on Earth or any of the life forms found on the
other solar planets. Instinctively, he knew its mind was as alien as its body.

If it could project that almost tangible wave of hatred,
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
strange in the stillness. ‘The Entity who brought us here has told us what must
happen if our races fight — extinction of one and weakening and retrogression
of the other. The battle between them, said the Entity, depends upon what we do
here. Why cannot we agree to an eternal 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 recoiled
several steps in sheer horror at the intensity of the lust-to-kill of the red
images projected at him. For a moment that seemed eternity he had to struggle
against the impact of that hatred, fighting to clear his mind of it and drive out
the alien thoughts to which he had given admittance. He wanted to retch.

His mind cleared slowly. 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 grin.
‘If I got your answer straight, peace doesn’t appeal to you.’ And, because he
was, after all, a young man and couldn’t resist the impulse to be dramatic, he
added, ‘To the death!’

But his voice, in that utter silence, sounded 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 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.
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. The
future of humanity depended upon
him.
It was an awful thing to realize.
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 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 receptivity mechanism be more vulnerable?

He stared at it and endeavored to concentrate and focus all
his thought 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 dizzy from the heat and his strenuous effort at
concentration. He sat down on the blue sand and gave his full attention to
studying the Roller. By 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. 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, or no more so than his own fingernails, if they were left to grow a
bit.

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

He 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.
On the other hand, where was it vulnerable? 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.