Read The Collection for Free Online Page B

calm.
    ‘Hello,’ said a voice.
    It was a small, thin voice. 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. Since there would be no peace unless he
followed the thing, he crawled after it.
    Another sound, a high-pitched, squealing, came to his ears. There
was something lying in the sand, writhing, squealing. Something small, blue,
that looked like a lizard.
    He saw it was the lizard whose legs the Roller had pulled
off, so long ago. 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.
    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 hopelessness, when
pain sapped his will and he wished that he were dead, envying the lizard he’d
just killed. It didn’t have to live on and suffer.
    He was pushing on the barrier with the flat of his hands
when he noticed his arms, how thin and scrawny they were. He must really have
been here a long time, for days, to get as thin as that.
    For a while he was almost hysterical again, and then came a
time of deep calm and thought.
    The lizard he had just killed 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.
    It hadn’t been dead, merely 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 protection, a mental hazard.
    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.
    He moved along the barrier to the mound of sand, about four
feet high, which he’d scooped out while trying — how many days ago? — to dig
under the barrier or to reach water. That mound lay 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 lay there against the barrier, 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
believe he was dead, he hoped — he thought it