The Fredric Brown Megapack Read Online Free PDF

the most nearly woodlike. 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, taken from an older story of Earth—“Pretty soon you get so lonesome you find yourself talking to the lizards, and then not so long after that you find the lizards talking back to you.…”
    He should have been concentrating, of course, on how to kill the Roller, but instead he grinned at the lizard and said, “Hello, there.”
    The lizard took a few steps towards him. “Hello,” it said.
    Carson was stunned for a moment, and then he put back his head and roared with laughter. It didn’t hurt his throat to do so, either; he hadn’t been that thirsty.
    Why not? Why should the Entity who thought up this nightmare of a place not have a sense of humour, along with the other powers he had? Talking lizards, equipped to talk back in my own language, if I talk to them—it’s a nice touch.
    He grinned at the lizard and said, “Come on over.” But the lizard turned and ran away, scurrying from bush to bush until it was out of sight.
    He had to get past the barrier. He couldn’t get through it, or over it, but was he certain he couldn’t get under it? And come to think of it, didn’t one sometimes find water by digging?
    Painfully now, Carson limped up to the barrier and started digging, scooping up sand a double handful at a time. It was slow work because the sand ran in at the edges and the deeper he got the bigger in diameter the hole had to be. How many hours it took him, he didn’t know, but he hit bedrock four feet down: dry bedrock with no sign of water.
    The force-field of the barrier went down clear to the bedrock.
    He crawled out of the hole and lay there panting, then raised his head to look across and see what the Roller was doing.
    It was making something out of wood from the bushes, tied together with tendrils, a queerly shaped framework about four feet high and roughly square. To see it better, Carson climbed on to the mound of sand he had excavated and stood there staring.
    There were two long levers sticking out of the back of it, one with a cup-shaped affair on the end. Seemed to be some sort of a catapult, Carson thought.
    Sure enough, the Roller was lifting a sizable rock into the cup-shape. One of his tentacles moved the other lever up and down for a while, and then he turned the machine slightly, aiming it,