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maybe it was freezing while
he was roasting. Maybe the air was as much too thick for it as it was too thin
for him. For the exertion of his explorations had left him panting. The
atmosphere here, he realized, was not much thicker than on Mars.
    No water. That meant a deadline, for him at any rate. Unless
he could find a way to cross that barrier or to kill his enemy from this side
of it, thirst would kill him eventually.
    It gave him a feeling of desperate urgency, but he made
himself sit down a moment to rest, to think.
    What was there to do? Nothing, and yet so many things. The
several varieties of bushes, for example; they didn’t look promising, but he’d
have to examine them for possibilities. And his leg — he’d have to do something
about that, even without water to clean it; gather ammunition in the form of
rocks; find a rock that would make a good knife.
    His leg hurt rather badly now, and he decided that came
first. One type of bush had leaves — or things rather similar to leaves. He
pulled off a handful of them and decided, after examination, to take a chance
on them. He used them to clean off the sand and dirt and caked blood, then made
a pad of fresh leaves and tied it over the wound with tendrils from the same
bush.
    The tendrils proved unexpectedly tough and strong. They were
slender and pliable, yet he couldn’t break them at all, and had to saw them off
the bush with the sharp edge of blue flint. Some of the thicker ones were over
a foot long, and he filed away in his memory, for future reference, the fact
that a bunch of the thick ones, tied together, would make a pretty serviceable
rope. Maybe he’d be able to think of a use for rope.
    Next, he made himself a knife. The blue flint did chip. From
a foot-long splinter of it, he fashioned himself a crude but lethal weapon. And
of tendrils from the bush, he made himself a rope-belt through which he could
thrust the flint knife, to keep it with him all the time and yet have his hands
free.
    He went back to studying the bushes. There were three other
types. One was leafless, dry, brittle, rather like a dried tumbleweed. Another
was of soft, crumbly wood, almost like punk. It looked and felt as though it
would make excellent tinder for a fire. The third type was the most nearly
wood-like. It had fragile leaves that wilted at the touch, but the stalks,
although short, were straight and strong.
    It was horribly, unbearably hot.
    He limped up to the barrier, felt to make sure that it was
still there. It was. He stood watching the Roller for a while; it was keeping a
safe distance from the barrier, out of effective stone-throwing range. It was
moving around back there, doing something. He couldn’t tell what it was doing.
    Once it stopped moving, came a little closer, and seemed to
concentrate its attention on him. Again Carson had to fight off a wave of
nausea. He threw a stone at it; the Roller retreated and went back to whatever
it had been doing before.
    At least he could make it keep its distance. And, he thought
bitterly, a lot of good that did him. Just the same, he spent the next
hour or two gathering stones of suitable size for throwing, and making several
piles of them near his side of the barrier.
    His throat burned now. It was difficult for him to think
about anything except water. But he had to think about other things:
about getting through that barrier, under or over it, getting at that
red sphere and killing it before this place of heat and thirst killed him.
    The barrier went to the wall upon either side, but how high,
and how far under the sand?
    For a moment, Carson’s mind was too fuzzy to think out how
he could find out either of those things. Idly, sitting there in the hot sand —
and he didn’t remember sitting down — he watched a blue lizard crawl from the
shelter of one bush to the shelter of another.
    From under the second bush, it looked out at him.
    Carson grinned at it, recalling the old story of the
desert-colonists on Mars,