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crumbly bushes as tinder...
    A bush of that type grew near him. He uprooted it, took it
over to the pile of stones, then patiently hit one stone against another until
a spark touched the punklike wood of the bush. It went up in flames so fast
that it singed his eyebrows and was burned to an ash within seconds.
    But he had the idea now, and within minutes had a little
fire going in the lee of the mound of sand he’d made. The tinder bushes started
it, and other bushes which burned more slowly kept it a steady flame.
    The tough tendrils didn’t burn readily; that made the
fire-bombs easy to rig and throw; a bundle of faggots tied about a small stone
to give it weight and a loop of the tendril to swing it by.
    He made half a dozen of them before he lighted and threw the
first. It went wide, and the Roller started a quick retreat, pulling the
catapult after him. But Carson had the others ready and threw them in rapid
succession. The fourth wedged in the catapult’s framework and did the trick.
The Roller tried desperately to put out the spreading blaze by throwing sand,
but its clawed tentacles would take only a spoonful at a time and its efforts
were ineffectual. The catapult burned.
    The Roller moved safely away from the fire and seemed to
concentrate its attention on Carson. Again he felt that wave of hatred and
nausea —but more weakly; either the Roller itself was weakening or Carson had
learned how to protect himself against the mental attack.
    He thumbed his nose at it and then sent it scuttling back to
safety with a stone. The Roller went to the back of its half of the arena and
started pulling up bushes again. Probably it was going to make another
catapult.
    Carson verified that the barrier was still operating, and
then found himself sitting in the sand beside it, suddenly too weak to stand
up.
    His leg throbbed steadily now and the pangs of thirst were
severe. But those things paled beside the physical exhaustion that gripped his
entire body.
    Hell must be like this, he thought, the hell that the ancients
had believed in. He fought to stay awake, and yet staying awake seemed futile,
for there was nothing he could do while the barrier remained impregnable and
the Roller stayed back out of range.
    He tried to remember what he had read in books of archaeology
about the methods of fighting used back in the days before metal and plastic.
The stone missile had come first, he thought. Well, that he already had.
    Bow and arrow? No; he’d tried archery once and knew his own
ineptness even with a modern sportsman’s dura-steel weapon, made for accuracy.
With only the crude, pieced-together outfit he could make here, he doubted if
he could shoot as far as he could throw a rock.
    Spear? Well, he could make that. It would be useless
at any distance, but would be a handy thing at close range, if he ever got to
close range. Making one would help keep his mind from wandering, as it was
beginning to do.
    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. 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 one end. It was crude, but strong.
    With the 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